PowerPoint Blog
Labels: powerpoint, templates
Ppted released a new PowerPoint template set -- this one is called Yellow. Not only do you get five great template designs, you also get the actual backgrounds so that you can use the same designs elsewhere. In this collection, you also get wide screen templates and backgrounds, and ten transparent PNGs you can use in your presentations -- at no extra cost.
Templates
Transparent PNGs
Categories: powerpoint, templates
Labels: google, online_presentations, powerpoint
After adding online presentation sharing 20 days ago, Google Presentations adds a quick new update in the form of vector shapes and PDF output.
AppScout reports that "Google Presentations is getting the ability to save documents as a PDF and PDF-based printing options. Users are also getting some basic drawing abilities and vector shapes, such as word bubbles and arrows.
The Wired Blog Network adds that "Google has released a new desktop uploader for Windows, making to much easier to move a large batch of files into Google Docs."
Categories: google, online_presentations, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, powerpoint, slide_management
A decade or two ago, users played with PowerPoint around twice a month, made some overhead slides through a service provider and hired expensive equipment to show these at really big events. Nowadays, people create PowerPoint slides more often than they sneeze!
The result is that there are billions of slides in the presentation sphere -- slides lost and mixed up in a chaotic land where it's easier to spend to a few hours to create new slides than search and reuse the ones that cannot be found. Our review product Slide Executive Professional may be all the help you need.
Read on to learn more...
Categories: add-in, slide_management, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, powerpoint, slide_management
There are essentially three PowerPoint related tasks: you either create, give, or archive/share presentations. You know that keeping one or all three of these tasks organized is not a task that can be described as easy as pie.
SlideManager is a slide management software that can assist you in each of the three task scenarios -- it lets you maintain an online presentation library that is cataloged down to the individual slide level.
Read the review here...
Categories: add-in, slide_management, powerpoint
Labels: graphics, powerpoint
Scrapbook Presentations has put up a whole series of St. Patrick's Day PNG embellishments that can be placed within your PowerPoint presentations.
Download these here...
Categories: graphics, powerpoint
Labels: powerpoint, templates
Ppted's Cartography collection has been updated with extras! Take a look here to see...
Not only do you get five great template designs, you also get the actual backgrounds so that you can use the same designs elsewhere. In this collection, you also get wide screen templates and backgrounds, and ten transparent PNGs you can use in your presentations -- at no extra cost.
Templates
Transparent PNGs
Categories: powerpoint, templates
Labels: interviews, powerpoint 
Bob Mathews (pictured to the left) is Director of Training for Design Science. A former military pilot, Bob came to Design Science in 1999 after teaching high school mathematics for several years. MathType from DesignScience is probably the foremost equation program available today -- it integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Office programs including PowerPoint.
Geetesh: Give us a generic profile of the typical PowerPoint user who also uses MathType.
Bob: Our customers hold such a variety of positions in education and industry that it's hard to describe a "typical" user. We see people using MathType with PowerPoint to present a 6th grade math lesson, and we see people creating engineering proposals with these products. In almost 10 years with Design Science, I've had only one or two customers ever ask me about doing something with the MathType/PowerPoint combination that couldn't be done, and those were things neither MathType nor PowerPoint were intended to do anyway. Actually, MathType can be used in a wider range of applications than just Microsoft Office (graphing tools, flowcharting tools, illustration apps, desktop publishing, etc.) -- basically anything into which you can insert, paste, or drag a graphic -- so its use in PowerPoint just fits into a normal day's workflow for many of our customers.
Geetesh: Tell us more about the new TeX entry feature in MathType, and how it helps PowerPoint users.
Bob: This is a really powerful feature for someone who prefers to use TeX but needs to use PowerPoint to prepare a presentation, or needs to use Word to collaborate with colleagues. Simply type the TeX or LaTeX markup into the MathType window, press Enter, and MathType converts the markup into a typeset equation. You can even mix MathType's point & click and keyboard shortcut features with the TeX input feature in the same equation. If a colleague sends you a TeX document and you want to use one of the equations on a PowerPoint slide, you can simply copy the equation and paste the TeX into MathType. In short, the new TeX entry feature provides the utility of being able to use a familiar program you're comfortable with, and combine it with a powerful typesetting language in order to get the mathematical expressions you need into PowerPoint.
Categories: interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint
Ric Bretschneider is Senior Program Manager for PowerPoint at Microsoft and he celebrates fifteen years as a Microsoft veteran, having joined the company in 1993 to work on PowerPoint for Windows and the Macintosh. Over the years, he's contributed to the design and direction of the application, and been awarded three PowerPoint related patents. In this interview, Ric discusses his fifteen years, his involvement with PowerPoint, the MVPs, his podcasts, and how PowerPoint was named.
Read the interview here...
Categories: interviews, powerpoint
Tommy Powell (pictured to the left) is from Neuxpower, a software solutions company based in the UK. Neuxpower custom-build both stand-alone applications and add-ins that enhance existing software such as Microsoft Office. Their commercially-available PowerPoint optimizer, NXPowerLite , radically reduces the size of PowerPoint files.
Geetesh: Tell us what is new in version 3.5 of NXPowerLite.
Tommy: NXPowerLite 3.5 features three big changes. The most important change is that it is now compatible with files saved in Microsoft's new Office Open XML formats (such as DOCX, XLSX and PPTX).
NXPowerLite 3.5 is the only product on the market that can optimize Word, Excel and PowerPoint files created in any version of Office, from Office 97-2008 (of course, it also works with files created in other Office suites, such as OpenOffice, StarOffice and even Google Docs, as long as they are saved in a Microsoft Office format).
Secondly, we've improved the way that NXPowerLite integrates with Microsoft Outlook, making it even easier to optimize your email attachments.
The third change is that NXPowerLite is now available in Chinese, increasing the number of supported languages to six (with more languages to follow soon). NXPowerLite detects the language of your Windows installation and automatically displays in that language - so if you're using a Chinese version of Windows, you'll now see a Chinese version of NXPowerLite.
Geetesh: NXPowerLite has evolved from an optimization program for PowerPoint to an optimization program for Microsoft Office files – tell us a little more about this evolution.
Tommy: NXPowerLite was originally launched back in 2001 as a program to make PowerPoint files smaller. PowerPoint files could (and still can) get incredibly large, making them difficult to store and share. NXPowerLite solved this problem, but customers frequently told us that they also had file-size problems with Word and Excel. You'd be amazed at what some people try to do with large graphics in Excel! So last year we added support for Word and Excel files to NXPowerLite. But we haven't forgotten our core PowerPoint audience -- we've got some cool new features for PowerPoint users coming later this year!
NXPowerLite has evolved in other ways too, NXPowerLite 3.5 is also available as a Server Edition, enabling organizations to automatically optimize all the Office files on their servers, freeing up large amounts of existing server space and, in turn, contributing to a greener storage strategy.
Categories: add-in, interviews, powerpoint, powerpoint_2007
Labels: add-in, interviews, powerpoint, powerpoint_2007
Labels: powerpoint, templates
Millions of presentations may be created each day, but you may only see a few each week. And even then they all look the same to you. Your newspaper changes their layouts, web sites rehaul their identities, companies go through image makeovers, even television looks different and more contemporary each day. So why do people make presentations that look the same? That's typically because they use the designs that are built inside PowerPoint.
PowerFinish Volume 6 is a set of 50 PowerPoint design templates that comprise an assortment of abstracts, geometry, and strokes with a painted canvas look. It is very contemporary, and the entire collection is available in both 4:3 standard and 16:9 HD sizes.
Read the review here...
Categories: powerpoint, templates
Labels: graphics, powerpoint
Scrapbook Presentations has put up a whole series of Circle PNG embellishments that can be placed within your PowerPoint presentations.
Download these here...
Categories: graphics, powerpoint
Labels: powerpoint, powerpointlive
Ric Bretschneider's newest podcast is now live on the Presentationsroundtable site.
In this podcast, Ric does a candid conversation with three PowerPoint MVPs who have been regulars at five successful yearly PowerPoint Live gatherings -- indeed some of the PowerPoint MVPs were responsible for the idea behind the PowerPoint Live conference -- this podcast recalls those origins, and reflects on why the event gets rave reviews from attendees.
The participants in this podcast are (as shown in picture above, clockwise from the larger photo) Ric Bretschneider, Steve Rindsberg, Echo Swinford, and Glen Millar.
Make sure you put up a comment on the podcast page!
Categories: powerpoint, powerpointlive
Labels: powerpoint, templates
Ppted released a new PowerPoint template set -- this one is called Photography 02. Not only do you get five great template designs, you also get the actual backgrounds so that you can use the same designs elsewhere. In this collection, you also get wide screen templates and backgrounds, and ten transparent PNGs you can use in your presentations -- at no extra cost.
Templates
Transparent PNGs
Categories: powerpoint, templates
Labels: books, powerpoint_2007
Here's a small excerpt from Tom Bunzel's review on PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit on InformIT:
There are, in my opinion, two different ways to get proficient in a computer, and more important, a professional discipline of some kind. One way is methodical, and the other way is to wing it.
I must confess that when I get a new program these days, I mainly try to intuit how it works and have little patience for methodical training.
But when I encounter methodical training, as I do in Echo Swinford and Geetesh Bajaj’s Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit, I am always reminded of how superior it is.
Particularly in a professional discipline like presentation coaching, consulting or authoring, and a program like the new PowerPoint 2007, taking a project oriented approach and then digging deep into the precise whys and wherefores helps to ground any end user thoroughly in techniques that are empowering and enduring.
Read more on InformIT...
Categories: books, powerpoint_2007
Labels: books, interviews, powerpoint_2007
Echo Swinford (pictured to the right) is a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional). When she's not working on new media, she is answering almost all the questions on the PowerPoint newsgroup. Echo is also the co-author of Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit, published by Que. The other author of this book is the owner of this blog -- so I thought it will be fun for one author to interview the other!
Visit Echo's site Echo's Voice to find several PowerPoint usability tricks...
Geetesh: How much ground does this new book cover for the everyday PowerPoint user?
Echo: Well, I think the PowerPoint 2007 Makeover kit actually covers most of the PowerPoint 2007 hills and valleys, at least enough to get you started walking through the woods!
Seriously, the book does cover almost all of the features in PowerPoint 2007, some to a greater extent than others. One of the goals was to teach users about PowerPoint 2007 while reviewing some basic best practices users can rely on to help make their presentations more polished. As a result, we talk a lot about leveraging themes and color schemes and slide layouts and the like to create consistency throughout a presentation. Because themes are new in PowerPoint 2007, and slide masters and layouts are not well understood (even though they do exist in previous versions of PowerPoint), even accomplished PowerPoint users should learn some helpful tricks.
I was really excited to do this book because I think it's important for people to see that even non-designers can make good-looking presentations.
Just because it's PowerPoint, it doesn't have to be ugly. There are a million design books out there, and there are a million PowerPoint books, but I don't think there's another "here's how to design in PowerPoint," with some practical things you can do to make your presentations look better.
Geetesh: What types of presentations do you cover, and why were these particular types of presentations chosen?
Echo: Well, we wanted to offer a good representation of the types of presentations we see every day, and of the types of presentations we're asked about frequently on the Microsoft PowerPoint newsgroup. So you'll see things like a couple of corporate presentations, a school report, a photo album with a background music track. This way, hopefully at least one makeover will be specifically relevant to most readers. Now, that doesn't mean the others won't be relevant -- they will be. For example, in the medical presentation makeover, we discuss using tabs instead of spacebar-spacebar-spacebar to align text on an agenda slide. But there are a gazillion other types of presentations that use agenda slides, and, for that matter, there are even more types of slides where you might use tabs to align the text. So the skills and best practices you learn about are transferable to any number of presentations.
Really, though, there seem to be some issues we just see repeatedly, no matter what type of presentation we're dealing with, and having a variety of presentation types allowed us to highlight those in different ways. To illustrate the point, I'll confess that I worry a little that readers will get sick of us harping on them to use the placeholders to ensure consistent text placement and formatting...but I'm telling you, that's one of the fundamental issues I see day in and day out as I clean up slides for various clients. If people only knew how to use the layouts and placeholders to their advantage, they'd save a ton of time -- and end up with better looking presentations to boot! I hope the book helps them realize that.
Categories: books, interviews, powerpoint_2007
Labels: powerpoint, tutorials
Although you can copy and paste an Excel sheet inside a PowerPoint slide, there's so much more you can do to make the entire Excel-in-PowerPoint thing more useful. Microsoft Excel possesses an amazingly intuitive and powerful calculation engine -- and tons of formulae. We would like to leverage these capabilities of Excel while running a PowerPoint slide show.
Learn more with Naresh Nichani and Brian Reilly...
Categories: powerpoint, tutorials
Labels: graphics, powerpoint
Scrapbook Presentations has put up a whole series of Feather PNG embellishments that can be placed within your PowerPoint presentations.
Download these here...
Categories: graphics, powerpoint
Labels: opinion, powerpoint 
The linear presentation approach has gone fundamentally unchallenged until recent years when something changed. It wasn’t the presenters (they actually liked the straight-forward simplicity) and it wasn’t really the software. It was certain audience types and we had better pay attention.
In this month’s column I want to challenge a long-standing norm and offer a simple solution. You see there’s been a fundamental change in how many of us interact with certain audiences – especially in a sales context when our goal is to persuade and move them to action.
Jim Endicott explains more in this article...
Categories: opinion, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, powerpoint
Tommy Powell of Neuxpower says that NXPowerLite version 3.5 has just been released.
NXPowerLite 3.5 adds support for Microsoft's Open XML (Office 2007) file formats and offers improved Outlook integration. It is also now available in Chinese. In addition, NXPowerLite 3.5 is available as a free upgrade to existing NXPowerLite 3 users.
Download a free trial version of NXPowerLite here...
For those who are not aware, NXPowerLite is a file optimization program for Microsoft Office file formats.
Categories: add-in, powerpoint
Labels: office_mac, powerpoint
Leaders of Microsoft's Mac Business Unit are spending the day showing Macworld Expo attendees the new Office 2008 for Mac applications.
Marcus Aiu, lead program manager of PowerPoint for Mac, is showing many new features in the presentation program. He earned applause, for example, when he demonstrated the ability to use Apple's remote control to page through slides.
Todd Bishop discusses more on the Seattle P-I site...
Categories: office_mac, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, powerpoint
If you create your share of PowerPoint presentations, you know that you end up doing repetitive tasks all the time -- for the most common commands such as aligning, distributing, grouping, or resizing objects, you have to access the menus and toolbars hundreds of times.
PowerPoint ShortcutTools 2.0, the product I am reviewing is a PowerPoint add-in which allows users to set defined keyboard shortcuts for specific PowerPoint commands.
Read the review here...
Categories: add-in, powerpoint
Labels: graphics, powerpoint
Scrapbook Presentations has put up a whole series of Cross PNG embellishments that can be placed within your PowerPoint presentations.
Download these here...
Categories: graphics, powerpoint
Labels: powerpoint, templates
Ppted's Photography 01 collection has been updated with extras! Take a look here to see...
Not only do you get five great template designs, you also get the actual backgrounds so that you can use the same designs elsewhere. In this collection, you also get wide screen templates and backgrounds, and ten transparent PNGs you can use in your presentations -- at no extra cost.
Templates
Transparent PNGs
Categories: powerpoint, templates
Labels: interviews, powerpoint
Jim Endicott is a nationally-recognized consultant, designer, speaker specializing in professional presentation messaging, design and delivery. In this interview, Jim discusses the implications of changes in this decade, the influence of technology, the sophistication of the marketplace, and the utilization of potential.
Read the interview here...
Categories: interviews, powerpoint
Labels: animation, graphics, interviews, powerpoint 
Glen Millar (pictured to the right) is a MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for Microsoft PowerPoint. Based near Brisbane, Australia, Glen is a regular on the Microsoft support newsgroups, and a featured speaker at PowerPoint Live. Visit Glen's site, PowerPoint Workbench for tutorials on cool animation effects in PowerPoint.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your work, and your involvement with PowerPoint..
Glen: I first began to use PowerPoint a number of years ago to present scientific information. It was critical that we could communicate effectively, as well as efficiently. I discovered that PowerPoint is a very powerful way to help people communicate. It allowed us to span information across time and locations. That is, we could take our audience to locations and across time in ways that simply cannot be done in real life.
Today, I work in a bunch of areas, including environmental education projects. I particularly build presentations for clients and conduct computer training into the features of PowerPoint that allow clients to build presentations faster and more effectively. I still think it is an awful shame that people spend lots of money on their projects and go to a conference and give a very poor presentation.
Geetesh: Tell us about your false background trick, and how you evolved it. Also what are typical usage scenarios for this trick?
Glen: False backgrounds take advantage of a property of AutoShapes that allows the shape to grab pixels from the slide background and lock them into place. The first time I created a false background was almost by accident. I was preparing for PowerPoint Live in 2004 and wanted to use an AutoShape to pan across the background image of a slide. However, every time I animated the AutoShape to move, it would take the background image with it. I learnt that if I covered the slide background, I could produce some amazing effects such as cropping, highlights and very cool animations. I mainly used the effect to crop multiple parts of an image and apply animations to them.
With the advent of PowerPoint 2007, the effects are even more amazing. When I have shown them to people, they don’t believe I didn’t use an external image editor. For example, a common comment at PowerPoint Live in New Orleans was that people had spent hours in external programs to create image effects that could be done easier and more accurately right within PowerPoint 2007.
I currently use this technique in a number of situations. I mentioned cropping of images. That is, I place an AutoShape over a strategic part of an image on the slide background and the shape drills through the false background in between. This allows a very powerful image crop to occur, but that is only the beginning!
Categories: animation, graphics, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, powerpoint
The new versions of PowerPoint seem to have everything apart from the kitchen sink -- but yet, it's amazing too see vendors create small add-ins that provide an impressive capability that PowerPoint lacks. Opazity is one such add-in that creates opaque effects inside PowerPoint -- and if you are wondering what's so great about an opaque effect in PowerPoint, then read on...
Categories: add-in, powerpoint
Labels: google, online_presentations
Google Presentations, a component of Google Docs has added new features. The most significant new option is the ability to create embeddable web slideshows that can be put up on any page, much like a YouTube movie.
The web output uses scripting rather than Flash unlike YouTube -- it will be interesting to see how Google copes up with animations and transitions in its Presentations through this output option. Maybe that's something they will take care of in the future since they don't have animations and transitions available as of now in Google Presentations.
Here's a link to a sample online slideshow...
Related Stuff: Google Presentations gets embeddable slide shows | Google Docs Releases New Presentation Features
Categories: google, online_presentations
Labels: powerpoint, templates
Ppted's Diabetes collection has been updated with extras! Take a look here to see...
Not only do you get five great template designs, you also get the actual backgrounds so that you can use the same designs elsewhere. In this collection, you also get wide screen templates and backgrounds, and ten transparent PNGs you can use in your presentations -- at no extra cost.
Templates
Transparent PNGs
Categories: powerpoint, templates
Labels: books, case_studies, opinion, powerpoint
Ric Bretschneider is Senior Program Manager for PowerPoint at Microsoft, and he just had his 15th anniversary working on the project! Ric's put up a great podcast on the new Presentations Roundtable site -- this podcast is just first of the many more podcasts you can look forward to hearing and downloading from this site.
The premiere episode of the Presentations Roundtable podcast brings together:
The discussion is in an easy conversation style -- the role of books in learning good design is investigated, along with some easy to follow hints on creating excellence in your own presentations.
Check out the podcast here...
Thank you, Ric.
Categories: books, case_studies, powerpoint, opinion
Labels: office_mac, powerpoint
The release of Office:mac 2008 is less than two weeks away, and already there's plenty of coverage on the product:
Stephen H. Wildstrom on BusinessWeek.com does not believe that "Office 2008 will cause many people to switch from Windows to Macs, though there are plenty of other reasons to do so. But it does give Mac users—especially creative professionals, students, and home users who are the core of Apple's market—an office suite that's superior to the Windows version in many ways".
Michael J. Miller on his PC Magazine blog writes about how "the most notable change across all the applications is to the user interface. Office 2007 on Windows moved away from the traditional pull-down menu approach, but Office 2008 for Mac is more conservative. It still has the pull-down menus, along with some quick icons for commonly used commands. But some other changes move the UI in new ways. A revamped floating toolbox works as a formatting palette and also gives you access to things like object shapes, reference tools like a thesaurus or a direct link to Encarta".
Elsa Wenzel of CNET Reviews is not too happy about how "Office for Mac saves work in the same new Open XML formats used by Office 2007 for Windows. We're not thrilled about this being the default option, even though you can save your work in the older DOC, XLS, and PPT formats.
Jim Dalrymple of Computerworld delves into individual program improvements. About PowerPoint 2008, he finds that "the updated presentation application includes several new features specific to Mac users. For example, users can now send their presentations to iPhoto and then sync them to an iPod. (The presentations need to be saved as a PNG or JPEG file prior to transfers.) PowerPoint also takes advantage of the six-button Apple remote that comes with most new Mac systems, allowing users to control their presentations".
Walt Mossberg’s All Things Digital column explains that "despite the fierce rivalry between Microsoft and Apple, there is one product on which the two companies work closely together: the Macintosh version of Microsoft Office. Microsoft makes a nice chunk of change from this software suite, which includes Mac versions of the famous Word, Excel and PowerPoint programs. Apple needs the Microsoft office suite so its Macintosh computers can live in harmony with the dominant Windows world".
Categories: office_mac, powerpoint
Labels: books, powerpoint_2007
Get ready to add punch and pizzazz to your presentations and wow your audience using the latest PowerPoint techniques. This friendly book/CD-ROM combo covers all of the new features of Microsoft PowerPoint 2007, including interface changes, presentation themes, multimedia, the Slide Library, and more.
Read a free chapter here...
Categories: books, powerpoint_2007
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