PowerPoint Blog
Imagine this scenario: you try uploading your vacation pictures to a social network site, or send it via e-mail to share it with your family and friends. And then you end up with an error message complaining about the file sizes and dimensions being too huge. Well, it's not your fault but that's what you get with 12 megapixel digital cameras! Fortunately, there is FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0.
Read the review here...
Categories: graphics, photos
Labels: graphics, powerpoint, smartdraw
I found this cool video clip on creating simple graphics really quick using SmartDraw -- these can be then used in your PowerPoint slides. Watch Daniel Hoffman take you through this walkthrough.
Categories: graphics, powerpoint, smartdraw
ColorSchemer Studio 2.0 is a color oriented application that can be used for creating new color schemes by mixing the color values to create schemes -- all the color schemes are created based on sound color theory principles. ColorSchemer Studio 2.0, is from the company of the same name -- which also creates products like ColorPix, Galleria, etc. You can download a trial version of ColorSchemer Studio 2.0 from their site. They have a Windows version available now, and a Mac version in development -- and also a free online version! For this review, I'm working with the Windows version.
Read the review here...
Categories: color, graphics
Labels: graphics 
We reviewed ConceptDraw Office in November 2008, and already the folks at CS Odessa have released a free update for all registered users of ConceptDraw Office. For those of you who are not aware of ConceptDraw Office, it is a three program suite comprising:
Tanya Kozovaya sent me this list of improvements:
You can learn more about these updates on the CS Odessa site...
Categories: graphics
Labels: graphics, interviews, microsoft_office, powerpoint, smartdraw
Paul Stannard is CEO of SmartDraw.com, creators of the popular SmartDraw program. In this Indezine exclusive conversation, Paul discusses the new features in the just-released SmartDraw 2009.5
Geetesh: Tell us more about SmartDraw 2009.5's new features, and why there are important to Microsoft Office users.
Paul: SmartDraw 2009.5 adds many new features but the three most significant increase SmartDraw's already considerable integration with Microsoft Office:
Geetesh: Your implementation of PowerPoint specific features is complete enough so that content created in SmartDraw need not be re-colored or re-animated in PowerPoint. What motivated you to create something so complete?
Paul: It's been said that "a picture is worth a thousand words" and we know that communicating visually with visuals in your slide is six time as effective for retention and comprehension than bullets. So, many SmartDraw owners use it to enhance their PowerPoint presentations.
Because this is such a popular and worthwhile application of SmartDraw we decided to provide a complete solution to PowerPoint users with the following capabilities:
The SmartDraw storyboard template makes this much easier to do than working inside PowerPoint. You get a complete picture of your whole presentation. You can drag and drop slides and bullets to change the content and order effortlessly. You can also link to other SmartDraw files that contain visuals you want to include on a slide and see a thumbnail of it in your storyboard.
Finally when you are satisfied with the storyboard of your presentation, you can pick the PowerPoint template you want to use and one click will build the entire slide deck, inserting the visuals from other SmartDraw files you specified, including their sequencing. This command sews all of our PowerPoint integration together for a complete solution.
Categories: graphics, interviews, microsoft_office, powerpoint, smartdraw
Labels: graphics, microsoft_office, powerpoint, smartdraw
SmartDraw has been long a mainstay of those who want to create professional looking graphics fast and easy. And although PowerPoint and other Microsoft Office applications include many info-graphic options, they continue to lack several business graphic options such as mindmaps, storyboards, flowcharts, etc. SmartDraw has traditionally filled in these gaps, but now it has started offering more than just the gaps.
We look at the new SmartDraw 2009.5, especially the new Microsoft Office oriented interoperability features in this review.
Read the review here...
Categories: graphics, microsoft_office, powerpoint, smartdraw
Labels: charting, graphics, powerpoint, smartdraw
SmartDraw.com announced the release of version 2009.5 of SmartDraw. This new release includes updated features and enhancements that allow easier interoperability with Microsoft Office applications:
PowerPoint Animation Support: Users can now add images, animation, and text that is replicated within PowerPoint as native PowerPoint objects when exported from SmartDraw.
Microsoft Project Interoperability: Users can take the tasks, sub-tasks, and dependencies from a smaller SmartDraw-created Gantt chart and export it directly into a larger Microsoft Project chart.
Integrating Excel Spreadsheets: Users can directly import and manipulate Microsoft Excel spreadsheets inside of SmartDraw, which means charts and graphs can be created and changed without exiting the SmartDraw file.
Existing version 2009 users of SmartDraw can get the 2009.5 upgrade free of cost.
More info is available on the SmartDraw site...
Categories: charting, graphics, powerpoint, smartdraw
ConceptDraw Office is a business software solution that combines three different applications: ConcepDraw PRO, ConceptDraw MINDMAP, and ConceptDraw PROJECT.
A very important aspect ConceptDraw Office is their new InGyre technology that creates integration and synergies between all the three applications found in ConceptDraw Office. InGyre technology helps these applications cater to all requirements of managing a workflow or project such as capturing ideas, planning and scheduling, organizing the process, arranging communications, and process tracking and management.
Read the review here...
Categories: charting, graphics
It can often take hours to create the perfect collage using tools in programs like Adobe Photoshop -- and even those may not work all the time. And when you want a quick collage, and don't really have the time to create it -- then you'll really want to look at this new tool called AutoCollage 2008.
AutoCollage 2008 is a standalone application which allows users to compile a set of photographs into one seamless collage. The output can be printed, used in e-postcards, web pages or desktop backgrounds, or e-mailed to family and friends.
Read the review here...
Categories: design, graphics
Labels: graphics
SmartDraw.com today announced that Virginia Tech has selected SmartDraw software for business graphics. According to Phil Lambert, Technology Business and Contract Analyst with Virginia Tech, SmartDraw will be available university-wide to help faculty, staff and students create polished, professional charts and graphics in minutes.
Read more here...
Categories: graphics
Labels: graphics, interviews, microsoft_office 
David Salaguinto (pictured to the left) is a writer on the Office User Assistance team at Microsoft who uses comics he creates to have fun, and to connect with readers -- see his Office Online Web Comic blog. In this conversation, David discusses how he got started, and where he gets inspiration from.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your work at Office Online. And how did you get started with the web comics blog?
David: Mostly, I write about Visio for the people who use it, although I do occasionally write about other Microsoft Office programs if a team needs my help. Every month, we look at the feedback we receive from customers, and we try to address it. Sometimes it means we write new articles or update existing ones. Sometimes it means we produce a video demo or online training. Sometimes it means we try new things. They don’t always work, but we like to think we learn from our failures.
One of the things we wanted to try was a comic. A colleague of mine found a fascinating article about comics being used in unusual places. What if we did a comic for Office Online? I thought it sounded like a fun idea, so I jumped at the chance to create a comic using Visio. For my first comic, I did a rather simple one about printing:
I personally thought it was kind of corny, but my coworkers seemed to like it, so I made more. Pretty soon, I was posting them online. You can read more about how I got started in this column I wrote for Office Online.
Geetesh: I love all the content you put up on the Office Online Web Comic blog -- what inspires you for all the ideas based on Microsoft Office applications.
David: I get a lot of my ideas from my coworkers. Sometimes, someone will send me an idea for a comic, but more often than not, I’ll read something in an e-mail or overhear something in a meeting that strikes me as a possible source of humor. It turns out that jokes aren’t that hard to write. Finding irony and surprise in everyday things—like Microsoft Office—now, that’s hard. For example, I was reading something written by a coworker about how a PowerPoint deck can have multiple slide masters. I immediately thought of the saying, “No man can serve two masters,” which lead me to this comic about PowerPoint and Marketing:
That’s where the ideas come from. As for the punch lines, well…I don’t actually know. They seem to come out of nowhere, but only after throwing out dozens of bad ones. You’d cringe in horror if you saw some of the bad punch lines I came up with for the preceding comic.
Geetesh: Tell us about some favorite posts you have put up, and why they are your favorites?
David: I think my favorite comics are the ones with the little pink girl in them. I have two young daughters myself, and I love the way they talk and how they look at the world. For example, I‘ve noticed that a lot of kids have started using PowerPoint in their school projects, which lead me to this comic:
For this comic, I spent a lot of time crafting the words so they would ring true and sound believable. I also wanted to capture the excitement in the child and the caring in the father. In so far as the comic succeeds, I think it succeeds because of that (and not just because of the jibe at marketing—although that certainly helps). As you can probably tell, I have a lot of fun creating these comics—probably even more than you have reading them.
Categories: interviews, graphics, , microsoft_office
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: clip_media, graphics, powerpoint 
Jeff Koke (pictured to the right) is a graphic designer and creative marketing expert who has been designing professionally since 1992. He is the co-founder of two businesses: Koke Creative, a creative marketing firm that helps innovative companies build strong brands and executes on those brands through Web, print and presentation design; and PointClips, a site that sells high-quality professional graphics for PowerPoint. Jeff lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and two children. He enjoys Tae Kwon Do, soccer, writing and music.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself and PointClips.
Jeff: I've been involved in graphic design professionally since 1992, and have been working in PowerPoint since 1997 when I was creative director for an enterprise software company, helping them craft effective sales and marketing presentations. More recently, my design firm Koke Creative has built a practice around creating beautiful and powerful PowerPoint presentations for all kinds of companies.
The idea for PointClips came from the fact that one of our clients required that all the artwork in their presentations be built within PowerPoint, not imported from JPEGs or other external graphics. This was for file size reasons as well as to increase the quality of the presentation when given over NetMeeting. We developed a method for creating beautiful icons and objects using PowerPoint's built-in drawing tools. Our illustrator, Russell Moore, used this method to build the hundreds of objects that we offer on PointClips.
Geetesh: How are PointClips different than other graphics for PowerPoint.
Jeff: When people think of graphics for PowerPoint, they usually think of backgrounds and templates, or stock photography -- or they think of the cartoony clip art that comes with the program. We wanted to break that paradigm with PointClips. PointClips are unique illustrations that convey the benefits of native PowerPoint objects (scalability, transparency, editability) while having the detail and beauty of graphics that are usually created in other design programs, like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. If you've spent any time working with PowerPoint's drawing tools, you'll know that this isn't easy.
Being vector illustrations, their main advantage is flexibility: they can be scaled to any size, from a tiny icon or bullet, to a graphic that fills the slide -- all without any loss of detail or quality (no jagged, pixellated edges); they have transparent backgrounds, so they can be placed on top of other elements without white boxes around them; and they are easily editable by ungrouping their components and editing the colors or individual points. If needed in other applications, they can be copied and pasted into Word or Excel, or exported as JPEG or PNG for any other application, including web sites.
PointClips are available here...
Categories: clip_media, graphics, powerpoint
Labels: graphics, powerpoint
Mind mapping is a great way to brainstorm, store ideas, and create visual relations between concepts. I found a great application to do mind mapping -- and it lets me save those mind maps as PowerPoint presentation outlines -- a great way to create great outlines.
With ConceptDraw MINDMAP 5, you can present processes, ideas, complicated relationships, and other concepts graphically. The program helps you present your learning material in a logical and structured way -- it also includes a comprehensive library of graphics, colors, figures and connections which helps in creating and sustaining the outline structure.
Read the review here...
Categories: graphics, powerpoint
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