PowerPoint Blog
Labels: interviews, opinion, powerpoint
Brent Dykes has used PowerPoint for more than 10 years in various marketing and consulting roles. His presentations have been seen by executives at Fortune 500 companies and various marketing conferences. In 2008, he started the PowerPoint Ninja blog. Brent has an MBA from BYU and is Director, Consulting at Omniture.
In this conversation, Brent discusses his PowerPoint involvement and his blog.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your involvement with PowerPoint.
Brent: I’ve been working with PowerPoint for more than 10 years in a variety of contexts: sales and marketing, business school, business start-ups, consulting, and management.
My first significant exposure to PowerPoint came when I interned at Microsoft for a couple of semesters in the late 1990s in Vancouver, BC. As a sales and marketing intern, I gained access to Microsoft’s vast marketing slide repository so that I could build presentations for various speaking engagements. Seeing what other very skilled users had created with PowerPoint really opened my eyes to what could be done with this presentation software.
After graduating from Simon Fraser University with a BBA in Marketing in 1999, I joined a successful web design agency, Blast Radius (WPP), as a marketing analyst. A core responsibility of my role was to create reusable marketing presentations for our sales and executive teams. I also worked on several sales pitches for Fortune 500 companies.
In 2002, I went back to school for my MBA from Brigham Young University. As an MBA student, I was able to leverage my PowerPoint skills on a weekly basis in my various class projects. I was also able to participate in a couple of business plan competitions where my presentation skills helped my team to place as a semi-finalist in the 2004 BYU competition and second in the 2004 Utah Entrepreneur Challenge. It was great to get exposure to VC pitches.
For the past five years, I’ve been working for Omniture as a web analytics consultant, manager, and director. In that time I have worked extensively with PowerPoint in building various client presentations for Fortune 500 companies, which focused on data analysis and strategy. I’ve also been fortunate to present at several marketing conferences including a 2008 keynote presentation in Japan. For better or for worse, PowerPoint continues to be a big part of my life.
Geetesh: How did PowerPointNinja evolve? What sorts of thoughts do you post?
Brent: Throughout my career I’ve had several co-workers, managers, and clients praise me on my PowerPoint skills. In 2004, I finally decided to purchase a web domain that related to my PowerPoint expertise. I chose “PowerPoint Ninja” because ninjas are skilled, mysterious, and just plain cool.
After a few years of sitting on the domain and telling people that I would eventually create a PowerPoint presentation website, I decided it needed to happen in 2008. Eventually, I’d like to publish a PowerPoint Ninja handbook.
In terms of the types of thoughts I post on my site, I believe I bring a very practical or pragmatic perspective to PowerPoint design and business presentations. As someone who is using PowerPoint in a corporate environment, I can relate with many of the limitations and challenges that business users run into because I’m battling those same issues.
I post tips and tricks on how to use PowerPoint features and how to design effective business presentations. I try to focus on all three phases of PowerPoint presentations: planning, design, and delivery. If you’ve already read some of my articles you’ll also know that I like to have fun with my posts.
Categories: interviews, opinion, powerpoint
Labels: animation, interviews, powerpoint 
Max Wijgergangs is the owner of a Dutch PowerPoint presentation company, Studio-Max. Max admits that he bought his first computer only in 2001, until which time he knew practically nothing about computers and PowerPoint. But he made up for that lost time soon by rapidly discovering all kind of possibilities working with Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe graphics software. This remained a big passion, but it was still a hobby until 4 years later, when he decided to quit his regular job. He launched Studio-Max with a goal to provide the Dutch market with professionally designed PowerPoint presentations. Since then, his energy focused on taking PowerPoint presentations to a higher level that has allowed Studio-Max to become a known name.
Max and his team love to play with the animation possibilities in PowerPoint. In this conversation, Max discusses this and more.
Geetesh: How can animation enhance a regular PowerPoint presentation to something above the ordinary.
Max: Many Dutch clients and companies don't know the full possibilities of PowerPoint, and they are in most cases pleasantly surprised when they see some of our works. "Wow, is this really done by only PowerPoint?' is what we hear a lot from these people. This reaction probably stem from the way we use graphics and animation. When animations are used in the right way, they can really enchance any PowerPoint slide. The secret is to combine different basic animations on pre-calculated timeframes (we use Excel formulas for this!).
When combined with well designed, corporate looking content (Photoshop/Illustrator artwork), this will result in stunning and professional looking animated slides that will blow people away.
We have an in-house PowerPoint professional, Lam Quang Huy working with us at Studio-Max. He is an animation specialist, and he really knows how to take PowerPoint animations to the next level.
There are many secrets hidden in the PowerPoint animation schemes, and we continue to discover new tricks on a regular basis! A lay-person could well imagine that these animations were created using Adobe Flash!
Geetesh: Is there anything called too-much-animation? Tell us more about the dividing line.
Max: Yes there is, I see that almost every day when companies send me their in-house presentations. Content is animated too fast or too slow, pictures are spinning and turning around the screen to vertigo levels, and so on. Too much animation of that sort can distract the audience from the message. Of course, an overkill of animations can also be annoying.
The dividing line in animations can be a distinct difference -- between slides created by a PowerPoint professional or an amateur. Most presentations made in this part of the world demand animations on each slide. It's always a challenge to find the balance between restful and highly dynamic, yet sophisticated animations.
Audiences must not be overwhelmed by all kind of animations but it's also important not to bore them with standard animation stuff they have seen a zillion time before. Being original and creative, that will help a lot!
Categories: animation, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, movies 
Jörg Hahn aka Jay Green was Marketing Manager with a screen capturing software publisher prior to launching his new company Convima. Now he successfully combines video production with online marketing. Hahn holds an MBA, speaks 5 languages fluently, and is planning to open another subsidiary of Convima in Singapore in August 2009.
Geetesh: Tell us more about this interesting concept of product videos for the web, and how it evolved.
Jörg: The concept is quite simple. We tell you how to make a video and how to get the most out of it. Combining video production with online marketing is a successful and future-oriented concept that initially got started when I was still working with software publisher balesio on ALLCapture. I realized that customers buying screen capturing software, like Adobe Captivate, balesio's ALLCapture or Techsmith's Camtasia, only purchased the tool that enables them to capture content and to produce online videos. However, the know-how how to make a professional video in terms of a good film script was often demanded. In some cases, customers don't have the time to learn how to use such software. This is where the idea to offer consulting on how to produce a video was born. Sometimes customers had an employee in charge of in-house video production, but due to that person leaving that position or the company, the need for an external video production company evolved.
Another interesting aspect of the Convima concept is that we integrate produced video content into our clients' online marketing mix and therefore boost their SEO/SEM efforts. Most companies use video content exclusively on their website. However, video and presentation platforms, bookmarking services and social media give us the opportunity to boost and promote a video (product video, corporate film, website or online platform presentation) in a very strategic way.
Geetesh: What are the benefits in creating these videos, and how long does it take to create them? Also how much do they cost.
Jörg: If you want to increase your incoming traffic and boost online sales, modern and interesting content is needed to attract more people coming to your site. Once they are on your online presence, you can use video content to improve the usability of the site and therefore increase conversion rates.
Creating these videos and integrating them into our customers' online marketing mix really helps to strengthen SEO and SEM strategies. We look at where the customer puts his priorities in his online presence. Is his website primarily an information platform, a showroom, lead generator or does it act as a sales engine. Depending on where the priority lies, we generate video content to underline this marketing focus and then strategically position it on the web – with relevant keywords, descriptions and links. This service therefore has a strong SEO/ SEM orientation and enables our customers to be listed on page 1 in Google. They can have a thumbnail of their video displayed in the SERPS (Google search results) or be listed in the SEVRS (Google video results).
The time to create videos really depends on what the customer wants and on the amount of content that was delivered to us beforehand. Content that can go into the final video is existing video material, articles, tables and graphics or most importantly, PowerPoint presentations. In many instances, our clients want to present their website in a brief video or to provide a support tutorial that makes navigating through the order process easier. In those cases, we need to record the screen and incorporate that into the final video. All in all, however, we don't need more than a week to produce the video and to successfully position it online.
The price for this high quality service is comparatively low. Any video up to 2 minutes starts at 699 € (or USD 899). That includes a consultation about editorial and technical aspects of the content and provision of a film script, the production of the video and the integration of the video content into the online marketing mix. Updates and minor changes to the video content are free of charge for 2 weeks after delivery. Additional minutes will be charged at 149 € per minute (USD 199). For further information, please consult the Convima website.
Categories: interviews, movies
Labels: books, interviews, powerpoint_2007, programming
Vivek Thangaswamy is a Software Solution developer and technical author based Chennai, India. He specializes in Microsoft enterprise application architectures and server-based product integrations. Vivek is a Microsoft MVP and he completed his Bachelor of technology degree in Information Technology and is currently pursuing a MBA in Finance. In this conversation, Vivek discusses his newly released book: VSTO 3.0 for Office 2007 Programming.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your VSTO for Office 2007 book, and what is the profile of your typical reader?
Vivek: Although there are numerous web resources available for VSTO, there are very few books available on this suject. I find it is always nice to refer to a book as and when required. When choosing a book for a new technology, readers always look for one that teaches from the ground level. In my VSTO 3.0 for Office 2007 Programming book, I start from the basics and make readers competent enough to take control over the VSTO programming. This book addresses all segments of the audience including beginners, intermediate users, and VBA programmers -- it is also a good resource for VBA programmers who want to learn VSTO. I make them comfortable with C# programming in VSTO, which info is not available in any other resource that I am aware of. The entire book was written in a style that calls for short and crisp content to make learning easier and faster. Full examples are provided using the latest Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite, and the code snippets are done using C#.
You will learn about VSTO, how VSTO compares to VBA, and features and limitations of the current version of VSTO, including its architecture. Each individual Office application is handled precisely in separate chapters of the book, including InfoPath and Excel. The book covers new ground by exploring VSTO programming for PowerPoint, Visio and Project, again that's something I haven't found covered elsewhere. You learn new concepts like Ribbon programming, application level solutions, and document level solutions for Microsoft Office 2007. Object models for each Office application are covered.
As part of a team with Packt Publications, I aimed to create a quality book for budding developers.
Geetesh: Tell us about your experiences working with the object model in PowerPoint 2007, and controlling it with VSTO.
Vivek: Microsoft PowerPoint is one of the finest presentation tools available. However, I was not a frequent PowerPoint user -- so I brainstormed with some frequent PowerPoint users about the essential operations that all PowerPoint users perform frequently, and used those observations for programming examples using VSTO for PowerPoint in my book.
First I cover all the basic programmability of PowerPoint using VSTO, and than explain the object model for PowerPoint. There is a huge collection of objects available to be explored by the PowerPoint programmer. While I don't cover it all, I have worked with the basics in the book so that the budding programmer has a strong foundation to start with PowerPoint programming using VSTO. Currently I don’t see as many PowerPoint programmers in the community as for other Office applications. I hope that my book will raise the PowerPoint programming interest in the community.
Categories: books, interviews, powerpoint_2007, programming
Labels: interviews, powerpoint 
Steve Rindsberg is the founder and President of RDP, based in Cincinnati, OH (USA). Steve's been associated with PowerPoint since the product originated -- his PowerPoint FAQ site is a treasure trove of PowerPoint information. When he's not updating his site, he's creating new add-ins that expand possibilities. Steve's also into a lot of print technology related stuff.
Geetesh: How did the PowerPoint FAQ (PPT FAQ) evolve?
Steve: Back before the internet and web became mainstream, Microsoft had several support forums on Compuserve. I used to hang out on the PowerPoint forum and answer questions. In part, it was a great way to learn more about the software and to get ideas for a monthly column I used to write for Inside PowerPoint magazine, but mostly it was fun to be able to help other PowerPoint users.
Of course, newcomers always tended to have the same basic questions. Rather than type the same answers over and over again, I started to keep a couple of text files with "stock answers" that I could copy and and paste as responses. That may seem a little impersonal, but really, it works out better for everyone. Instead of dashing off a quick answer (and maybe leaving out important bits by mistake) I could take the time to write a nice, clear, complete answer once and many people could benefit from it. And that left more time to work on the tricky, less-frequently asked questions.
Then along came the web. Publishing all of these stock answers on my web site seemed like the obvious thing to do. That way people didn't have to wait for me to reply to their questions on the forums, they could just check the site for a quick answer.
Geetesh: How do you keep all this content updated?
Steve: For a while, I wrote the content and created the links in Word, then exported to HTML for the web. That worked fairly well when there were only a few dozen questions and answers, but the FAQ very quickly grew unmanageable in Word.
You know what they say: "When the going gets tough, the tough get going."
Well, the not-so-tough, if they're nerds, write software.
I wrote my own program to create and update the questions and answers, create the HTML and publish it to the web. And of course I added features that make it easy for me to find an answer quickly and paste a link to it directly into forum and later newsgroup replies.
This all evolved into a program called Friday (for obscure reasons having to do with a 1950's TV detective show), that I use to maintain the PowerPoint FAQ, the various PPTools sites, and several other sites.
Interestingly, a lot of the work that went into Friday became the basis for our PPT2HTML add-in for PowerPoint, but that's another story for another day, I think.
Geetesh: Does the PowerPoint community help you?
Steve: Oh, absolutely! Somebody has to ask questions frequently in order for them to become frequently asked questions.
Without the PowerPoint community, the PowerPoint FAQ (at least my version of it) wouldn't exist. Between the users' questions and the contributions of the PowerPoint MVPs and other newsgroup regulars, there's no end of material for the FAQ. Even with Friday's help, I have trouble keeping up.
The PowerPoint FAQ really is a community effort. You might say that I'm more the librarian than the author. That's why this is one of the first things you see when you go there:
"Thanks to everyone on the newsgroups for asking such interesting and challenging questions, and a very special thanks to the PowerPoint MVPs and the OughtaBeMVPs who've contributed so much to this site and to the larger PowerPoint community."
And since I wrote that myself, I couldn't agree more.
Categories: interviews, powerpoint
Labels: books, interviews, legal, powerpoint 
Herbert Rubinstein has been involved in computer graphics for over 15 years as founder and CEO of ReGraphix, an award winning creative house for graphics and design. The past few years, Mr. Rubinstein has taken his presentation graphics experience and applied it to developing presentation techniques for the Courtroom. He has worked with the FBI, DEA, U.S. Customs Service and other government agencies, as well as many law firms across United States. In this conversation, Herb talks about his book and CD called PowerPoint For Court.
Geetesh: How are presentations created for the courtroom different than your conventional PowerPoint presentations?
Herb: I believe that the main difference would be in style Courtroom Presentations need to be, stylistically speaking, bland. If the judge feels that you are trying to influence a decision by including design elements that are prejudicial, it will not be allowed.
Case in point. A Paralegal for a District Attorney prepared a Cast of Character illustration using the SmartArt feature of PowerPoint. For the background he used a gray/blue but it had little pin stripes, very subtle, in the background. The judge would not allow it to be presented claiming that the pin stripe design was reminiscent of Prison Clothing and was therefore prejudicial to the client.
When designing for Courtroom display, you need to keep the design clean and devoid of distracting graphic elements.
Another area that is quite different is in the presentation. The show may need to be paused repeatedly because of objections from opposing counsel.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your new book on using PowerPoint in the courtroom.
Herb: The new PowerPoint for Court updated for 2009 has all the screenshots from the latest version of PowerPoint. This e-manual is not meant as a complete PowerPoint bible, it has been designed specifically for the Legal Profession. You can hand this to a staff member and have them up and running creating cutting edge Trial Presentation material in a very short time.
Dealing with audio clips, opening PDF’s, proper preparation of images, inserting Flash animations and how to work with Deposition Video are just a few of the many subjects covered and updated in this latest release.
If you want to continue winning in the courtroom you must utilize the latest court technologies. PowerPoint for Court 2009 will help you and your staff accomplish this.
PowerPoint for Court 2009 is now available as an instant download, as well as on CD and the price has been reduced! Now the CD package is $99 (with free shipping) and the instant download package is $89 with instant access to the Resource page on our website that includes all the resources mentioned in the book.
Categories: books, interviews, legal, powerpoint
Labels: authorstream, interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint 
Dinesh Awasthi is Product Manager for authorSTREAM.com at authorGEN (authorSTREAM's parent company). In addition to developing the strategic product roadmap and implementation of various features on authorSTREAM, he works with the development team and keeps an eye on user feedback to formulate new releases. Dinesh holds a Masters degree in Computer Applications, and certifications in Quality Management and Software Testing.
Geetesh: What are these new presentation channels on authorSTREAM?
Dinesh: authorSTREAM Presentation Channels are your personalized web pages that showcase a collection of presentations -- be it on one topic or a theme. We realized that each individual usually has a bunch of presentations on each topic, and that everyone has a variety of interests. authorSTREAM Channels allow users to create multiple channels, say each focusing on one topic of interest. For example, a channel on photography would cater to photography enthusiasts and another one on China travel would help people find information on traveling to China. One can start a channel on 'Global Warming'. Companies can create a channel for each of their products and services. We went a step further by empowering channel owners to allow other users to upload presentations in their (owner's) channels. Say, an instructor might want to let all her students upload their English assignment presentations in one channel and so on.
Geetesh: How do you think channels will help users in a web-social way? Also, do you plan to provide a pro level channel with more abilities?
Dinesh: We have visualized authorSTREAM Channels as a platform for creative collaboration. Channel owners can also invite other authorSTREAM members to add presentations to their channel. A university department can create a channel and allow its professors to contribute, a journalist can start a channel about a story or an event where witnesses to the event can post their own point of view. A teacher can create a channel on a homework assignment and allow her/his students to submit their assignments there. This gives people the freedom and the ability to keep a lively discussion going about any particular topic or theme.
If you like a particular channel, you can subscribe to it with a single click and authorSTREAM will keep you updated about them on your dashboard. Soon, you will also see the RSS feed of a channel. If you like to embed a particular channel on your blog or website, simply use the channel embed code -- in a small area on your website, all the channel presentations would show up! The buzz has already started with people creating channels on fashion, spirituality, marketing, beliefs etc.
In the coming months, we have plans to add pro level channels with advanced features.
Categories: authorstream, interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint
Labels: books, interviews, powerpoint 
Andrew Abela is an Associate Professor of Marketing and Chair-elect of the Department of Business & Economics at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and author of Advanced Presentations by Design.
His consulting clients include Microsoft, ExxonMobil, Motorola, Burger King, eBay, and Kimberly-Clark. Prior to academia, he ran the Marketing Leadership Council, was a consultant with McKinsey & Co., and a brand manager at Procter & Gamble. He lives with his wife and their six children in Great Falls, Virginia, and was born and raised on the island of Malta.
Read the interview here...
Categories: books, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint, powerpointlive
Rick Altman of PowerPoint Live has launched the PowerPoint Live Template Contest for this year's event to be held from October 11 to 14 at Atlanta. Winners of the template contest will get a free trip to the fall event!
For those of you who want to see how the winning entries look like, head to this exclusive page we created last year that shows you all the winners over the years.
Also exclusive is this small conversation with Rick.
Geetesh: So the PowerPoint Live template contest enters its fifth year -- I know you cannot say what you are looking for in a winner, but you could say what you are not looking for?
Rick: I can say both. We are looking for an intelligent and elegant design that will remain as attractive on Day 3 as it was on Day 1. We are not looking for something that shows off a person's knowledge of PowerPoint features. That is the job of our presenters.
Geetesh: Tell us more about what the winner gets.
Rick: Free pass to the conference and round-trip airfare from any city in the United States that Delta Airlines flies to.
Now, how do you take part in this contest? Head here to learn more.
And who judges the entries? The entries are judged by a panel of conference regulars, including "yours truly":
Ric Bretschneider, is Senior Program Manager for PowerPoint at Microsoft and he celebrates many 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.
Nancy Duarte has been a Principal of Duarte Design since1990. Her firm is in the heart of the Silicon Valley and the client list is loaded with Fortune 500 companies. Her passion for business communications that are clear, meaningful and attractive has opened doors for her in a business world full of cluttered and complex visual communications.
Julie Terberg develops custom presentation solutions -- unique for every client and purpose as owner and principle designer at Terberg Design. She co-authored a book on crafting medical presentations. Julie also conducts training sessions for those who want to expand their skills, and is a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for PowerPoint.
Geetesh Bajaj has been a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for PowerPoint since 9 years now, and is currently authoring his fifth book on the program. Based in India, Geetesh also runs the popular Indezine.com web site.
Categories: interviews, powerpoint, powerpointlive
Labels: add-in, interviews, powerpoint 
James Ontra, co-founder of PPTshare, has been developing presentation management solutions for over thirteen years. His company’s software products range from the high-end Ontra Presentation Management solution known for its ability to play rich animations and video, to applications that enhance and help manage PowerPoint. In this conversation, James discusses the new PPTshuffle product.
Geetesh: Tell us about PPTshuffle, and what does it do?
James: Find the slide you need, when you need it. PPTshuffle is a browser-based PowerPoint slide library that lets you preview slides and then drag & drop them into another presentation. It's a presentation management solution that helps companies with thousands of PowerPoint presentations manage and organize all of that content, so individuals can find the slide they need, quickly and easily. Companies can use it on their Intranet behind a firewall, or use it online as an on-demand service.
Features include:
Geetesh: Who is the potential user of PPTshuffle, and what benefits will a user achieve from this product?
James: PPTshuffle is made for organizations that have hundreds, even thousands, of PowerPoint files that no one can seem to find.
It works on two levels.
First for individual users, it is a library where a user can preview individual slides and then drag and drop them into a new presentation. They can do a key word search for individual slides based on file name, title, speaker notes and content, preview the slide, and then decide whether or not to drag & drop into a new presentation. Or they can click on a PowerPoint file and quickly preview all of the slides within that file. No more hunting and pecking through their e-mail, networks and hard drive looking for the great pie chart or latest sales figures. It saves hours of time preparing presentations.
Second for managers and administrators, PPTshuffle serves as a repository of approved presentations and manages access through user groups. Therefore, it ensures that everyone in the organization has the most up-to-date, branded and compliant presentations.
Categories: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: design, interviews, powerpoint 
Scott Schwertly is from Ethos3 Communications, an internationally renowned and award-winning presentation design and training company located in Nashville, TN. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of SlideMagnet.com - an online portal for the presentation space. Scott works with a wide spectrum of clients that includes Fortune 100 companies, Silicon Valley start-ups, and various other organizations throughout the world. He may live in Nashville, TN with his wife and three dogs, but he calls San Diego home - the place of his beloved San Diego Chargers. Scott has a B.A. and M.B.A. from Harding University. In this conversation, Scott discusses his new SlideMagnet site.
Geetesh: Tell us more about SlideMagnet, and what is its raison d’être?
Scott: SlideMagnet.com is an online portal/magazine for both novice and professional presenters. It provides presentation tips and advice as well as the latest presentation technology news. The site features articles to help maximize the effectiveness of presentations through improved design, content and delivery methods and includes an ask-the-expert section. There’s also a community forum that encourages discussion on related topics.
When I first started Ethos3 close to 3 years ago, I found very limited online resources to build presentation knowledge. Thus, I found myself taking lessons from classics like the works of Dale Carnegie. The unfortunate reality is that I had to rely on books written from the 1930's since I couldn't find anything on the web. Today, the resources remain limited -- there are, without doubt, some fantastic blogs and tools, but the overall resources are still lacking. My hope is that SlideMagnet will help fill that gap. With sites out there like SlideShare, SlideRocket, Presentation Zen, Slideology, and now SlideMagnet -- 2009 will surely be the year of presentations!
My dream is that SlideMagnet will empower presenters. It's a shame when people inquire with presentation design firms, but due to budget cuts or limited capital, they can't afford solid presentation design services. Hopefully, SlideMagnet will serve as an alternative by providing tips, tricks, hacks, etc for the entrepreneur with a shoestring budget or the Marketing Director who is unable to receive corporate buy-in regarding presentation services.
Geetesh: What sort of content do you plan to make available on SlideMagnet, and whom is this targeted towards?
Scott: SlideMagnet.com has lots of great features including items such as:
SlideMagnet.com is for everyone. Most importantly, it's for presenters. It is my hope that SlideMagnet will be the catalyst for everyone's next great presentation.
Categories: design, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: clip_media, interviews, maps, powerpoint 
Carles Enric Lopez is CEO of Netmaps, SA -- a Barcelona, Spain based company. He has a degree in Geography from the Universidad de Barcelona (UB) and the University College of London (UCL). In addition, he holds a Master in Demography (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ) and is a Postgraduate in Urbanism (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya).
In this conversation, Carles Enric Lopez talks about the use of maps in PowerPoint.
Geetesh: How can presenters and presentation designers benefit from using maps in their PowerPoint slides?
Carles: PowerPoint maps are not only perfect for making your presentations easier to create, but also give them a far more professional look. Such maps are ideal if you are looking to add clear, visual references into your presentation. One of the benefits of our maps for presentations is that we have covered all the country maps in the world with the same kind of information so it would be perfect for any company to unify their information.
You can modify any of the maps, and make your own look and feel, so our maps can be combined with your corporate images in an easy way. It is a well known fact that visual aids greatly help people to retain for longer the information which you present to them, and the speaker finds it much easier to engage with their audience and pull off a successful presentation, if they don't have to worry about technical problems or trying to describe geographical locations. PowerPoint maps will save you a lot of time and hassle, since the maps have been purposely created for PowerPoint software, so you won't have to worry about glitches, bad graphics or difficult modifications.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your company, and the PowerPoint specific maps that you provide.
Carles: We, at Netmaps, have over 11 years experience under our belts, and specialize in the creation of digital maps in a variety of formats, for example PowerPoint, Illustrator, and Freehand. Our diverse team comprises of experienced geographers and cartographers. Our head office is located in a four story building in the quiet suburbs of Barcelona (Spain), but we have reputable customers in 69 countries throughout the world, such as DK, Time Out, National Geographic, African Development Bank, HP, BBC, Apple, and so on. We offer maps of continents, countries and cities, both topographical, political and road maps. Our maps for PowerPoint were created in 2003 because some of our largest clients needed specific and customized maps for their presentations. We used our beta website version from 2003-2005, with Maps 1.0 available. In 2006 we launched the new version of our website 2.0, and finally in 2009 we have decided to start our PowerPointMaps version 3.0 which combines the free version 1.0 and the payable version. We have also reduced prices by 50% of the version 2.0. Version 1.0 maps are completely free to download, and you can start using them straight away. Upgrading to version 2.0 maps (at a cost of just 49 euros each) allows you to easily modify the PowerPoint map.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your support infrastructure.
Carles: Our maps are fully vectorized, which means that our production team is working day in day out to update any new information. When we update any of the maps, we also transform them to PowerPoint format to make them available for users of PowerPoint presentations.
We can be reached by either phone or email. You will be put straight through to a member of staff (no pushing lots of buttons!). If you choose to send us an email, we promise to get back to you within 6 hours. Our team comprises of native speaking English, French, Spanish, and German nationals. Our production team is on hand if you have any problems with downloading, but if all else fails we can send the map to you via email. Our central server is in the UK and we have backups in India and France. It means our presentation maps are guaranteed 24 hours X 7 days.
Categories: clip_media, interviews, maps, powerpoint
Labels: delivery, interviews, powerpoint 
Jerry Weissman is among the world's foremost corporate presentations coaches. His private client list reads like a who's who of the world's best companies, including the top brass at Yahoo!, Intel, Intuit, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Netflix and many others.
Jerry founded Power Presentations, Ltd. in 1988. One of his earliest efforts was the Cisco Systems IPO road show. The Power PresenterFollowing its successful launch, Don Valentine, of Sequoia Capital, and then chairman of Cisco's Board of Directors, attributed "at least two to three dollars" of the offering price to Jerry's coaching.That endorsement led to more than 500 other IPO road show presentations that have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in the stock market. In this conversation, Jerry discusses his new book: The Power Presenter: Technique, Style, and Strategy from America's Top Speaking Coach.
Read the interview here...
Categories: delivery, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: design, interviews, opinion, powerpoint 
Olivia Mitchell has been a Toastmaster, a management development trainer for a major bank, and a political candidate. Now she teaches others how to become more confident and effective presenters - through face-to-face training courses in New Zealand (Effective Speaking) and her blog Speaking about Presenting.
Geetesh: Can you tell more about what got you interested in design changes for PowerPoint slides? And how did the idea of a group blog come about?
Olivia: Most of my course participants, and visitors to my blog, already know that bullet-points are awful but they don't know what to do about it. I want to make it easy for people to transition from bullet-point slides to visual slides.
Many presentation design bloggers have a particular design style and that comes through on their blogs. So I see my role as digesting all the great design and styles that are out there and showing people how they can adopt those styles. For an example see my post The Top 7 PowerPoint slide designs.
The group blog came about because of post by Laura Bergells from the Maniactive blog. Laura argued that in some cases we need a return to more detailed slides. I started composing a blog post to respond to what Laura had written but realized that initiating a wide-ranging debate would be more interesting. I broadened the debate by suggesting that the theme of their posts should be "What you'd like to see in PowerPoint slide design in 2009."
I invited presentation bloggers and selected experts to contribute. There's now a total of 40 contributions. It seems to be an issue that people wanted to write about.
Geetesh: What's your opinion about changes in design?
Olivia:I totally support the move away from bullet-point slides.
But I think there is an issue with integrating new design approaches into everyday business culture. It's all very well to say that businesses should put as many resources into their PowerPoint slides as their brochures or annual reports, but that's not going to happen. The reality is that everyday business people will continue to put together the majority of PowerPoint slideshows. They are not going to read design books or read the archives of Presentation Zen. They need quick and simple ways of putting together slides that don't suck.
Geetesh: Can you quote some opinions from the numerous blog posts that have been put up as part of this group blog initiative.
Olivia:Here are some of the themes that have come through.
First, from the presentation bloggers who are in the trenches working with business people, there comes the theme that most presentations still suck. Here's Bert Decker:I would estimate 90% of all types of presentations are created by people who go to their computers and start the process by using the PP outliner or going right to writing text and bullets on the slides themselves. So the end result is totally PP driven, and we have information without influence and data without emotion.
Many other bloggers echoed this.
There are two main controversies that came through. The first one is "Does Design Matter?". On the one hand you have Joey Asher saying:But ultimately my position on PowerPoint is this: it’s largely irrelevant to whether you accomplish your goals. That’s because PowerPoint and other visuals, now matter how graphically pleasing, don’t inspire audiences, sell ideas, or win business.
and on the other, Ellen Finkelstein:I’d like presenters in 2009 to know that design is important. Good design provides a professional, custom look that says that the presenter cared enough about the audience to do more than slap on a default background. Companies hire professionals to design their web sites and printed brochures; why not their presentations, which are just as important?
The second controversy is "Simplicity versus Detail". This is the issue that Laura Bergells discussed in the post that sparked the project. The majority suggested that there should be one idea per slide and that should be supported by a visual.
But there was also a significant minority who suggested that it should depend - this from Brent Dykes:I am concerned that rather than adding the simple, visual approach to presenters' "toolboxes", presenters will use it as a hammer for all presentation situations. .. Just because bullet points may be perceived as the duct tape of PowerPoint design (inelegant and ugly), it doesn’t mean bullet points aren’t effective in certain situations.
Many bloggers used this opportunity to reiterate key design principles - there's a lot of unanimity around these -- which will provide clear guidance to presenters. For example:
Finally, many bloggers also looked at what might be ahead. The most interesting theme here was the influence of social media techniques on PowerPoint and presenting. Laura Bergells suggested that:The brevity of Twitter can make you a better designer. A better headline writer. A better presenter. Using and studying Twitter can be a powerful exercise in how to get your point across swiftly and succinctly.
I'll be publishing four round-up posts to highlight these themes. The first one is already published: PowerPoint Slide Design in 2009: Does Design Matter?
See Also: Slide Design in 2009: Changes -- by Geetesh Bajaj | PowerPoint Design in 2009 -- by Olivia Mitchell
Categories: design, interviews, opinion, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
Damian McDonald is the founder of Visual Newmedia which has over 15 years’ experience in developing communication solutions for a number of leading global brands. Damian heads the team in the development and implementation methodologies of Visual’s presentation management solution - Visual Presenter.
Geetesh: Can you tell us more about the problems being faced by folks who create and deliver presentations?
Damian: We’ve been developing presentations for corporate clients since the mid-nineties and have found that the issues businesses face in the area of presenting to their own clients have remained pretty consistent throughout that time.
Obviously the most-widely used presentation application is Microsoft PowerPoint, which is simple enough that most presenters can construct a basic piece of work within it. The problem lies in a more macro sense: in particular the management – and control – within the business of the various presentations that have been created.
From a business point of view, there tends to be no brand consistency across this multitude of presentations, both visually and within the content itself. This is an issue even for smaller organisations. With individuals ‘going it alone’ to create presentation collateral, the brand messages are mixed, confused, personalised and worse, often obsolete. This isn’t necessarily the fault of the end user -- another issue we find time and again is that those presenting cannot find the information within the company’s network drives to even update what they are going to present. This is especially true for those working remotely who, ironically, tend to be in the kinds of roles that have to deliver most of the company presentations, and so they simply create and recreate ‘individualised’ presentations, and the information being delivered becomes more and more off-brand, off-message, and out of date.
We also find that even if businesses want to keep their front line personnel updated with the latest information for client presentations, they often have no mechanism with which to do this. Or you’ll find they can get information to one business channel, but not others, so you still have a frighteningly inconsistent brand message being communicated to clients and prospective clients. So it becomes a vicious cycle, in a sense. These are all issues that we created Visual Presenter to address.
Something else we worked on while developing Visual Presenter was addressing the issues in PowerPoint when it comes to linking associated media files. Clients no longer accept sitting through ‘Death by PowerPoint’ bullet point after bullet point. People expect multimedia, and any effective presentation will include this.
Unfortunately, as multimedia technology has evolved with PowerPoint, media formats such as video, audio, and Flash struggle to maintain valid media links. For example, if you import a video over the network and then disconnect from the network, when it then comes to presenting, PowerPoint can’t play the video as it tries unsuccessfully to search for the file on the ‘non-existent’ network location. Very frustrating for the presenter, and very unprofessional.
And how do you merge interactive custom shows? Again we’ve frequently found that those presenters who do begin to get a bit smarter with the advanced functionality of PowerPoint are hampered by the fact that currently there is no way to merge interactive presentations without losing this functionality and having to recreate it. Again, very restrictive, and very frustrating.
The end result, invariably, is that presenters give up trying to create dynamic presentations, they find they can’t customise material to suit a particular audience, they can’t access new information and so they go out to the market with tired, inaccurate, unprofessional-looking material, despite the best of intentions. And the organisation suffers accordingly.
Geetesh: How does your Visual Presenter product help them in the problem scenarios you explained?
Damian: Working for such a long period of time in this area, and with a large range of businesses has enabled us to address all these problem scenarios effectively. We also continue to develop Visual Presenter to address issues that we anticipate could affect businesses in the future. At a one-on-one level, we work with the organisations to use this knowledge to address their specific needs. Thankfully not every business is affected by every problem we were talking about in the first question!
Specifically, where we help is addressing the needs at both ends of the problem, if you like: those of the business itself, and those presenting.
With Visual Presenter, users can create presentations in minutes that automatically tailor the content and design to their audience. Content that is relevant to a user is automatically updated from a centralised server. This is one of the key pieces of functionality of Visual Presenter: it operates as a Master Library of presentations: easy to access, easy to update, easy to control.
We’ve also designed Visual Presenter to allow users to create presentations remotely while flying or in between appointments without internet or network access. Everything they need to create presentations is cached locally.
From the viewpoint of the organisation, if messaging changes, or if there’s an entire brand ‘look and feel’ change out, it is simply a case of applying a new PowerPoint template to the library of presentations. Visual Presenter automatically reformats the required content to the correct design format. For larger organisations, or those that manage multiple brands, Visual Presenter also enables them to have information dynamically represented with different template designs across the library.
When any changes are published to the main library – and it’s a very simple process to make alterations to the content – online users are automatically notified that updates are available. Through a “one click” update process all required content for the user is updated to enable them to create presentations on or off the network.
We did a lot of work around the media file issue, and the effectiveness of our solution is that it automatically tracks media content supported by PowerPoint. If media is found that is not stored locally, Visual Presenter will automatically copy down the media and make sure it is tracked with the presentation, the key point being that this ensures that media always plays effectively during a presentation whether you are on or off the network.
A concern often raised with us is the inability companies have to tailor presentations to suit their audience. This is where Visual Presenter, as an Agenda Based Presentation Management Solution is streets ahead of Slide Management Solutions. When a presentation is created it automatically selects the appropriate information and structure for a given audience. This allows companies to better manage how information is communicated to different target audiences. Further to that, if a presenter wants to tweak the content while they present, Visual Presenter has a unique agenda-based interface that allows additional information to be made available while presenting, giving the presenter a new level of control.
And to complete the process, Visual Presenter makes it simple for companies to get accurate presentation feedback. They can define what they would like to report on, e.g. presentation results, content feedback, next action and date, market feedback etc. As with the other features of Visual Presenter, this works to ensure a company is delivering the best presentations possible to an ever-demanding market.
Categories: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, interviews, officefx, powerpoint
Don Brittain is CEO and a founder of Instant Effects, a California company that develops software to visually enhance presentations, communications, and collaboration. In this conversation, Don discusses the new v3.5 release of Instant Effects Presenter.
Geetesh: What’s different in this release of Presenter v3.5, and what are “brandable” themes?
Don: The Presenter product line is known for producing very fluid presentations from content authored in PowerPoint. In addition to the large number of included professional looks, 3D artists have always been able to add fully-branded backgrounds, transitions, and logo treatments to Presenter by using our free theme authoring tools.
Presenter v3.5 takes this ability to create customized motion backgrounds and transitions to a whole new level. With the new “brandable” looks introduced with this release, 2D user-supplied images are seamlessly integrated with our brandable themes in such a way that everyone can produce custom-branded broadcast quality results.
This feature raises the bar for visual branding by allowing people to easily produce customized results that are not possible with any other presentation package available today. And you should see the effect on potential clients and customers when they see their own logos and brands appearing in your presentation in TV-like fashion!
Moreover, with a single button press, the custom-branded looks can be captured, in still form, as PowerPoint backgrounds, so that branding remains consistent across live motion presentations, traditional PowerPoint presentations, audience handouts, and user-produced digital movies made with Presenter.
With Presenter v3.5, we’ve also enhanced the user interface for dual monitor shows, improved support for HD video, and enhanced playback performance for all ranges of hardware. Users can often pay for the Presenter software license with just the savings that come from reduced video equipment rental and setup charges at their first video-rich show!
Geetesh: How well does Presenter v3.5 work with PowerPoint 2007 files.
Don: We put a lot of work into Presenter v3.5 to provide tighter integration with PowerPoint 2007. Due to bugs and missing features in Microsoft’s programming interface for PowerPoint 2007, some features in the previous release of Presenter were only available to people running PowerPoint 2002 or PowerPoint 2003.
Presenter v3.5 uses alternative approaches to get around many of the limitations present in the PowerPoint 2007 programming support. In particular, support for bitmapped text has been dramatically improved. This feature is critical for presentations that contain text that reads right-to-left, and for improving text clarity on computers with minimal 3D graphics support (e.g. integrated Intel graphics).
As with earlier releases of PowerPoint, we now support the use of external sound files and event triggering in PowerPoint 2007. And all new features and benefits of v3.5 also work well with PowerPoint 2007.
Geetesh: Do you provide any samples that can be downloaded and viewed?
Don: Yes. We encourage people to try our software with no need to buy anything. You can download a free copy of Presenter from this link. This free version runs with a "watermark" on the images that is removed if you purchase a license. There is no time limit to the trial, so you can test out various features of Presenter as your schedule permits.
We also have videos throughout our web site that show our software in action, and, of course, we would be very happy to discuss how Presenter can help you improve your presentation effectiveness. Feel free to contact us via the links or numbers on the contact page of our web site.
Categories: add-in, interviews, officefx, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint, powerpoint_flash, slideboom 
Yury Uskov is a founder and CEO of iSpring Solutions Inc., an innovative software company with the development center in Russia. Yury has a Masters degree in Software Engineering and since 2001 have been working in rich media industry inspired with the idea of making the best solution for online presentation sharing. iSpring Solutions has already launched several Flash technology projects including iSpring, a PowerPoint to Flash converter, and SlideBoom, an online service for presentations sharing. In this conversation, Yury discusses the new SlideBoom Pro account.
Geetesh: Tell us more about how the SlideBoom Pro account evolved, and how it differs from the free account.
Yury: As you know SlideBoom is a professional solution for sharing PowerPoint presentations which offers a full set of services for publishing presentations on the web. Sharing and distributing PowerPoint presentations on the web was normally quite difficult as PowerPoint PPT files are usually large to send, they require the proper version of PowerPoint installed, etc.
SlideBoom makes presentation sharing as easy as never before. It takes just a few clicks: upload a presentation to SlideBoom, and send a link to anybody. SlideBoom has become extremely popular due to the rich set of features, and excellent presentation quality. Plus it’s available for free.
Those who use PowerPoint presentations on a daily basis require additional capabilities for online presentation delivery. We are happy to supply them with advanced features available under the Pro account now.
Professional service cannot be free, but the pricing is quite moderate: The Pro account is available for $99 per year including SlideBoom technical support.
SlideBoom service can be a perfect online companion to iSpring desktop products for PowerPoint to Flash conversion. While free SlideBoom Basic accounts are targeted to users of the non-commercial iSpring CONVERTER freeware, SlideBoom PRO accounts are primarily designed for customers of the advanced iSpring PRESENTER product, widely used in a business sphere.
SlideBoom PRO account adds a number of advantages essential for professional work with presentations:
Geetesh: What sort of branding options do you allow in the Pro account -- and how is that a convincing reason to upgrade to the Pro account?
Yury: Branding options are available for Slidelog and customizable players.
You can customize your Slidelog, posting your company logo and choosing a color scheme that matches your company colors. It’s easy to set up a custom appearance for your Slidelog by changing navigation elements and sidebar blocks.
The players also change their colors according to a color scheme, and display your company logo over your content if needed. For example, you may want to include company logo in a presentation when it appears at third-party sites and blogs or only into its offline versions that should be delivered on CD/DVD.
If you’d like to have personal web page at SlideBoom, brand your presentations, and require advanced sharing experience -- then Pro accounts are the right choice. For $99/year you get the maximum from SlideBoom.
Categories: interviews, powerpoint, powerpoint_flash, slideboom
Labels: case_studies, interviews, powerpoint, second_life 
Lisa Lindgren has brought solid presentation advice to hundreds of thousands of people during her professional career. For nearly a decade she published the critically acclaimed Presenters University Web site and its monthly Presentation Pointers newsletter. Now a member of the Steering Committee for InfoComm's Presentations Council, she continues to work to enrich the industry and advocates for improved presentation techniques and standards.
Geetesh: Tell us about Second Life, and how it can be a platform to deliver and share PowerPoint presentations.
Lisa: Second Life is a 3-D virtual world where you navigate “inworld” using your own, personalized avatar. It claims to have millions of participants and many companies and universities have built presences there with the hopes of capitalizing on it. The reviews are mixed, although I did hear a presentation given by Sarah Robbins from Ball State University about her experience in running her class lab in Second Life. She said that one of the challenges was that her students got so engrossed that they forget to go to their next class! This is precisely why I think that there may be some potential for giving presentations there when you can’t physically be in front of your audience. Unlike a Webinar, or a podcast, it’s a very rich and consuming experience, one that your audience is not likely to listen to half-heartedly while they check their e-mail.
I should make it clear that I am not an expert on Second Life, but I have had the opportunity to visit the Virtualis Convention and Learning Center located in Second Life. There may be other presentation-oriented locations (called islands) there, but this was the one that I got to visit; or, more precisely, that my avatar visited.
Geetesh: Tell us about your experiences. And what sort of potential do you foresee for something of this sort?
Lisa: I watched a basic presentation, without any animation or fancy bells and whistles. But that didn’t really matter, at least to me. I was so engrossed in the total experience that perhaps it was best that the visual slides were simple.
Because it is a virtual world, the possibilities are literally endless. There were a variety of pre-set rooms and seating arrangements, such as a large theater-style room and small classrooms. The classrooms were equipped with individual workstations, where streaming video could be displayed. There were even break areas where your avatar could enjoy a coffee break, and a ballroom complete with a dance floor and disco lights.
Just like a Webinar or Webcast, your audience logs on from wherever they happen to be. Then they direct their avatars to the pre-determined location and have them gather to watch the event. They can sit in chairs, or since the avatars don’t get tired that really isn’t necessary. They could position themselves wherever it was easiest to see. You could even have them fly and hover around the presentation screen. Although in his Tips for Second Life Presentations, Gary Barber suggests you seat the avatars “very close together in almost a tiered traditional speaking pit of amphitheater arrangement…” He offers some other common sense suggestions for the would-be Second Life presenter.
One of the strengths of using Second Life is that the audience members are likely to pay more attention since they are actively participating in controlling their avatars. Of course if it is a boring and truly awful presentation, they are still likely to tune out, just like they do during Webinars or in person. So the responsibility is still on the presenter to provide engaging content.
Second Life has some advantages over traditional in-person presentations too. Instead of simply showing photos of a new product in a sales presentation, one that you couldn’t easily bring to a physical venue, you can literally create a working model of it inworld. And the physical limitations disappear. Need to teach your technicians how to repair your latest copier, for example? Build one 50 times to scale and take their avatars “inside” to see the mechanisms. It’s really pretty amazing when you think of it in these terms.
Geetesh: What does one need to get started with using PowerPoint as a content source within Second Life?
Lisa: The obvious requirement is that you need a presentation forum in Second Life. Similar to presenting on the Web, you can either build/buy your own or use a service. Virtualis is one option for using a service and there may be others. Building your own may not be as daunting as it sounds. Many large companies of course already have islands in Second Life, but Andrew Burton in Giving a PowerPoint Presentation in Second Life, and the ensuing commentary below his article makes it sound like it would be a pretty doable endeavor, assuming that you were already competent in building simple structures in Second Life and didn’t need a lot of fancy extras for your audience.
After you have a place to present your slides, you then need to import them. They must be imported one slide at a time as GIF, JPEG, or PNG files. So no animation or transitions, but because it is such a visually rich environment, you want to keep them simple so that they don’t compete with the experience. Finally you have to pay in Linden dollars to import your images. You purchase Linden dollars with real money, so there is a real expense in this virtual world.
The final “cost” of presenting in Second Life is both you and your audience need to create avatars and learn how to operate inworld. It’s really not very difficult, but I’ll admit I was a bit intimidated at first. My friend, and presentation consultant, Ellen Finkelstein, offered to accompany me at first, and it was reassuring to have her there with a helpful tip or two as I learned the basics. But Second Life really does make it pretty easy. There are standard avatars from which you select, which can be customized later. And you start your inworld experience on a beginner’s island, where everyone is learning. There are tutorials to walk you through what you really need to know and host and hostess avatars available to answer your questions. Only newbies are around you at first, so you are less likely to be embarrassed.
Is Second Life for everyone? Certainly not. You need an open mind and a business culture that will support it. If management or your client base perceives it as just a game, they are not going to be receptive. But for the right companies and markets, I think it’s a powerful option.
Categories: case_studies, interviews, powerpoint, second_life
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: interviews, powerpoint, powerpoint_flash, wildform
Colby Devitt is the president and co-founder of Wildform, a multimedia software company based out of Los Angeles, USA. In this conversation, Colby discusses Flair, their Flash authoring product that includes a dedicated PowerPoint to Flash converting component.
Geetesh: Tell us more about Flair, and its PowerPoint to Flash converting capabilities.
Colby: Flair is a fantastic all-round program for people who want to author in Flash, but don’t want to take the time to learn or pay for Flash. (That said, we also have plenty of customers who are Flash developers who use Flair to supplement their work in Flash.) Flair is primarily designed for people who want to create multimedia and e-learning presentations. It includes a top of the line PowerPoint to Flash converter which consistently creates high quality conversions with small files sizes. Plus, you can edit your converted PowerPoint files within the Flair editing environment, which is a huge advantage.
Geetesh: Flair is much more than a PowerPoint to Flash conversion program. However, can you highlight how Flair differs from other PowerPoint to Flash converting solutions.
Colby: You’re right -- Flair is much more than a PowerPoint to Flash converter. Flair has multiple essential presentation capabilities in one program. It’s a Flash authoring tool, a video, image and audio converter, a text effects animator, a quiz creator, and a full video and screen recorder (like Camtasia), in addition to being a full PowerPoint to Flash converter. Each of these capabilities in Flair could be a full program in itself.
The PowerPoint to Flash converter by itself is considered to be the best on the market. It creates high quality conversions with small file sizes, and is the only converter that I know of that lets you edit your PowerPoint files after you import them into Flair. This is a huge convenience for people working with multiple PowerPoint files because it lets you combine pieces from different PowerPoint files, or edit the content of your inherited PowerPoint files before converting them to Flash. It also lets you use your existing PowerPoint templates and designs in Flair projects.
One of the reasons we created this all-in-one program called Flair, was that our customers not only wanted to convert PowerPoint to Flash, they also wanted to add multimedia elements and interactivity to their presentations. Flair is unique because it lets you create a lot of things you either cannot make at all, or can’t make easily in PowerPoint. For example, Flair has a wizard that lets you combine, and synchronize your video and PowerPoint files in three steps! People love this feature. Again, no other product on the market does this.
Categories: interviews, powerpoint, powerpoint_flash, wildform
Labels: digital_asset_management, interviews, powerpoint 
Steffen Setzer is Director of Marketing at Canto. Canto is a leading supplier of digital asset management solutions and has been dedicated to helping customers fully utilize their digital assets since 1990.
In this interview, Steffen discusses Canto Cumulus, a cross-platform solution that enables companies to easily organize, find, share, and track their ever-increasing numbers of photos, illustrations, presentations, video, audio, layouts and more.
Read the interview here...
Categories: digital_asset_management, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint
As Vice President and General Manager of ToolBook, Brad Crain is responsible for ToolBook products, including strategy, research and development, and product management. Brad previously held various positions at Click2learn/Asymetrix including Director of Learning Management Systems Engineering and Director of Enterprise Products.
In this interview, Brad discusses the ToolBook product from SumTotal Systems, and its PowerPoint related abilities.
Read the interview here...
Categories: interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint, slide_management 
Liber Rodriguez-Florez (pictured to the left) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but is resident in Sweden. He holds a Master of Science in Engineering Physics and works as the Sales Director of Novatrox AB where he is responsible for the technical sales towards international customers. Prior to joining Novatrox AB, Liber worked several years at Relevant Traffic, a highly competitive Search Engine Marketing company, as Technical Director cooperating closely with the Relevant Traffic sales department.
In this discussion, Liber discusses Novatrox's Slide Executive product.
Geetesh: Tell us more about the improvements in Slide Executive Professional 2.3?
Liber: We have improved and streamlined a numerous number of things that will increase usability and make working with Slide Executive even easier. I can’t tell you everything we’ve done because I would go on for too long. But here are some top picks:
Search improvements: A search form is now accessible from the toolbar so you can start a search for slides or files without needing to click any menu or button first. This is very handy not only for slides but also if you want to look for some file you know is far down in the folder structure. Just as before you can limit your search by searching just a part of your slide library from folder down to presentation level. Also the relevancy of the search is improved since Slide Executive takes account of more parameters when sorting the results. We also added some nice shortcut buttons for each slide in the slide search results, allowing you to immediately download a slide’s master presentation or going to that slide’s master presentation directly within Slide Executive.
Auditing and statistics: For managers we have added auditing and statistics to improve the possibility to track how Slide Executive is used in their user base. We have added both general statistics and audit trails on file and folder level. This way you can see exactly who has viewed or downloaded a particular presentation/file in the system in any period of time. The general statistics give you numbers like the total number of indexed slides and indexed presentations resident in the system and much more. Thanks to the easy access of information we now know that having thousands or even tens of thousands of slides in a Slide Executive slide library, is a common thing among our customers.
Progress details: Now when you import or export presentations to the system you are shown continuous information of what Slide Executive is doing, basically you see the progress slide by slide from indexing to creation of thumbnails. You can also choose to cancel a job at any time.
Export options: Slide Executive has always allowed a variety of export options. A new feature is that you can now export to older PowerPoint versions. Together with the already existing export possibilities to PDF, web archive, web page etc. we now offer a complete set of export options reducing the steps for preparing materials for professionals.
Previews: Now you can preview how a virtual presentation will look when new versions of master presentations have been imported. If you have chosen to update your virtual presentations manually (the automatic update works as before, updating immediately) you will be able to see all new versions of updated slides on forehand, before choosing to update. You can also choose to update slide by slide on an individual level, of course you can also preview the new slide version before updating a single slide.
More features: We have also introduced other new features like a garbage can to be able to restore deleted files, ability to add discussion posts per slide (not just per presentation like before) to allow user comments on ongoing work, new actions added to the roles section for customizing what each user can do within the system, a last visited files section with links to the files you looked at recently and many more minor things to improve the user experience in Slide Executive.
Let me also mention our coming release which I am very excited about. If 2.3 has been packed with new, truly good features, our 2.4 release in the first quarter of 2009 will be introducing some new functionality to improve the user experience dramatically.
Geetesh: Can you give us an idea about your support infrastructure?
Liber: Novatrox always gives personal support from highly skilled people. We provide support in form of phone, mail and even by remote desktop connection if needed. Having support staff that have thorough knowledge about development allows us to respond not only with immediate qualified support but also to collect new ideas and requirements to implement for “the next version”.
On our website, we have a Support Center where we have all kinds of information available for our users. Apart from document downloads, an extensive forum and contact information, we also have flash video instructions for paying customers.
Categories: interviews, powerpoint, slide_management
Labels: books, interviews, powerpoint 
Claudyne Wilder is an acclaimed speaker, coach, published author and creator of two seminars: Winning Presentations Seminar and Creating PowerPoint Presentations That Get Your Point Across. She trains executives, entrepreneurs, and professionals in the world's leading companies on how to coherently and passionately present their messages and share their stories. She brings a unique and invigorating perspective to her work from her years of studying the Argentine Tango.
She discusses her book: Point, Click & Wow in this Indezine exclusive interview.
Geetesh: What did you add to your new book and why did you add it?
Claudyne: I am frequently asked to coach managers who I’m told just can’t speak to senior staff with enough authority and credibility. I added a chapter called “Demonstrate Executive Presence.” This chapter tells you the differences you need to be aware of when speaking to executives. This information is based on my own coaching of clients who spend their days speaking to executives, as well as quotes from executives sharing what they’d like from presenters. 
I also included the five paths to persuasion from the book The 5 Paths to Persuasion: The Art of Selling Your Message
Geetesh: What’s one key to presenting to executives?
Claudyne: The presenter needs to give an executive summary of the whole talk. This is a one slide summary of the most important content in the talk. Executives do not want to wait until the end of the ten to twenty minutes to hear your recommendation. They want all the relevant information right up front at the beginning of the talk. My clients love this structure. They get wonderful feedback from the executives when they use it.
Geetesh: What three big problems have you seen with your clients that you addressed in your book?
Claudyne:
Geetesh: If you could have a client just do one idea you suggest, what would that be?
Presenters, who do not rehearse out loud before a talk do not understand the importance of doing what I call a “real rehearsal.” So in chapter 7 I give them a short and simple process on how to rehearse out loud. I tell them the behaviors to practice. I tell them how to use the rehearse timings in PowerPoint. I provide a rehearsal critique form for the colleagues who listen to the rehearsal talk.
In chapter 4 I provide a library of images that the readers can use over and over again in their actual slide presentations. This chapter shows images to use instead of putting line after line of text. It also shows how to “chunk” or arrange information into meaningful bites so that it can be shown in a more organized manner.
I call Point, Click & Wow! The Habits and Techniques of Successful Presenters Your Presentation Coach in a Book. I wrote it in the order of how I coach my clients. I want someone to pick up the book, start at chapter 1 and use each chapter as a guide on how to go about putting together a fabulous talk in the shortest amount of time possible.
Claudyne: I wish my clients would tell more stories and share less data. Stories give something to the audience they can go tell others. When told with enthusiasm, stories are easy to remember. They enable the presenter to speak more dynamically and emotionally and also engage the emotions of those listening. I tell my readers how to create a plot to go with the story. When my clients use the story process, they start to tell relevant and motivating stories to their audiences.
Categories: books, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
John Wilson (pictured to the left) is a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP who creates some cool add-ins for PowerPoint. He participates in the PowerPoint newsgroups and runs the PPTAlchemy site. John is based out of UK, and his newest add-in brings back the pattern fills that were removed from PowerPoint 2007.
In this discussion, John discusses the Pattern Fills Add-in product.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your Pattern Fills add-in for PowerPoint 2007, and what motivated you to create this add-in.
John: While answering questions on the PowerPoint newsgroup I noticed a fair number of questions about how to use pattern fills in PowerPoint 2007. The most usual answer was to create a texture fill that mimicked the old pattern fills and for a while this was my solution also. However it isn’t totally satisfactory and even if you create the fills carefully the final product isn’t really the same.
When I noticed that pattern fills still existed in Word 2007, I posted a tutorial on how to use them to create proper pattern fills in PowerPoint 2007. Pretty soon, I was getting 4 to 5 emails a day mainly thanking -- so there is clearly a desire to use them!
In-house, we were using VBA to create the fills but VBA code is a little scary for many users, and we didn’t have the knowledge to at that time to create a ribbon tab or group in PowerPoint 2007 to make the code simple to use. When I read an article by Eric Patterson I realized that it would be easy to adapt his Excel Ribbon to PowerPoint and Pattern Fills was a reality!
It’s a totally free add in and available on our site.
Geetesh: Who are the folks who miss the Pattern Fills? And why are the Pattern Fills so special?
John: Mostly, they seem to be people who need to print diagrams and charts in black & white. The pattern fills make it much easier to identify parts of the diagram and usually print out much clearer than textures and gradients.
Everyone that writes in now wants to know how to get pattern fills in graphs in 2007! So far I don’t think this can be done as the object model doesn’t expose the new graphing engine. One answer is to switch back to the old MS Graph from earlier versions of PowerPoint temporarily. You can do this with a registry hack. Steve (Rindsberg) has a tutorial on his site here.
Categories: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: case_studies, delivery, interviews, powerpoint 
Andre Vlcek (pictured to the left) is an Australia-based sales consultant and Managing Director of Sales Psychology Australia. He specializes in designing and building advanced selling strategies for sales teams.
In this discussion, Andre discusses the Visual Selling with PowerPoint concept that he evolved with Robert Lane.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your concept of visual selling with PowerPoint, and how this evolved from your everyday work.
Andre: About 2 years ago, I arrived for a ‘typical’ one-hour meeting with the human resources manager at one of Australia’s major petroleum companies. This was my first meaningful contact with them, the proverbial foot in the door. The plan was to discuss the firm’s sales recruitment process. Certainly I had my detailed linear PowerPoint show in hand, for what was supposed to be an informal meeting with only this person—and I had thought a lot about what he needed to hear. As soon as I walked into his office, though, I sensed trouble brewing.
The room contained five people, instead of one, and my HR manager contact proceeded to enthusiastically introduce me to his ‘unexpected’ guests, including the general manager of sales, a psychologist HR consultant, the firm’s call center manager, and of all people … the CEO! His guests happened to hear about the meeting just that morning and were curious about individual issues related to their job responsibilities. All of a sudden, my simple, casual talk turned into a full-blown sales demonstration, addressing multiple competing interests and perspectives. Those careful, late-night preparations for this meeting subsequently evaporated into thin air.
Five minutes into the talk, the psychologist interjected that another meeting was coming up and he had just a few quick questions to ask. Of course, my canned slide show didn’t contain appropriate answers to his issues, or, in some cases, slides sat somewhere 30 transitions away. Other attendees soon asked questions, as well, and a discussion ensued. The GM of sales wanted to know to what extent previous projects had increased sales revenues. The HR manager hoped to explore the candidate testing process; and the call center lady was wondering how all this related to her call center environment.
Over the next hour, most of my PowerPoint content sat worthless and unused before me because I couldn’t properly adjust it to the rapidly changing situation.
Annoyance with PowerPoint’s linear design eventually led me to look for alternative ways of presenting information. It was unacceptable that my reputation hinged upon how well I could foretell the future by lining up perfect slide sequences in advance. Surely I needed something other than PowerPoint, I thought, and then I happened across Robert Lane’s Relational Presentation approach while reading another article. That was the solution I needed and eventually Robert and I teamed up to develop the interactive PowerPoint-based selling process featured in this article, called Visual Selling. The Visual Selling Whitepaper published by Microsoft is now available as a free download from the Aspire website.
Geetesh: How do you believe this can benefit end-users -- and is this approach restricted to sales presentations?
Andre: I recommend anyone using PowerPoint apply the innovative organizational and navigational structure called Topical Navigation developed by Robert Lane – CEO and Founder of Aspire Communciations. Doing that will provide powerful flexibility to respond to your audience and overcome the constraints of PowerPoints traditional linearity.
In my case, with my branding, it turned out like the example in Figure 1. Categories of information appear along the left side of slides and individual topics within those categories display in the menu at bottom-left. While working with customers, I now can move seamlessly between hundreds of slide options, in any order, at any time.
Figure 1: Modified version of the title slide with navigational hyperlinks on the left side
Having that kind of flexibility has been a lifesaver several times already. The other day, I scheduled another hour-long meeting with a major bank, to discuss improving prospecting skills for their nearly 200 mobile business bankers. I don’t know. Maybe I attract these things, but upon arriving at the establishment, I could see the buying team was visibly distracted and anxious. The Vice President of Sales then informed me that some kind of technical glitch had occurred within their operations and that he could spare only fifteen minutes for our meeting. My timeslot promptly diminished in size by 75% before my eyes! I had to cut right to the point and hit the highlights of my proposal, without appearing frazzled or disorganized in the process.
These days I can do that, and it’s not nearly as difficult as I once thought.
That same kind of powerful flexibility and adaptability is available to anyone who needs to communicate, persuade, or sell their ideas using Microsoft PowerPoint. In conclusion the power of flexibility is one of the best kept secrets within Microsoft PowerPoint!
Categories: case_studies, delivery, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint_flash 
Ellen Finkelstein is author of several PowerPoint, Flash, and AutoCAD books, including the bestselling Flash CS4 For Dummies.
Her company, Ellen Finkelstein, Inc. helps clients create presentations and designs that communicate clearly and achieve their goals. She maintains a web site that offers PowerPoint and Flash related tips, and a selection of free backgrounds.
In this discussion, Ellen discusses her Flash CS4 For Dummies book.
Geetesh: You work with both PowerPoint and Flash -- can you tell us more about which program works best in a given scenario, and also how do you use them together.
Ellen: For advanced animation, especially programmable animation, Flash reigns supreme. And you can morph shapes in Flash, a feature that I'd love to see in PowerPoint. Also, Flash is created for the Web; it creates small, fast SWF files that almost everyone can play.
PowerPoint is much easier to use and doesn't require programming to add interactivity. Its strong point is in delivering presentations. PowerPoint is focused towards displaying from the software itself; to distribute on a Web site, you almost have to convert a PowerPoint presentation to SWF format.
There is an area of overlap, for self-running presentations. For a high-end result, you could use Flash, but you could also use PowerPoint. There are animators that can create amazing, Flash-like results in PowerPoint. I have several tips on my site that explain how to duplicate in PowerPoint an animation technique that I originally saw or created in Flash. Some examples are a bouncing ball, magnifying an image, dissolving one image into another, a revolving earth, a line drawing itself, and cutouts (transparent areas through which you see another image).
Of course, you can insert a Flash movie into PowerPoint. I explain how to do so. This allows you to take advantage of the advanced animation features of Flash within PowerPoint.
Geetesh: Tell us about your new book Flash CS4 For Dummies -- can PowerPoint users benefit from this book, and how?
Ellen: Flash CS4 For Dummies is our latest edition -- and it's finally in color!
CS4 has some fantastic new features. Perhaps the most well-known is Inverse Kinematics, which makes it easy to animate people or animals walking. Pattern fills and the spray brush are other great, new graphics tools. This book has always been a best seller, because it explains Flash is a clear, simple way. PowerPoint users who want to bring their animation skills up to another level will benefit from this book, because they can create their own SWF files to insert into PowerPoint.
Categories: interviews, powerpoint_flash
Labels: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
Vikas Joshi (pictured to the left) is regarded as a thought leader for pioneering e-learning and knowledge management. He is also known for his groundbreaking work in the online learning industry, product innovations, and offshore outsourcing models. Under his guidance and leadership, the Harbinger group has built innovative software products for the global marketplace.
In this discussion, Vikas discusses the new YawnBuster product.
Geetesh: Tell us how YawnBuster evolved -- and what is its raison d'etre?
Vikas: As presenters, we all know how difficult it is to keep boredom away in meetings and enliven them. We try various tricks to make the presentations more interactive. With this need in mind, we thought of YawnBuster. YawnBuster is useful for every person in the world who needs to make a presentation since it brings together PowerPoint and Flash, two most popular tools used in presentations and web development. With YawnBuster, a PowerPoint user can quickly and easily introduce Flash based group activities in the presentation, with no need for programming.
YawnBuster is the ideal tool for enhancing PowerPoint with group activities for the busy presenter. Its quick-to-learn and easy-to-use interface allows you to create lively interactive presentations without having to learn Flash ActionScript or the Flash timeline. It's a great way to add Flash to the PowerPoint presentations.
Geetesh: Can you share some usability scenarios for YawnBuster.
Vikas: Well, YawnBuster can be used in corporate training, education, sales presentations, business meetings, and many more such applications. YawnBuster allows the presenters to include various Group Activities such as audience polls, games, group exercises and competitions in your presentations. With these, the presenters can get their audience to think, enjoy, participate and identify key takeaways quickly and easily.
Categories: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpointlive 
Rick Altman (pictured to the right) is a presentation consultant based out of Pleasanton, CA. Rick is well known as the host of the annual PowerPoint Live User Conference and has a strong sense of the needs of the presentation community. In this conversation, Rick discusses the PowerPoint Live in San Diego that was held in September 2008.
Geetesh: Looking back at the just concluded PowerPoint Live held in San Diego, tell us about the highs and lows, wows and anything else.
Rick: The biggest wow for me was the demographic of the patrons -- so much enthusiasm and spirit this year! Most of them were first-timers, but sent from companies that had sent people in previous years. So they were fresh and yet predisposed to having a good experience. As the host and organizer, you gotta like that!
The highest high and the lowest low were actually the same event: the Wednesday keynote address with Garr Reynolds was amazing, as we established a video connection with him from his home in Osaka Japan, at 1:00a in his morning. It was an incredible experience for everyone. And it was, without any doubt, the most stressful hour of my conference career, as we careened out of control, totally at the mercy of the technology and a fragile hotel Internet connection.
The non-academic high water mark had to have been the concert at the beach Tuesday evening, where we took over a Mexican restaurant on the boardwalk for a big margarita party and visit from a Journey tribute band who really played and sounded like the real thing. People were buzzing about that all day on Wednesday.
Geetesh: What gets PowerPoint Live to San Diego every alternate year?
Rick: I just love the city. I grew up vacationing down there (I'm from Northern California, about 500 miles north) so it's in my blood. It offers a perfect September-October climate (when other parts of the country are beginning to get cold and even snowy), it's easy to get to, affordable, with lots of attractions.
Also, the hotel we choose fits us like a glove and has many services and amenities nearby. At some point, the patrons might get bored of going there every other year and will tell us so, but so far, nobody has.
Geetesh: Why did you choose Atlanta for the next PowerPoint Live in 2009?
Rick: We are alternating between east and west each year, but we have not yet gone all the way to the East Coast. We know of many people who will appreciate direct flights or simple drives to Atlanta, as well as people whose companies simply don't have the budget to travel for conferences.
And the Buckhead community of Atlanta is a fantastic place to visit, with lots of dining, shopping, and entertainment. The hotel we chose was purchased by Marriott six months ago and is almost finished with a $65M renovation, so it will essentially be a brand new hotel for us.
Categories: interviews, powerpointlive
Labels: interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint, presentation_samples, slideshare 
Jeff Brenman (pictured to the right) is the founder and director of Apollo Ideas, an award winning presentation design and consulting firm based out of North Carolina. Jeff regularly works as a communication consultant to top executives in corporations around the globe, empowering their business communications with better visual storytelling. His presentation won the last The World's Best Presentation Contest held by SlideShare -- and he won it again this time!
Geetesh: How does it feel to win consecutively for the second time?
Jeff: Surprising. There were a lot of great presentations entered in the contest this year, so it's an honor to have been chosen as the winner by such accomplished judges. Honestly, I was more concerned with entering the dialog than entering the competition this year. The SlideShare contest is a fantastic way to bring good design to important issues, and spread critical messages to people around the world.
Geetesh: Tell us more about the type of research you did on the topic – also what made you choose Water as the topic of your presentation.
Jeff: Everybody drinks, but hardly anyone is talking about water. The fresh water crisis is a fascinating topic because it's one of those things not a lot of people know about, but is going to affect all of us very soon. In my opinion, that also makes it a perfect topic for a web-based educational presentation.
The water crisis is a big issue, so to do it justice required spending a lot of time researching the storyboard. The full list of books, articles, and news stories that went into THIRST can be found at http://apolloideas.com/thirst.
Putting together a presentation is kind of like making a pizza. There are dozens of delicious toppings you could add to a pizza, but you have to be selective and choose just a few. A pizza with every topping imaginable wouldn't taste very good. In the same way, a presentation with every piece of research you discover isn't going to be very interesting — it'll be overwhelming. You have to be selective with the information you include.
THIRST is far from comprehensive, but intentionally so. It doesn't offer a list of suggestions for how to conserve water. It doesn't get into the politics of who controls the water resources around the world. It doesn't even go into detail about the problems surrounding the bottled water industry. Instead, THIRST is a conversation starter, designed to inspire people to explore the topic deeper on their own. As a story, THIRST was created to act as a beginning, not a beginning, middle, and end. Based on the feedback it has received so far, I'm proud to see it's working.
Categories: interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint, presentation_samples, slideshare
Labels: articulate, interviews, powerpoint
Mark Schwartz (pictured to the left) is the executive vice president for sales and marketing at Articulate. In this role, he has worldwide sales responsibility for Articulate leading the direct sales and channel management teams as well as all product marketing activities. Prior to joining Articulate, Mark spent 20 years in sales and sales management roles with IBM and Dell.
In this discussion, Mark discusses the new Articulate Presenter ’09 product.
Geetesh: Articulate Presenter is already such a full featured program -- what did you add to version '09 to make it better?
Mark: We're really proud of the great job our engineering team did in improving upon Articulate Presenter. I've had an opportunity to demonstrate Presenter '09 at several trade shows already. The feedback that I've received has been extremely positive. The features that seem to receive the most acclaim include: the ability to add annotations to the course, preview publish options, improved image fidelity, branching support, notes formatting, mobile support, and PowerPoint 2007 ribbon interface and new feature support (such as SmartArt). We've summarized the many new features here:
Articulate Presenter '09 - New in '09
Geetesh: Tell us more about the support infrastructure in place for Articulate Presenter, and your other products.
Mark: According to our own and independent third party research, Articulate continues to receive very high marks in support. We recently won a Top 10 Best Web Support Site for the second year in a row. We offer free web based support, and we work hard at providing a comprehensive self service support site that solves most customer problems almost instantaneously. Should a customer need to open a case, we are able to respond to over 90% of our cases within an hour.
Our community forums - which is a critical element of our support offerings now has over 32,000 active members. We actively monitor and respond to customer threads and our customer base also does a great job responding to other customers in need. We truly have a very helpful and amazingly intelligent user community. I believe this is paramount to our success.
Our support site includes over 90 web based tutorials to get customers up to speed on our products. Should customers desire customized training from us, we offer web based and instructor led training sessions. This is available at: Articulate Support - Training
We offer an enhanced, fee-based support option -- the Platinum Membership Plan (PMP) which provides a free Software Developers Kit, chat support, and pre-paid, discounted version upgrades. Information on the Platinum Membership Plan is provided here.
Finally, we offer fee- based incident phone support that includes a web conference component where we can take over the user's computer if that would prove beneficial and if we are granted access.
See Also: Articulate Presenter ’09 -- The Indezine Review
Categories: articulate, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: freepath, interviews, playlists, powerpoint
Lou Douros co-founded Freepath. His passion for story and compassion for digital storytellers fueled the desire to bridge the gap between content and audience. Lou contributed to the earliest Freepath user experience. Most recently, he co-designed a site where world class, multi-format, native content could move fluidly between communicators, Freepath's social network MyFreepath. Lou sees the world as places made up of people described by their stories; increasingly made up of digital content. His 20+ years of remote video production experience informs his continuing quest to move and be moved by inspired ideas.
In this interview, Lou discusses the new Freepath 2. Read the interview here...
Categories: freepath, interviews, playlists, powerpoint
Labels: articulate, interviews, powerpointMark Schwartz (pictured to the left) is the executive vice president for sales and marketing at Articulate. In this role, he has worldwide sales responsibility for Articulate leading the direct sales and channel management teams as well as all product marketing activities. Prior to joining Articulate, Mark spent 20 years in sales and sales management roles with IBM and Dell.
In this discussion, Mark discusses the new Articulate Quizmaker ’09 product.
Geetesh: How easy is it to create a quiz or survey in Quizmaker '09 -- does it involve any coding at all? And what's your favorite new feature in Quizmaker '09.
Mark: That's the power of Quizmaker '09. It allows for very simple quiz and survey authoring and requires no coding at all. If you do like to code in Flash, Quizmaker '09 easily supports inserting those Flash objects within the quiz. Quizmaker '09 provides for 2 authoring options - a form view and a slide view. The form view is set up a as template that allows for simple fill in the blank question creation. With it you get an effective, albeit generically designed, quiz. The slide view empowers the author to design a beautiful, engaging quiz. And it's simple to use. The slide view interface is similar to the PowerPoint 2007 animation, design, and pictures interface plus we add an audio and timeline editor for precise controls over audio and timings. It really allows for some amazing design options.
My favorite new feature is the slide view authoring capability. It provides total free form design but remains extremely simple to use. I can't wait to see some of the quizzes and surveys that our customers create. I also love the new conditional branching option used in conjunction with our new blank slide feature. The branching option allows Quizmaker '09 to direct the student to a specific slide or question based on a right or wrong answer. The new blank slide feature allows the author to create non-question slides, which provide for directed remediation when used with branching.
Geetesh: How does Quizmaker '09 integrate with Articulate Presenter and Articulate Online -- and are there any unconventional case studies on Quizmaker that you can share?
Mark: Customers who have Quizmaker '09 and Presenter '09 can integrate their quizzes within Presenter '09 courses. When integrated within a Presenter '09 course, you can set the number of quiz attempts and you can direct the student to a specific slide within the Presenter course based on a pass / fail result. All of these settings are easily controlled via a simple drop down selection.
Articulate Online is an Articulate hosted offering that allows customers to easily track and manage Articulate authored content. Quizmaker '09 authors can publish the quiz or survey directly to their Articulate Online portal via one click within Quizmaker '09. Once published, Articulate Online administrators can see full answer level detail for all students and quizzes.
I'm not aware of any unconventional case studies related to Quizmaker. It's really designed to allow for quick quiz and survey authoring, and that's how are customers are using it. With the blank slide feature and powerful design capabilities now provided with Quizmaker '09, perhaps we'll learn of some new unconventional uses for Quizmaker.
See Also: Articulate Quizmaker ’09 -- The Indezine Review
Categories: articulate, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: books, interviews, powerpoint 
Mark Normand (pictured to the left) was born in Chelmsford, England, and he has since lived and worked almost two decades in Singapore. In his present position as the founder and managing director of Impress Training, he has traversed much of Asia to deliver training in management and business communication. With a keen interest in graphic design and amateur photography, he is a regular contributor to such sites as SlideShare and Stock.XCHNG.
In this discussion, Mark discusses his PowerPoint (2003) Mechanics ebook.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, and how this book evolved?
Mark: Together with my business partner we run a Impress Training, a training firm based in Singapore providing soft skills training to organizations in various areas such as management, sales, service, communication and more.
During my years of work, like many others, you've either sat through or provided many PowerPoint presentations. And like so many others, they just look bad and take a lot of value away from the delivery of the presenter.
The blog site, and the book evolved out of a course we run at Impress Training to train normal business professional achieve a higher quality of PowerPoint visual. Looking around, I thought there is still something missing, there's a lot of books out there that can be too technical, too wordy, or that talk about 'what' should be done but never the how, and many of them feature graphics that you'll come to realize are designed by professionals, use Photoshop or Illustrator and many other applications to produce these visuals. What I really wanted to do was provide the means to ordinary business people to whip up a presentation quickly, look good, and not use any external tools to produce the visuals - just plain PowerPoint because at the end of the day this is all that most people have. The ebook is basically a straight to-the-point step-by-step guide to producing some of the visual effects that many people see around them - and why 2003? Because for many businesses (here in Asia at least) we're still some way from everyone upgrading to 2007 -- however, I'm working on a new ebook just for them in the future.
Geetesh: What do you believe is the most important thing that any reader will gain from the book?
Mark: As mentioned, this book doesn't have any text on the dos and don'ts because there are many others books out there that do a good job of that, i.e. explaining the what. What I wanted to give them is the how. The main aim being to provide the mechanics, and let them use those techniques and apply them to their own presentations. As with the blog, I try not to touch on effects which are too readily available but something a little more unique.
Categories: books, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, microsoft_office, office_online, powerpoint
This has to be among the most interesting interviews I have done with anyone -- mainly because I was not interviewing just one person! This team of six comprises some of the most amazing folks I have interacted with -- together they take care of all the content that you will find on the PowerPoint section of the Office Online site at Microsoft.com.
Kudos to Mary Sobczyk for patiently coordinating with me on this -- and Shellie Tucker, Eric Schmidt, Joy Miller, Jen Zamora, and Eric Jensen -- you'll find them all pictured below.
In this exclusive Indezine interview, they discuss how they work as a team, and what factors influence the creation of new content for the PowerPoint part of the Office Online site.
Read the interview here...
Categories: interviews, microsoft_office, office_online, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint, slideshare 
Rashmi Sinha is cofounder and CEO of SlideShare, the world's largest community for sharing presentations. She manages design and business development at SlideShare. Previously, she founded Uzanto, a user experience software company, that worked with companies like eBay, iFilm, AAA and Blue Shield. She also lead the team that created MindCanvas, a rich online survey platform for customer research. Rashmi has a PhD in Cognitive Neuropsychology from Brown University. She did a PostDoc at UC Berkeley in Human Computer Interaction. She blogs at www.rashmisinha.com about social software and running a startup.
Geetesh: Tell us how the idea of The World's Best Presentation Contest evolved.
Rashmi: The idea of the contest came from Guy Kawasaki. We had toyed about with the idea of a contest earlier. I met Guy at a conference and he mentioned that he had always wanted to organize a PowerPoint contest. We continue talking and discussed several ideas before finalizing on the World's Best Presentation idea. It was Guy's idea to keep it general (not focused on any one topic) and not limit to slidecasts (slides + audio) which we considered at one point.
Geetesh: How is this contest being held in 2008 different from the previous one.
Rashmi: The 2008 contest is bigger - 1670 entries so far compared to 400 last week. Partly its simply because SlideShare has grown. But also, the results of the contest last year captured the imagination of many people and this year they have decided to participate as well.
Also, we were inspired by global contests and events like Oscars and Olympics. We really wanted a sense of scale (all the world participating), but we also wanted an openness that you can only have on the internet (anyone with a computer and internet connection can participate). PowerPoint is a people's medium. We wanted a people's contest.
Its really great to see that come alive as the contest captures the imagination of people the world over. We see slideshows from all across the world. We see blog posts and Twitters from all across the world. Its really quite cool.
Also, we have six category prizes this year that we did not have last year. Finally, we have participants form many more countries (it is truly an international contest).
Geetesh: Tell us about some entries that you find unconventional, strange, funny, or just different.
Rashmi: Here are some interesting ones this time in the contest; one interesting trend is that last time, the contest was the first time -- and so many of the entries were from the early adopters; this time the audience seems to be far more broad-based.
There's a bunch of presentations on green, environment etc. and they are all very popular (getting lots of votes)
About a social issue
A love story
Categories: interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint, slideshare
Labels: animation, design, interviews, powerpoint 
Shawn Toh (pictured to the left) is based out of Singapore and loves to do advanced animation tricks using PowerPoint. He is a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional) and runs the PPT Heaven site.
In this discussion, Shawn discusses the PowerPoint Heaven eConvention 2008.
Geetesh: Tell us more about how you evolved PPTH eCon, and what it is?
Shawn: PowerPoint Heaven eConvention 2008 is an annual online convention, which will be held this year on 27 September, a month after the PowerPoint Heaven anniversary date.
The eConvention starts off with the voting of the eCon Awards 2008: Animation / Artwork / Game / Broadcast of the Year, which involves works submitted on the PowerPoint Heaven site in the year 2008. The voting process is a pre-eCon event starting from September 1st to 26th. Winners will then be reflected on 27 September, along with Contributor of the Year, who will be interviewed with a list of questions given by the board members.
Any new PowerPoint works, demos, or trailers can also be submitted during the eCon period by anyone. Also, expect to see screenshots, demo and trailer of a upcoming RPG game in PowerPoint and a sophisticated 3D animations by Han Byul Jang (Zzangdol).
The eConvention was inspired by several of our existing board members, who suggested we have an event where all members on PPTH board can participate.
Geetesh: What is the motivation and objective of PPTH eCon, and who can participate?
Shawn: PowerPoint Heaven eConvention 2008 is a day where PowerPointers get together to discuss, review and submit their latest PowerPoint works on PowerPoint Heaven. The purpose of this eConvention is to recognize our contributors for their hard work and efforts for the year and enable them to get together to discuss and keep each other updated on what they have been doing.
For the viewers, this is also a day where you can get to see wide variety of PowerPoint works created by the contributors.
Throughout the eConvention, participation and involvements from the Guests and PPTH board members are welcomed, where the discussion board will be the communication channel for discussions, feedback, suggestions, submissions and more.
Categories: animation, design, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: books, design, interviews, powerpoint 
Nancy Duarte has been a Principal of Duarte Design since 1990. Her firm is in the heart of the Silicon Valley and the client list is loaded with Fortune 500 companies. 
Her passion for business communications that are clear, meaningful and attractive has opened doors for her in a business world full of cluttered and complex visual communications.
In this interview, Nancy discusses her much awaited book slide:ology that was released this month. Nancy discusses how the book evolved, how she decided what makes it to the book, and more. She also discusses herself and the importance of stories in slides. And then talks about a scraped book cover!
Read the interview here...
Categories: books, design, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint, powerpoint_flash, slideboom Yury Uskov is a founder and CEO of iSpring Solutions Inc., an innovative software company with their development center in Russia. Yury has a Masters degree in Software Engineering and since 2001 have been working in rich media industry inspired with the idea of making the best solution for online presentation sharing. iSpring Solutions has already launched several Flash technology projects including iSpring, a PowerPoint to Flash converter, and SlideBoom, an online service for presentations sharing.
Geetesh: Tell us more about SlideBoom -- did you look at this as a natural evolution process after iSpring?
Yury: I’d rather mention two aspects. First is that iSpring users needed such a site to share their great presentations converted by desktop products. From this point of view SlideBoom is just a great companion to iSpring.
Secondly, it is not a secret that people use online services more and more each day. This growing tendency inspired us to build SlideBoom as an online alternative to iSpring. From this point of view, SlideBoom looks like a result of iSpring evolution process.
Geetesh: What sets SlideBoom apart from similar slide sharing sites?
Yury: Thanks for the good question. Other similar sites are usually good for sharing static presentations only, and this kills some advantages of PowerPoint presentations. SlideBoom is designed for sharing rich video-like presentations with animations, embedded Flash movies, audio narrations and video clips. The unique feature of SlideBoom is graphical annotations over presentation content, which could be saved with a presentation on the portal.
I can say that SlideBoom leads the second generation of PowerPoint sharing facilities (PowerPoint to Web 2.0) and I know that our competitors also work on similar solutions. We have developed iSpring technology since 2004, and have an advantage over competitors at least for 2-3 years.
We get feedback from people that use SlideBoom and most of them tell that SlideBoom is the service that they were looking for a long time. And I am sure there is a room for SlideBoom at the market, and it will have a great future.
Categories: interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint, powerpoint_flash, slideboom
Labels: articulate, interviews, medicine, online_presentations, powerpoint, training 
Greg Friese, MS, NREMT-P is president of Emergency Preparedness Systems LLC and a paramedic, educator, author, and outdoor enthusiast. To learn more and to receive rapid e-learning design and production tips subscribe to the EPS blog at their site.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, Emergency Preparedness Systems LLC, and the training programs you create.
Greg: I am the founder and president of Emergency Preparedness Systems LLC. EPS does four things:
Our training programs for EMTs and paramedics, generally 25-30 minutes long, are used for continuing or refresher education. Since emergency responders work rotating shifts, it is very difficult for all employees to be in the training room together. Online lessons allow asynchronous delivery of the exact same content across multiple shifts and multiple stations. If users are called out for an emergency they can resume the training program when they return. Each lesson is approved by the Continuing Education Coordinating Board for EMS (CECBEMS) so students know that it will be accepted for local, state, or national recertification requirements. Most EPS content is distributed through CentreLearn.com and RapidCE.com.
Geetesh: Why do you use PowerPoint as the starting point for the creation of these programs? And what else do you use to enhance and distribute these programs.
Greg: We use PowerPoint for several reasons. First of all it is an excellent tool for us to storyboard a lesson. During initial production, each slide is given a working title and the script for the audio narration is written in the notes view. As production and editing progresses, notes for images, objects, and animations are added to the notes view. Once the script is finalized, slide production begins which includes a descriptive slide title and sub-title, insertion of images and objects, and animation formatting.
The final step is to convert the PowerPoint slides to Flash using Articulate Presenter. The audio is inserted and synchronized with the PowerPoint slide animations. The end user watches a narrated Flash movie inside the Articulate Presenter player. They may not even be aware that they are watching a movie that was created with PowerPoint.
We also use another Articulate product called Engage to create and insert custom Flash learning objects into the PowerPoint. The Articulate Engage Interactions publish inside the Articulate Presenter movie.
Categories: articulate, medicine, online_presentations, powerpoint, training
Labels: design, interviews, powerpoint, storyboarding Scott Schwertly is an epic storyteller. Today, he owns and operates Ethos3 Communications, an internationally renown and award-winning presentation design and training company located in Nashville, TN. Scott works with a wide spectrum of clients that includes Fortune 100 companies, Silicon Valley start-ups, and various other organizations throughout the world. Scott has a B.A. in Communications and an M.B.A. from Harding University. .
Geetesh: What's StoryBored? Is it a blog? Or an e-book -- or both? Also what is the raison d'être for StoryBored?
Scott: StoryBored is an e-book that was sparked by my desire to help others tell better stories through their presentations. During the past few years, I have done a lot of research on Gen X and Y in my quest to understand myself better and why certain messages/stories resonate or don't resonate with me. What I found through this research and my own self-discovery is that alternative methods work best with me and people who are in my same age demographic. We want sarcasm. We want pop-culture. We want something fun. It's those three things that I tried to deliver in my writing. With that said, StoryBored is really an e-book for everyone but just told through the eyes of a twenty-something.
Geetesh: This one is not really a question -- it's probably just an invitation to think aloud. Nowadays, it's the "in" thing to have a story rather than those bullet points, complex slides, and animated charts. But we all know that the real world is different -- people still need to make those slides. So how do they weave a story in their existing content -- also, does a middle path exist?
Scott: I firmly believe that there is a story in everything. You have stories. Your parents have stories. Your grandparents have stories. Your company even has a story. No one should miss an opportunity to tell a story when giving a presentation. After all, stories create emotions. Emotions create motivation. Motivation creates action. Action creates results. On that note, storytelling equals results.
I have found that the best place to tell a story is in your introduction. There really is no better way to engage your audience than early on. There is this great quote out there: "If you tell me a fact, I'll remember it. If you tell me the truth, I'll believe it. If you tell me a story, I'll put it in my heart forever". That's powerful stuff.
Regarding a middle ground, I do think it exists. When Ethos3 works with clients, we often suggest that they use a compelling metaphor or center their content around a powerful theme - a one-word brand that captures the essence of their message. These are great alternatives to telling a story without feeling like you are huddled around a campfire singing Kumbaya. Honestly, many still get uncomfortable around the concept of "story" even with it being such a big buzz word these days. In short, centering your message around a metaphor or theme is a great middle ground.
Categories: design, interviews, powerpoint, storyboarding
Labels: delivery, design, interviews, powerpoint 
It is not everyday that an Indezine reader suggests a conversation with a presentation expert -- shares some thoughts with her, and then she comes back with such a well explained, balanced response -– when you see something of this quality in an email, you know it should reach a larger audience.
This thread was started by T. L. Sanders -- and the presentation expert here is Julie Terberg. As owner and principle designer at Terberg Design, Julie develops custom presentation solutions — unique for every client and purpose. Julie also conducts training sessions for those who want to expand their skills. To find out more about Terberg Design, visit her site...
T. L. Sanders: I’m curious about your thoughts as an MVP on a possible design shift in PowerPoint presentations. I’ve watched over the last few years as people like Cliff Atkinson, Guy Kawasaki, Masayoshi Takahashi, and Steve Jobs, to name just a few advocated that the speaker is the storyteller, not PowerPoint. After this de-emphasis of bullet points, complex slides, and animations, did you have to change your business model or skill set to compensate?
I believe there is still a need for well-designed (emphasis on the word designed not built) presentations (Flash or PowerPoint) for demos, kiosks, etc. However, I believe the current emphasis on solid visual design skills and crafting a story makes preparing presentations less about PowerPoint and more about content.
I work in an organization that unfortunately bought into the Microsoft model of preparing presentations. Presenters typically try to cram as much information on the slide as possible, use a single corporate template, and read from the actual text of the slide as a script. Absolutely horrible and boring.
Julie: The “shift” you write about has been happening for longer than a few years and is MOST welcome. Instead of “giving” presentations, deliver a presentation that the audience “gets”. The focus becomes the audience – not the presentation (what do you want the audience to understand, remember, and take-away from the talk?). An effective presentation takes all of this into consideration. It’s not enough to clean up poor content and make it look better.
My business model has not changed much over the last 10 years, as I’ve always specialized in custom developed presentations. I receive scripts, notes, images, etc. from clients on the presentation content and flow – and then I storyboard a presentation from there. I’ve always emphasized simplicity over complexity. Design is my passion (Industrial Design education and 23+ years of experience in computer graphics). I worked backstage in business theater, observing and learning all about the relationship between a powerful presenter, great visuals, and a grateful, receptive audience.
The key to change at your organization is education and awareness. If you’re responsible for cleaning up or formatting others presentations – you could be a catalyst for change. Share the knowledge you’ve learned from experts like Cliff Atkinson and Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen). Get the book: Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte. The folks at your organization are simply unaware of what they’re doing wrong, and keeping things status quo because they don’t realize this method of presenting is ineffective.
Tip: Take one presentation and redesign a few key visuals for better audience communication. Strip out the text on the slide and move it to the speaker notes, design visual concepts to convey ideas. Share this with the presenter and show them how to use Presenter View so they have their notes visible while speaking. Yes this method requires more preparation and rehearsal for the presenter – the time is well spent and the results worthwhile.
Another idea: get an expert to speak at your company about this topic.
And another: Attend PowerPoint Live this September in San Diego.
I understand and appreciate your frustration. Best wishes to you!
Categories: delivery, design, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: education, interviews, powerpoint 
Jefferson West is a co-founder and the CEO of Studeous. Jeff is responsible for the marketing, public relations, and strategy at Studeous. Often traveling between schools and the company headquarters in Austin, Texas; Jeff is frequently in discussions with teachers, administrators, and students to get timely feedback from the people who use Studeous.
Geetesh: Tell us more about Studeous, and how this evolved.
Jefferson: Currently, teachers and administrators would agree that many Learning Management Systems are behind the technology curve. These systems, though often poorly designed, are somehow extremely over-priced. Schools all over are having to dish out large sums of money in an attempt to keep up with technology and connect their schools on the internet. Unfortunately, these solutions are not working. They are too complicated and confusing for the teachers to effectively use and thus provide little academic benefit to the students.
Enter Studeous, a simple, easy to use, and most importantly, free way for teachers to organize their courses online. We make it so simple for teachers and students to stay connected long after the bell rings. Studeous is a hosted solution, so teachers don’t have to worry about buying their own servers and there is no download. If a teacher wants great e-learning tools—he/she has them in a heartbeat. And, it requires no training.
This solves the teacher and students pain, but how does this “connect a school”? And why is this good for institutions? Administrators get free access to Studeous as well. We have three levels---Bronze, Silver, and Gold. Bronze is free and allows administrators to moderate the content in their school’s Studeous portal. They can edit bad content, suspend students from using Studeous, post announcements on the home page, etc. Administrators then have the option to upgrade to Silver or Gold for a small fraction of the cost of standard LMSes. With Silver and Gold they can do even more useful things like send out mass messages to all teachers or all students. They also have the option to brand their school’s portal to the school colors.
The ease of use ensures that the average teacher will be able to use great e-learning tools and the advanced administrator controls starting at just $649 per school per year, ensures that virtually every school will be able to afford it. With this, we hope to make e-learning a commodity.
We have essentially created a web-based LMS that requires no training, no sales force, and minimal marketing--allowing us to put up to 100% of sales revenue back into the product itself, unlike the other enterprise e-learning companies. This allows us to continue to make Studeous better and better. Which is great for the teachers, administrators, and students of Studeous.
Geetesh: What types of files can teachers and students share with each other on Studeous? Also, is there anything I can do with PowerPoint files?
Jefferson: Teachers can share any files. We give teachers the ability to upload files to their class pages that can be downloaded by students. And we let students send teachers files by putting them in the Studeous “Dropbox.” PowerPoint files can be easily shared with Studeous. A great feature for students is our “Study Groups” feature that gives students a space to collaborate and exchange files so they are not emailing them back and forth all the time. This is a great time saver. They even get their own personal “Locker” (for students) and “Desk” (for teachers) that lets them upload personal files to store on Studeous. Say good-bye to the thumb drive! These files can be made private for personal use or public for sharing. Studeous is everything you need in one place.
Geetesh: What’s your revenue model? And will Studeous always be a free product?
Jefferson: Studeous makes money by selling administrator controls to school administrators which allows them to moderate content and communicate with their teachers and students. This is our only source of revenue now, as we are more concerned with getting users on Studeous, then with making money. But, down the road, we have devised many unique and effective ways to monetize Studeous, without just advertising.
With that in mind, Studeous will always be free. Free for teachers, free for students, and free for administrators (with the option of upgrading for a cost).
Categories: education, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: delivery, education, interviews, powerpoint 
Lee Potts has been blogging about visual communications and presentation-related issues since 2002. His current project, Breaking Murphy's Law (tagline: because when you're presenting, someone's always watching), launched in June. He serves on the steering committee of InfoComm's Presentation's Council and he was recently elected to the Health and Science Communications Association (HeSCA) Board of Directors.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, and how you created the Breaking Murphy’s Law blog.
Lee: Most of my career has involved, in one way or another, helping people to do presentations. As a graphic designer, a AV tech or a tactical consultant I've worked on everything from basic one-on-one pitches to trade shows to large sales training meetings. Right now, I work for a major pharmaceutical company helping research teams to present their findings at FDA Advisory Committee meetings. These meetings represent one of the final, critical milestones in the drug approval process and they are very exciting to be part of because the stakes are so high.
When I started thinking about what would eventually become Breaking Murphy's Law, I knew that although I really wanted to get back into blogging, I didn't want to have another blog that was basically just a collection of annotated links to other websites.
It occurred to me that some of the most interesting moments in my career happened when things were going very wrong. Along the same lines, many of my best work memories involve hanging out during down time with the other meeting and staging professionals listening to their stories about when things went very wrong for them. I think that everyone would agree that there's something fascinating about the subject. These stories can provide a certain level of vicarious knowledge. They are an entertaining way to gain some experience without actually screwing up yourself. A trick, tip or technique learned while listening to these stories might be crucial to saving a meeting or even a career.
I created Breaking Murphy's Law hoping it would eventually grow into an ongoing conversation, a large-scale sharing of stories about what can go wrong when you're a presenter or when you're supporting someone else’s presentation. A place where everyone, whether you're an experienced professional or newbie, can learn how to break Murphy’s Law before Murphy’s Law breaks you.
Geetesh: What are the favorite topics you have covered in the blog? Give us a few thoughts and links.
Lee: Well, in Jedi Knights With Frickin' Laser Pointers we covered presenters with poor pointer control. The world's worst wet T-shirt contest deals with a last minute beverage and business presentation collision. Sticky Situation tells about the time we had problems with the AV tech's most basic of tools -- gaffer tape. The hotel had just put down new carpets that had been heavily treated with stain repellent. Who knew it would also repel tape adhesive. None of the cables we taped down stayed down. Needless to say, some of the meeting attendees took an unplanned trip without ever leaving the venue.
I try to stay away from stories that are mainly about bad presentation and PowerPoint skills. There are so many other really good blogs already covering that. However, I am interested in stories from all the different areas of expertise that go into making a presentation possible, including administrative support, meeting planners, AV techs, venue staff and, of course, the presenters themselves. And in nod to blogging tradition, I try to publish a weekly list of things I stumbled across online that my readers might be interested in that they might have missed. The most recent example is here.
I'd like to take this opportunity to ask your readers to submit any stories or anecdotes they have about presentation problems they experienced or witnessed. Stories about presentation disasters narrowly averted are also encouraged. You can take full credit for the story or remain safely anonymous, whichever you prefer. You can use the form on this page to submit your story. Please take a few minutes and add to the collective wisdom and experience of the presentation professional community.
Categories: delivery, education, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, movies
Philip N. Morgan is a seven year veteran of muvee and is its Chief Operating Officer. Before joining muvee Philip spent over 25 years working in television production and operations with stints at the BBC, ITN, TV-am, TVS, Orbit, TVBS and Sony Pictures Television. Philip is a keen photographer and videographer and enjoys cycling, jogging, travel and cooking -- and in this Indezine exclusive conversation, Philip discusses the cool, new features in muvee Reveal, and shwup.com, a new media sharing site from muvee.
See Also: muvee on Indezine
Geetesh: Tell us more about how muvee's products such as Reveal differ from conventional movie editing programs.
Philip: muvee Reveal is our latest and greatest software product for the PC platform and is the direct replacement product to our award winning muvee autoProducer range of products. It provides a completely automatic and intuitive approach to turning photos and home videos into emotionally engaging productions set to music which users can then share with others.
Most traditional video editing packages rely on users manipulating media with timelines and complex editing tools having a good knowledge of the grammar of editing and how to use effects and transitions. Of course this is great if you went to film school and also have a day to spare to edit a three minute video of your child's eighth birthday party to send over to granny. But if you are a busy parent, have never practised video editing and only have ten minutes what do you do? Well try muvee Reveal. Our PC software program prompts you to select your photos and videos, prompts you for a choice of music track and lets you select one of the 8 pre-installed styles. muvee Reveal will then analyze your photos and video, fix any problems with the photos (e.g. red-eye effect from using flash) and then automatically put together a fully edited video made to whatever style that you have selected. And all this is done in just a few minutes. And the styles are pretty smart - you can tweak a few settings in each of the styles to get just the look you want for your video and you can also personalise your production by addding titles, credits and captions. You can view your muvee instantly with full screen preview or burn a DVD or share via upload to the internet orwhatever. We have many types of output and sharing options.
muvee Reveal also includes our patented magicMoments technology which allows you to give a thumbs up to the video sections you want to include and a thumbs down to the bits of the video you want to exclude. This makes it really simple to get your video looking great without needing any fancy editing skills and hours of time to tackle the tedious part of conventional manual editing.
muvee Reveal can be purchased online priced at $99.95. You can see how easy and simple muvee Reveal is by downloading a free trial from www.muvee.com
Geetesh: Can you tell us more about the improvements in muvee Reveal -- and about the new shwup.com site?
Philip: muvee Reveal brings High Definition video support to our products for the first time so you can enjoy muvees in High Definition on your large screen television. Choose between 1280x720 and 1920x1080 resolution. The product also supports instant full-screen preview in DVD quality.
This is pretty amazing as you can sit back and watch your muvee instantly and in great quality before you decide whether to save it or burn it to a DVD or whatever. We also provide one-touch transfer from your camcorder, phone, or camera which makes it easy to import any pictures regardless of format and you can also save your muvee back to say your iTouch, iPhone or PSP too as we realize that most users are really keen to share the muvees that they have created and these devices are a great way of doing that.
Whilst I'm talking about sharing I want to mention another key product that we have just launched - we've called it shwup and you can go to www.shwup.com to find it. We're pretty excited about it as its our brand new photo and video sharing site - but centred around groups of people contributing and sharing their content in a more private environment than the other "sharing" sites that are out there. So say you and a bunch of buddies all go on a weekend camping trip - you all have different digital cameras, cameraphones and video cameras but how do you gather together all of the materials that get shot when you all get back home? Someone says they'll burn a DVD, another person says they'll post the pictures on their facebook page, someone else says they'll email the best shots of the Saturday night party... But it's all a bit clumsy and complicated and people often forget. With shwup one person can start an album, invite the others by email and they can all then contribute by just replying to the invite and attaching their own photos and video - all without the hassle of registration or sign-ups.
And the great thing about shwup is that each album is private to the individuals who are invited. This is very important because we realise that people don't necessarily want their private gatherings or parties posted all over the interenet for everyone else in the world to be able to see or download.
At shwup we also provide an online muvee-making function so people can make their own muvees with the materials they have contributed or which have been uploaded to an album by their friends. Plus our PC product (muvee Reveal) can also upload muvees to a shwup album or download raw materials from a shwup album to make muvees from on the PC desktop. So the experience is all pretty seamless and well connected. I'm having a lot of fun myself using shwup and its great that it introduces newbie users into how easy it can be to make muvees that look terrific and that you'll really want to share with others.
And by the way the term shwup came up as the site is about sharing and "showing up" and so we thought shwup was a neat way of expressing that.
You can try shwup for yourself at www.shwup.com and it's totally free.
Categories: interviews, movies
Labels: add-in, interviews, nxpowerlite, powerpoint
Neuxpower creates NXPowerLite, a popular optimization program for Microsoft Office file formats including PowerPoint -- Andrew Molyneux leads Neuxpower's in-house team of developers -- and in this Indezine exclusive conversation, Andrew gives us detailed responses on the evolution of NXPowerLite, and more.
Geetesh: Tell us more about how NXPowerLite has evolved – all the new features you add, and the acceptance by users.
Andrew: The original idea for NXPowerLite came from a client for whom we had been doing some bespoke development work. He told us that he'd received a very large PowerPoint presentation which he needed to edit and pass on to several other people, but his organisation's outgoing email size limit meant that he couldn't send it out without first reducing the size considerably. He spent hours painstakingly copying the images into Photoshop, scaling them down and then inserting them back into the presentation. He asked us if this process could be automated, and the idea of NXPowerLite was born.
When we released Version 1 of NXPowerLite in late 2001, the response from users was overwhelmingly positive; they were astonished at the huge reduction in the size of their files, the speed with which it could be achieved, and the incredibly simplicity of NXPowerLite.
Over the next few years, we gradually improved NXPowerLite's performance, adding support for new versions of PowerPoint as they were released. The software was also translated into French and German at the request of our increasingly international customer base.
By 2005, we'd reached the limit of what we could accomplish by automating PowerPoint. Optimizing very large presentations could take a long time, and there was a limit to the size reduction that could be achieved using this method. Customers were also increasingly asking for a version of NXPowerLite that could run on servers, which wouldn't have been practical with the automation approach. To address these problems, we obtained documentation on the PowerPoint file format from Microsoft and completely rewrote NXPowerLite's optimization engine. The result was NXPowerLite Version 2, released in late 2005. This offered considerably better compression and was much faster than previous versions. Version 2 also saw the introduction of the Integrated Edition of NXPowerLite, which enabled the software to be easily launched from within PowerPoint itself, or by right-clicking on a PowerPoint file in Windows Explorer.
By the time NXPowerLite 2 was released we had a large and rapidly growing international user community, who gave us a constant supply of ideas for development. In a period of just over a year, in addition to improving the core optimization engine, we added several major features including integration with Microsoft Outlook, batch processing, Spanish and Japanese translations, and a Server Edition, allowing NXPowerLite technology to be integrated with our customers' server-based applications.
Customers had been telling us for some time that they would like to see NXPowerLite's optimization technology applied to other file formats. This led to the release of NXPowerLite Version 3 in early 2007. This added support for Microsoft Word and Excel files. We also included Chinese and Italian translations and began packaging NXPowerLite using Microsoft's Windows Installer (MSI) technology to improve manageability for our larger enterprise customers.
With the addition in version 3.5 of support for Microsoft's new XML-based Office 2007 formats, the number of supported file formats has grown from the original one (PowerPoint 97-2003) to six (PowerPoint, Word and Excel 97-2003 and PowerPoint, Word and Excel 2007). We've also devoted considerable resources to improving NXPowerLite's core optimization technology. Unique features of NXPowerLite's optimization engine, developed as a result of sample files sent to us by our customers, can result in files that are over 25 times smaller than any of our competitors can achieve. These features can be found in NXPowerLite 3.6, released earlier this month as a free update for NXPowerLite 3 users.
Geetesh: What’s your favorite NXPowerLite feature that you believe is not too well known or under-utilized?
Andrew: That's a tough question, because we've carefully designed NXPowerLite to make it as simple as possible to use all of its features.
One feature that will be increasingly important, however, is the ability to optimize files specifically for mobile devices. This is already important for mobile workers using the current generation of Smartphones and PDAs based on Symbian, Windows Mobile and other platforms, but will be even more valuable as the next generation of mobile devices evolves, such as the upcoming iPhone 3G.
Categories: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint, powerpoint_2007
Wendy Russell is the About.com Guide to Presentation Software -- in her role as a software consultant and teacher, Wendy gives frequent presentations, coaching and offering advice to students, educators and business clientele on how to make the most of presentation software. In this interview, Wendy discusses her role as a guide at About.com, talks about PowerPoint 2007, and shares some trivia.
Read the interview here...
Categories: interviews, powerpoint, powerpoint_2007
Labels: animation, interviews, powerpoint Shawn Toh (pictured to the left) started creating PowerPoint presentations since secondary school and his interest in PowerPoint animations kept growing. Shawn loves to do advanced animation tricks using PowerPoint.
In this conversation, Shawn discusses animation in PowerPoint and his PowerPoint Heaven site.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself and PowerPoint Heaven.
Shawn: I have graduated from the Singapore Polytechnic with a diploma in Business Information Technology with merit and has enrolled into the National University of Singapore. During my free time, I work as a freelance presentation consultant where I do project consultations, conduct workshops, trainings and speaking engagements with companies and schools.
I have been actively participating in the Microsoft Office Discussion Group for PowerPoint (under the alias "tohlz") and has been working closely with Korea's PowerPoint Expert Club.
Geetesh: PowerPoint Heaven is distinctly different from other PowerPoint sites since it looks more at drawing and animation in PowerPoint – what made you choose this direction?
Shawn: PowerPoint Heaven is both an entertainment and educational site that offers you with advanced animations and PowerPoint works. You will be able to find works such as PowerPoint games, artworks, anime, and even web-comics. On this site, the goal is to show users that PowerPoint is not simply a presentation tool, but is also capable on leveraging into other areas such as creating games, artworks and animations comparable to those created in Adobe Flash and Photoshop.
The aim of this site is to create the WOW factor and go beyond the capability of PowerPoint, where visitors entering PowerPoint Heaven will get amazed by the works featured on the site. And through this site, users can get to learn how these advanced works are done by accessing the tutorials section.
PowerPoint Heaven started off as a personal site, where I published my tutorials and works. Being more animation and entertainment focused, PowerPoint Heaven started off with showing works that are unique from other PowerPoint sites and has greatly shown the differences. Thus, the site began receiving more exposure, and has attracted people who are interested in contributing to PowerPoint Heaven.
Categories: animation, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint
The NJBIZ site has a very interesting and inspiring interview with Steve Adubato, author of "Speak from the Heart" and "Make the Connection." In this interview, Steve discusses how PowerPoint can be a huge communication crutch. I may not agree with him all the time since I know that it is possible to make statistics look interesting in PowerPoint slides as well -- but I do agree with him that PowerPoint by itself is no help at all unless it is accompanied by a good speaker (and good slides).
Read the interview here...
Categories: interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint
Christian Lund-Sørensen is co-owner and serves as Managing Director at SkabelonDesign. He is responsible for all international activities in the company and also focus on strategic development of the company. In this interview, Christian discusses the PresentationEngine product, and how it can make life easier for PowerPoint designers.
Read the interview here...
Categories: interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, medicine, powerpoint 
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. She also creates tons of presentations for the medical industry -- you can contact her for your presentation requirements through her site: Echo's Voice.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, and the PowerPoint work you do in the medical industry.
Well, I started working for a medical education communications company in 1997. The owner was considering outsourcing her slide work, but she was worried about quality control. I knew my quality control was good in general, so I proposed that she let me create her slides. I didn’t tell her that I didn’t really know PowerPoint, so when she agreed, I had to learn it – and learn it fast!
I think my background in journalism and desktop publishing has really helped me with slide development, especially if you think of it as page layout on a large scale. I know that my proofreading skills are a definite plus, and the fact that I’m a bit of a math and puzzle geek sure hasn’t hurt!
Here I am, 11 years later, still developing presentations for a variety of industries. In the healthcare and medical education industry specifically, I do a lot of slide cleanup work, making presentations consistent and visible for conferences and meetings as well as developing collateral materials like scientific posters and syllabi. I also do a lot of promotional decks, speaker-led presentations, CME materials, and stand-alone enduring education modules that are distributed in a variety of ways. In addition, I can often be found with the production crew backstage at meetings, running speaker review or minding the presentation equipment. I love being self-employed, so I have the opportunity to do all of those things and more (like write PowerPoint books!).
Geetesh: What sets the presentations created for medicine to be different than conventional PowerPoints?
Echo: Honestly, I don’t know that there is such a thing as a “conventional” PowerPoint! PowerPoint is used in so many ways….
One thing common to many medical presentations, though, is the sheer amount of data-driven slides. That means lots of charts, lots of tables, and lots of really text-heavy slides. I find that the extreme mix of chart slides is always a challenge in medical presentations – more so than with what I see in other industries. For example, it’s not unusual for a medical presenter to want four or six very small charts on a slide, with the goal of comparing various studies or compounds at different stages. Therefore, understanding what point the speaker wants to make becomes imperative to the design of the slide. If you can eliminate or at least downplay the extraneous information, you can emphasize what’s important – what the audience should remember.
So, maybe after this four-chart slide, there’s a column chart. Then a line chart, then a pie chart, then a column chart with a trend line. Some have error bars, some don’t. Some slides have two or three or four charts, others have just one. The challenge is making all of these different charts look like a cohesive set, especially when the data varies so greatly. It’s also important to understand what types of charts show what types of data the best so you can advise your clients appropriately.
When you toss in text-heavy slides, it’s important for the presentation developer to understand what’s important and what can be moved into speaker notes or downplayed on the slide. Some text slides work better as tables, especially if the text has lots of numbers and specific data.
And then, of course, there’s always the struggle with where to place references, P-values, and acronym definitions, and it’s not unusual to have a lot of all of those on an individual slide! That extreme amount of “fine print” just isn’t as much of an issue in the presentations I work on for other industries. And finding some of the symbols used in medical presentations can be an adventure, too.
Categories: interviews, medicine, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint
Christina Deatherage serves as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for ShowLogicTM for Catevo. Prior to joining The Catevo Group, she worked for IBM/Lenovo where she held various marketing, sales and strategy positions. In this interview, she discusses Catevo's new ShowLogic presentation platform.
Read the interview here...
Categories: interviews, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
Joel Harband heads Tuval Software Industries, based in Israel. Their best known product is Speech-Over Studio, a PowerPoint add-in that enables PowerPoint slides to incorporate narrations using automated voices.
Geetesh: Tell us more about the new features and improvements in Speech-Over 2.5
Joel: Sure. First, I'd like to remind readers of Speech-Over's mission: To use narration and animation in PowerPoint to achieve the impact of a live presentation. This boosts the effectivity of PowerPoint-based e-learning, training and web presentations in a easy and economical way.
Speech-Over lets users build effective narrations from individual narration clips, combining general orientation topics, like introduction and summary, with specific content topics linked to screen objects. PowerPoint animations synchronized with the narration clips are added to illustrate and clarify the narration.
Speech-Over uses articulate text-to-speech (TTS) voices to add and maintain professional narration easily.
The new features in Speech-Over 2.5 are designed to raise efficiency when the software is used by teams of authors. The features include the ability to refresh all narration clips in the presentation after changes in preferences, including the slide notes generated in the notes pane, and an improved voice preview function in the narration clip editor that allows skipping sentences during the preview and stopping it in the middle.
Geetesh: Can you tell us more about the TTS voices, what they are, and how one can get more of them?
Joel: Text to speech (TTS) is the automated synthesis of speech from text. The heart of the system is the text-to-speech engine, a sophisticated piece of software that parses the text input, analyzes its grammar, sentence structure, punctuation and capitalization, and activates voice simulations to produce a vocal rendering of the text.
The data for individual voices are provided in separate files called "voices". The TTS engine can work with any of the voices interchangeably.
Advances in TTS technology have replaced the old robotic computer voices with new, amazingly realistic ones.
Synthesized from real voices, these remarkable TTS voices can read books aloud beautifully without a mistake, guided only by grammar, sentence structure and punctuation. People use them to learn and review while driving.
The exciting news is that these articulate TTS voices have been harnessed by Speech-Over to empower users to add professional narration in presentations easily.
Speech-Over, which has an embedded text-to-speech engine, accepts user narration text and launches TTS voices from within PowerPoint to record professional narrations from the text alone.
Change the narration text as often as you need and these tireless voices record new versions quickly and faithfully without complaint.
TTS voices are separate computer applications which, once installed, are recognized by Speech-Over. They are available in male and female gender, in all major languages, and in various regional dialects.
Basic quality Microsoft voices Mike and Mary are included free. For much better results, premium TTS voices are available from voice vendors such as AT&T and NeoSpeech at affordable prices. Speech-Over uses SAPI 5 standard TTS voices. (For info about premium voices, see here...).
For more info about text-to-speech, see here...
Categories: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint
Scott Schwertly of Ethos3 recently interviewed me in the first of his series on 7 Questions -- this interview can be found on his new Storybored blog...
Categories: interviews, powerpoint
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: 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: books, interviews, powerpoint_2007Echo 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: 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: interviews, powerpoint, sounds 
Mike Bielenberg (pictured to the right) is general manager/musician for Jupitertunes, a division of Jupitermedia Corp. He is the original founder of www.BBM.net, an online music library created for Flash, PowerPoint and web professionals. He is based in Atlanta.
Geetesh: Tell us more about RoyaltyFreeMusic and its music collection.
Mike: With over 8,000 instrumental songs and 10,000 sound effects, RoyaltyFreeMusic.com is currently the world's largest online collection of what is called "buyout music" or "stock music". "Royalty free" means you only pay once and can use it again and again in commercial projects.
Although our subscriptions are a great bargain, anyone and everyone can listen to the tracks in our library, use a credit card or PayPal to buy a single track and download it in either WAV or MP3 format. Our friendly staff is available by day to help people with their purchases and choose music for them.
Geetesh: In your opinion, what genre of music works best in PowerPoint presentations?
Mike: You can never go wrong with an upbeat classical piece or an ambient electronica track. So few PowerPoint users actually employ music I think you're already ahead of the game by having music at all (as long as it's legal!)
But really, it's not about genres. That's too limiting. It's more about tempo and emotions. Many online music libraries now let you search for music based on both tempo and/or emotion. I think that's much more liberating than limiting yourself to just classical or techno.
If I'm watching a PowerPoint presentation, I'm there to learn something. That's a very state of mind for me than passively watching television. So, for PowerPoint, the music really has a different job to do. It has to:
Satisfying #1 usually means picking something with a fairly brisk tempo. Satisfying #2 completely depends on your subject matter, but I find it's usually something positive and inspiring. I think one of our best CDs for this requirements is Background Music for the Digital Age (#SCUND07)
Categories: interviews, sounds, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
Henk de Groot (pictured to the left) has been very involved in display and presentation technology. In the last 17 years, he has held various management positions at Tektronix in Europe and the USA; he led the European operation of InFocus projectors right from its startup for 9 years. He is owner of Intelligent Lectern Systems BV and Sho-Q BV where he developed a new presentations systems solutions that creates a product category and new levels of productivity in presenting and teaching.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your role and Sho-Q.
Henk: As CEO of Sho-Q I am very involved is all aspects of the company which fundamentally falls into 2 separate categories- The development of the products and working with end users on making sure that the product has the right features and that these features can be developed into current and future versions of the products. It is the most fun I have had in years -- truly making a difference and enhancing the presentation experience.
Geetesh: What things does Sho-Q do well.
Henk: We are all about enabling the presenter. PowerPoint does a great job at developing presentations. However it does not enable the presenter or presenters to deliver a seamless presentation -- especially in a multi-presentation environment. That is where Sho-Q comes in.
The software has a load of features -- on both the organization and the delivery side.
Figure 1: Show all Slides
Seamless transitions between presenters and presentations, the ability to set up Intermezzo screens so attendees don't have to watch the whole setup process, users' ability to walk up to a presentation device and effortlessly using a USB Flash device run a presentation and when finished walk away with the security of knowing that their presentation is not on the machine they just used are just some of the features.
Figure 2: Presenter View
Figure 3: Selector Screen View
Additionally users can time their presentation, see their notes , navigate their presentation -- all though a very intuitive screen that runs on a touch display. This is the first PowerPoint enabled software application specifically written for touch displays.
So we are both a software and hardware company -- we develop a complete line of touch screen enabled lecterns -- again enabling the presenter. That is what we are all about.
Categories: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, interviews, perspector, powerpoint
George McCaskill (pictured to the right) was a founding investor in Perspector and currently enjoys the role of Chief Technology Officer. George is responsible for product strategy and development. He earned his startup stripes by joining QSS in 1993 where he was one of two developers building the market leading requirements management tool DOORS.
Geetesh: Tell us more about the new features in Perspector 4.0.
George: The major new feature in Perspector 4.0 are 3D lists. You can convert from the bullet lists in your existing PowerPoint presentation into 3D list images, or you can start from scratch with our library of list images and fully featured 3D list editor. This presents PowerPoint users with a first easy step in the journey of breaking free from bullet point paralysis towards acquiring a much more visual style.
Perspector 4.0 now uses the presentation color scheme to give your images colors that match the rest of your presentation. This is a real time-saver compared with earlier versions of Perspector.
Professional Edition users can now add their own Perspector images to the Library so that they can save their 3D work for reuse in future presentations.
More information on Perspector 4.0 is available here...
Geetesh: Can you share some case studies on the use of Perspector.
George: Many Perspector customers are consultants and other communicators working with commercially sensitive information, so their presentations often cannot be shared with a wider audience, much as we would love to work with them on case studies. The other thing we have noticed from conversations with customers is that they like to keep Perspector as their 'secret weapon' that gives their presentations a distinctive edge when compared with their competitors' (or even other colleagues'!).
Our website has some example presentations which have come from the Perspector community. Community resources and case studies are areas we are actively seeking to improve, so if any Perspector users are reading this - please consider sharing your work with us if that is possible!
Categories: add-in, interviews, perspector, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, photos, powerpoint 
A refugee from 18 years in corporate management and marketing, Rikk Flohr (pictured to the right) turned his attention inward to his 20-year love affair with Photography. He founded his design firm Fleeting Glimpse Images in January 2006 and divides his days between various print and screen design projects, presentation consulting and, of course, photography. He lives in Apple Valley, Minnesota.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, your work, and how you got started with photography.
Rikk: My first serious camera arrived in the form of a wedding present. I still remember it-Minolta XGM. I still have it. It still works. Within months, I was burning through a dozen rolls of film a month and spending my free time packing my burgeoning gear around they Wyoming countryside. I ran the gamut, shooting weddings, graduations, fine art, landscape and anything I could think of. It gave me a good grounding in the basics. Soon I graduated to Medium Format and things got really expensive.
At the same time, my career with a diesel engine distribution company took off and I found myself having little time for photography any longer. My degree was in Computer Science back in the day in which personal computers were a dream and mainframes the reality. But, as the PC revolution hit the corporate world, I found I could leverage myself into the graphics end, eventually taking over marketing, print and web development and presentations for my company. I still remember my first presentation program, Applause II from Ashton Tate. I did a lot of amazing things with that on that lowly 286.
In 2005, I dusted off my photography passion and invested in the new-fangled digital gear. Eight months later I relapsed and spent all my spare time in the field shooting. My company received a letter of resignation and I founded my design firm to leverage my hard-won marketing and design skills and pursue my twin passions of writing and photography. My firm now works in capture, high-end digital stills or high definition video; design, for prepress, web or other media; and present, building presentations and coordinating events. Photography is where I like to be and when I am not shooting, I am conniving ways to teach photographic skills or teach image editing. Recently, I had the good fortune of serving as Artist In Residence for the National Park Service spending 35 days in the field perfecting my craft.
Geetesh: How can PowerPoint users benefit from using their cameras.
Rikk: PowerPoint users have a unique opportunity to leverage digital photography. Presentations, visually at least, consist of essentially three elements: Words, Illustrations (Including Charts) and Photographic Images.
For content creators, the immediacy and ease of digital capture is a great benefit. An image of a person for the next slide deck is just a digital photograph away. Whether that person needing photographed is in the office next to you or across the country, today's digital imaging, coupled with email, puts that image into your next slide in the next ten minutes. That was something film could never deliver. The low resolution nature of presentations means that any camera is capable of creating acceptable content for PowerPoint. With a little imagination, modest amount of technique and some basic understanding of image editing software, you can create a photo of your company's latest product and have it into a slide before the film could be taken to the developer. No longer are slide jockeys limited to the canned clipart or the antiquated photos gathering electronic dust in lost folders on the corporate servers-fresh content is always just a click away. Why use a cheesy clipart image of two hands shaking when you can take a picture of your company president shaking hands with a real live customer? Why settle for predesigned slide backgrounds when you can set your point-n-shoot on close-up (the little flower on most digital cameras) and find a real, contextually accurate image to use?
I feel one of the greatest ways a slide wrangler can enhance their capitol at a company is to embrace digital photography and image editing as a way to enhance and distinquish their company's presentations. Pictures are worth a thousand words-none of them bulleted.
Categories: interviews, photos, powerpoint
Labels: books, interviews 
Carmine Gallo (pictured to the right) is a communications coach for the world’s most admired brands. His client list includes Intel, Chase, Barclays, IBM, Nokia, and many others. He is an Emmy award-winning journalist and former anchor, host, and business correspondent for CNN, Fox, CNET, and CBS.
Geetesh: Tell us more about Fire Them Up!, your new book, and what motivated you to do this book that helps motivate others.
Carmine: Americans are uninspired at work, in school and in their communities. At work, only 10% of employees look forward to going to work. Believe me, you don't want to be in the other 90%! In school, 7,000 U.S students drop out of the school system every day. In our communities, out of 172 democracies, America ranks 139 in voter turnout. We are discouraged, disillusioned and unmotivated. The same holds true for workers in many other countries as well. Leadership is in short supply. But it doesn't have to be that way. Each and every one of us has the ability, and I would argue, the obligation, to inspire, motivate and positively influence everyone in our personal and professional lives. You can do if you learn the language of motivation.
For more than a year, I spent time with extraordinary men and women who are considered inspiring communicators. These people run companies like The Ritz-Carlton, Google, Travelocity, Cold Stone Creamery, Starbucks, 24-Hour Fitness, Cranium, Virgin and many others. Some of the participants sketched ideas on napkins and through their power of their presentations, convinced investors to follow their vision. Some leaders transformed their company from one of the worst places to work to top of the Fortune list as the best place to work in the country. One man became a famous teacher for taking a class of underachievers and helping them outscore the gifted classes despite seemingly insurmountable hurdles. His story was turned into a movie but he offers his techniques for readers of Fire Them Up.
You will never be a leader unless you inspire those around you. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be." Imagine what life could be like if you satisfy that chief want? Recruiters will want to hire you, customers will want to buy from you, investors will want to back you, employees will want to work with you, and everyone will feel energized by your presence!
Geetesh: If you had to explain your book in a generic paragraph to a prospective reader, how would that read?
Carmine: Fire Them Up reveals the 7 simple secrets of motivation as practiced by the world's most inspiring business leaders, entrepreneurs and educators.
Categories: books, interviews
Labels: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
Steve Hards (pictured to the right) plays with PowerPoint all the time, and creates add-ins. His newest project is Opazity, about which he discusses in this conversation. Steve is also involved with Perspector, a 3D add-in for PowerPoint.
Geetesh: Tell us more about Opazity, and how it can help PowerPoint users hold the attention of the audience.
Steve: Thanks for the opportunity to expand on this. I only hinted at these things on the Opazity website. There are a couple of aspects to the way I see it helping to hold audiences’ attention.
First, and rather superficially, you can use Opazity to create some interesting effects. These range from shapes with mysterious, soft fills, as in the second demonstration video on the website, to a sense of depth in the visuals where you can make the foreground stand out because the background is ‘out of focus’.
It irritated me for years that PowerPoint is so ‘hard edge’ everywhere. My first attempt to produce these effects started when I was taking photos to use in presentations. I used to try and take pairs of them, one sharp, and one out of focus. That was a bit hit-and-miss, but then I realised that I could take any photo and create a blur on it using facilities in photo-manipulation software. That was better, but going backwards and forwards between the programs until I got the effects I wanted was very time consuming. Also, you couldn’t do it with shapes and text generated in PowerPoint unless you converted them to a picture first. It was all very tedious and frustrating, so I eventually came to the idea of getting an add-in made.
So a more subtle approach to visual effects is one thing that Opazity has going for it and, once you start noticing it on TV and in movies, you see the effect in use everywhere, particularly in transitions.
This is where the second of my points about audience attention comes in. Curiosity is a very fundamental human instinct and we are particularly curious about, and therefore pay attention to, things which we believe are being hidden from us. It’s my personal theory that, of our ancient ancestors, only those who were intensely curious survived to breed, so this trait is probably ‘hardwired’ into us. We can imagine them around the fire at the entrance to a cave, peering into the shadows... and you can see it in us from childhood — parents universally play ‘peek-a-boo’ with a baby, for example. Also, revealing the hidden is always used to great effect in story telling, in literature, in theatre and other entertainment (and a presentation is a performance, after all). I hesitate to mention striptease, but that is the ultimate attention-getter, at least for most men!
So, to bring it back to PowerPoint, without Opazity, I think it is actually quite hard to arrange things visually so that people in the audience are attending to the screen before something is shown to them. Images are either there or they are not. Using fades and other animations means that it is only fractions of a second before it is obvious what they are.
Geetesh: Can you share some usability scenarios for Opazity?
Steve: There are some obvious ones, but I’m hoping – and expecting – Opazity users to discover others!
The first (although it wasn’t obvious to me until someone pointed it out) is that Opazity can be used to construct visual quizzes very easily. You have a picture, such as a familiar object or a famous person, overlay it with a blurred image and ask a question. People will search for clues in the blurred image, which you remove to reveal the clear image underneath when they have answered. You can arrange two blurred images, with different degrees of blur if you want to be able to give them a clue after an incorrect answer. I can see uses for this in certain kinds of teaching, especially with young children or in language teaching, but other people can use quizzes to good effect. Some presenters might want to have a fun quiz up their sleeves to show if they have to wait for more audience members to arrive before starting their serious presentation. The point is that with Opazity it is so easy to set up a quiz like this, whereas with anything else it is too time consuming to be worth it.
Then I think it will be used in situations where someone’s identity has to be protected. Possibly in courtrooms, but more likely in medical presentations where patients’ faces need to be obscured for confidentiality reasons.
I am hoping too that artistically inclined presentation makers will use it to make interesting effects, and if any Indezine readers do that, I’d love to see some!
Finally for now, I’ll point out a use which is particular to Perspector 3D add-in users. Perspector creates fantastic looking lists as an alternative to PowerPoint’s bullets but it is not possible to animate the list items to bring them in one after the other on command. The current workaround involves creating a series of images with different list items added, and then aligning and animating those. With Opazity, it is much quicker and easier to overlay the list items with their blurred images and to remove those items one-by-one. That way, the audience can see something is still to come, but can not read ahead – which brings us back to the point about increasing attention because of the power of curiosity.
Geetesh: You mentioned Perspector, which you are also involved with. Why didn’t you produce Opazity under that brand?
Steve: Yes, I’m still the Sales and Operations Director for Visual Exemplars, which produces Perspector. To be brief, when I saw that PowerPoint 2007 did not have the effect you produce with Opazity, I wanted to get on and produce the add-in. However, the rest of the Perspector team were totally focused on some new Perspector developments and so I branched out on this one. And, no, before you ask, I can’t tell you about those new developments now, but you will not have long to wait!
Categories: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint 
Jihoon Kim serve as sys-op at PowerPoint Experts Club, a popular online community for Korean PowerPoint users. Jihoon is also a Microsoft MVP for PowerPoint.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself and the PowerPoint Experts Club.
Jihoon: My name is Jihoon Kim. I lead the Microsoft Powerpoint Expert Club", an online community on Naver (Korean No.1 Search Portal). My alias in the club is Promise. www.powerpoint.kr
Launched on December 09 2003, our community is continuously growing with the currently 210,000 members, which is regarded as biggest knowledge community in PowerPoint area. Our PowerPoint Expert Club cafe is open not only to experts but also to anyone who's interested in PowerPoint and who's looking for such information. Our cafe intends to be a place where anyone can be an expert even with his little knowledge of PowerPoint and such knowledge can be shared. This is our community philosophy: virtue of sharing, and we always try to do so.
Since being awarded as a PowerPoint MVP in 2006, I'm sharing information and giving professional lectures to people who want to learn an efficient business presentation skills.
Geetesh: The PowerPoint scene in Korea is very experimentive -- with illustrations, movies, and games being created using PowerPoint. Can you tell us more about this?.
Jihoon: You commented that the usage of PowerPoint in Korea is experimental. The reason seems to me that you saw only some of our members' works. But it's not the general usage in Korea.
I think there are many PowerPoint enthusiasts, because of PowerPoint's ease in graphical presentation. And such is the case in our community. These days, there is a fair number of people who put these high level skills to professional presentation usage. And now that PowerPoint animation has been improved next to Flash since Office XP (PowerPoint 2002), this animation is being used to captivate the distracted audience in the beginning of presentation.
Paying attention to this, we held a contest in celebration of reaching 200,000 members (maybe you saw some "experimental" works in this contest). You can see one of our experimental works on YouTube...
Also there are some enthusiasts who create animations, games by use of high level illustration and animation method. But this is out of PowerPoint substance, so I don't recommend it as leader of one of major online communities.
Categories: interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint, powerpoint_flash, wildpresenter 
Colby Devitt is the president and co-founder of Wildform, a multimedia software company based out of Los Angeles, USA. In this conversation, Colby discusses Wildform Online, their new online service that lets you host surveys and quizzes.
Geetesh: Tell us more about Wildform Online, and how it can help users do simple tasks?
Colby: With Wildform Online people can upload their e-learning quizzes, tests, surveys and presentations to the web and track viewership and score results without the expense and labor typically associated with using an LMS (Learning Management System). For as low as $19.99 a month, we host and track how their employees, students, customers and prospects interact with their projects.
For example, if a teacher creates a quiz, she can post it online, invite her students to take the quiz, track the test scores of her students, and if she wants, send them their results. She can choose to publish her quiz for a general audience or restrict it to just her students. Wildform Online also creates detailed reports for her - she can see how many people viewed her quiz, who took it and how they did. Wildform Online is also a great way to conduct surveys and polls - just upload your survey, invite people to take it and view the results. It's also an effective way to host and track the results of interactive presentations and online courses.
Geetesh: How does Wildform Online integrate with other Wildform products?
Colby: Wildform Online works fantastically with our product WildPresenter Pro, which lets you create multimedia presentations, quizzes, tests, surveys, and product demos, as well as converting PowerPoint to Flash, and recording onscreen activity . It is because of WildPresenter's quiz and survey creation capabilities that we built Wildform Online. Many of our customers created quizzes and surveys and then wanted to know how to upload them to the web and track the results from people taking them. What they were asking for typically requires an expensive and complex LMS (Learning Management System) that frequently costs in the tens of thousands of dollars. We offer this service to our customers for only $19.99 a month.
Categories: interviews, powerpoint, powerpoint_flash, wildpresenter
Labels: interviews, microsoft_office, powerpoint
Katherine Murray is the author of more than 50 books on technology and writes articles for various Microsoft sites. She also writes and edits the Microsoft Mindshare newsletter and contributes articles to CNET's TechRepublic. In addition to books and articles, Katherine publishes BlogOffice, a blog sharing tips and ideas related to various versions of Microsoft Office.
Read the interview here...
Categories: interviews, microsoft_office, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, office_mac, powerpoint
James Gordon has been a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) since 2000 and can be found in the Microsoft Macintosh newsgroups for Excel, PowerPoint and Word. PowerPoint users will recognize Jim as the creator of InsertPicture add-in for Macintosh. At SUNY University at Buffalo, Jim works helping faculty, staff and instructors with a wide array of technologies for higher education.
Read the interview here...
Categories: interviews, office_mac, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint, powerpoint_flash 
Rhys Jeremiah has been working in IT after graduating from Bristol University with a degree in mathematics. He started writing database applications for a large insurance company and quickly moved into web development, the largest site for a major international motor manufacturer. Although now teaching mathematics, he still manages some IT work. He currently lives in Cardiff, Wales with Sarah, his wife, and their children Lloyd and Carys.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your Extract Flash product, and what inspired you to create this.
Rhys: As is often common, the reason for creating the Extract Flash product was to solve a problem that could have easily been avoided. The company I was working for at the time was a major client of a marketing firm here in the UK. Last thing on a Friday afternoon, we were asked to update a flash file on a website and that the replacement file would be winging its way to us via email very soon. None of us in the office were quite prepared for the fact that the file had been placed into a PowerPoint presentation. It seemed that the last thing the marketing company did before the weekend was to send that file as numerous phone calls to get the original file failed. So we had a problem.
I noticed that it was possible to drag and drop the embedded Flash object between Office products and even drop it onto the desktop as a scrap file (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/138275). So I reasoned that the file must contain the Flash file that we were searching for. Hence it was worth digging a bit deeper. On opening the scrap file in a binary editor, I was able to locate the header block of the SWF file and without too much effort it was the possible to pull the binary data out and write it back to disk. The reason I wrote an application to do this is that I enjoy the challenge of trying something new, and also providing a useful tool to the community. In theory the scrap approach would work for any type of embedded object so long as the header block could be read and processed. With a small amount of knowledge it would be possible to change the file to search a binary file for any header block and extract the embedded data. From memory I think that SWF files are held in PowerPoint files without encryption so you don't necessarily need to mess about with the scrap file.
Geetesh: Many people believe that their embedded Flash content in a PowerPoint slide is secure -- so this does prove them wrong. How important is it for them to be aware of this, and would the scrap approach also work with any other embedded content in Microsoft Office documents.
Rhys: From my experience many people think that all embedded files in Office documents are secure. I can't count how many times someone has sent me a Word document containing loads of images. I've never really considered the people actually use this method to protect their files. It's certainly naive to approach security in this fashion. Personally I think that the only way to secure your sensitive data is not to give it away, as soon as you release any information you lose the ability to control the distribution. If you really want to secure your embedded content don't embed it.
Categories: interviews, powerpoint, powerpoint_flash
Labels: add-in, interviews, powerpoint, sounds Joel Harband heads Tuval Software Industries, based in Israel. Their best known product is Speech-Over Studio, a PowerPoint add-in that enables PowerPoint slides to incorporate narrations using automated voices.
Geetesh: Tell us more about this new update to Speech-Over.
Joel: Microphone recording and prerecorded files can now be used in addition to text-to-speech (TTS) voices to add narration to PowerPoint presentations -- substantially broadening the product’s applications. Also, you can now add narration clips to slides without attaching them to objects -– good for general topics like introduction and summary.
Speaking about recording, many people ask us: PowerPoint can already add voice recordings to presentations with the Record Narration function, why would I need Speech-Over? The answer is that Record Narration lets you add a voice track to a slide, and that’s fine for static slides. However, when objects on the slides are animated, you want to be able to easily synchronize the voices with the animations to achieve an effective multi-media, movie-like presentation. Speech-Over provides the solution: it delivers a voice track that is perfectly synchronized with the animations. Using a unique technology that adds voice clips directly to animated objects, it synchs voice media effects with the objects’ animation effects. And it’s easy to use: Speech-Over works in PowerPoint design mode and integrates with PowerPoint functions. Users can preview the results immediately in slide show mode. Its voice editing commands change the voice track without re-recording.
In another recent development, designers that want to add voices to PowerPoint-based Flash presentations are finding it easier to add voices to the presentations with Speech-Over before converting them to Flash. The voice track is automatically converted by the PPT2Flash conversion tools.
Speech-Over includes the basic Microsoft TTS voices free, and is now available in the Speech-Over Premium Voice Package, which includes the NeoSpeech premium voices Paul and Kate.
Geetesh: Can you share some case studies of people using Speech-Over.
Joel: Here are three case studies, each showing a different application of Speech-Over.
Categories: add-in, interviews, powerpoint, sounds
Labels: books, interviews, powerpoint
Ellen Finkelstein is the author of How To Do Everything with Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 and the upcoming PowerPoint for Teachers: Dynamic Presentations and Interactive Classroom Projects. Ellen maintains a web site that offers PowerPoint tips and a selection of free backgrounds. There, you can sign up for her monthly PowerPoint Tips Newsletter to get free tips, tutorials, and techniques.
Read the interview here...
Categories: books, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint 
Sandra Johnson has devoted the past 6 years of her career to PowerPoint presentation design and delivery. Sandra helps clients leverage this powerful Microsoft tool as a sophisticated and dynamic component of their marketing mix. Visit Sandra's site...
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself and your work.
Sandra: I have an education in nursing and 20-plus years experience working in the advertising business (that's an odd career path, I know). In advertising, I was involved in new business efforts. As a result, I frequently used PowerPoint. When I left advertising in 2001, I happened upon a PowerPoint project with American Express -- and, as they say -- the rest is history. My work has grown from doing PowerPoint on the side, to it being a full-time (plus) commitment for me. I work with clients that include United Healthcare, Medica, Carlson Wagonlit Travel and HP. I'm also a PowerPoint trainer, a contributor to the PowerPoint newsgroup and a PowerPoint Live team member.
If I were to describe my sweet spot (a sports analogy borrowed from colleague Rick Altman and for whose book "Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck" I was an editor), I'd say I have an eye for design, and I'm passionate about leveraging animation to help presenters tell a story.
The majority of my work is done for corporations whose sale people need to present to customers or prospects. I also do a lot of work in the legal field, working with attorneys to build their cases graphically with PowerPoint. I like to brag that "I've never lost a case."
I have the dream job. I truly never thought that I'd be able to have a career where I would love what I do so much.
Geetesh: What are the latest PowerPoint trends? What are presenters asking for? And what's passé?
Sandra: My clients get it. Corporate marketers in particular, are beginning to view PowerPoint and presentations as a part of their strategic marketing communications mix. With that perspective, they no longer are throwing templates to their sales people and relying on them to create presentations.
Indeed, my clients look to me to help them hone in on a key message and create a story that is relevant to their audience -- all while maintaining a design intergrity that is in keeping with their print collateral and advertising work.
And because they see PowerPoint presentations as a part of their marketing communications mix, it's become easier for me to encourage them to cut the bullets and use graphics and headlines instead. These clients understand that they can rely on their collateral materials as a "leave behind" (how many times have your clients said, "but we need the details on the slide so people can have a handout to read later"), and use PowerPoint to begin to establish a relationship between presenter and customer.
Additionally, my clients are asking for sophisticated animation in the form of info-graphics in their presentations. I know animation often gets a bad rap -- but I love using it (instead of text) to help the presenter tell his/her story.
Categories: interviews, powerpoint
Labels: clip_media, interviews, medicine, powerpoint 
Olivier Gryson is the Internet Project Director at Servier International, an independent pharmaceutical company based in France. Their medical art is an offshoot of their existing business which they offer as free downloads for non-commercial use. In this exclusive conversation, Olivier discusses Servier's medical art and its evolution and usage.
Geetesh: Tell us more about the purpose and evolution of Servier Medical Art.
Olivier: The aim of Servier Medical Art is to provide healthcare professionals with a valuable tool to help them create their PowerPoint presentations. Indeed, when you want to illustrate a specific medical mode of action or an experiment in a lab, it is very difficult to find the image that exactly suits your needs.
Our idea was to propose a construction set made of basic elements that can be combined each other to create more complex scenes. For example, to illustrate a pharmacological mode of action, you can combine an empty cell, with a nucleus, receptors, channels, and any other intracellular component by a simple “copy” and “paste”.
We launched Servier Medical Art at the occasion of the congress of the European Society of Cardiology in September 2005 in Stockholm. More than 30,000 cardiologists were attending the congress.
At this time, we were looking for an innovative service to animate our booth. It met a great success.
We then used Servier Medical Art during other international and national congresses or events in many countries worldwide. (Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Turkey, …)
Geetesh: What's unique and different about the Servier Medical Art collection. Can you share some trivia about their usage.
Olivier: First of all, our images are available as PowerPoint files. Using them only requires “copy” and “paste”. It was very important for us to propose a service that is easy to use. Indeed, most of our visitors do not have specific skill in computers.
They are true vector images. We work with specialized scientific illustrators who produce Adobe Illustator files. Images are rescalable without loss of quality.
More than 2500 images are available for download. Furthermore, doctors can submit their suggestions online. We enrich our image bank almost every week.
Servier Medical Art is free of charge. Our objective is to be a source of reference for any healthcare professional who would like to illustrate a PowerPoint presentation. Basically, we precise on the site that images are available for educational purpose only, but we are often contacted by companies, universities or public organization who want to use our images in books or training programs. We often grant them the permission providing that they add Servier in the credits.
Recently we were amused to discover that our files were also spreading via peer-to-peer networks. We don’t think that it is the best way to get our image bank. Indeed, Servier Medical Art is in permanent evolution. Our site is the only up-to-date source to get the files. Furthermore, we do not ask for a specific registration to get the images. “You enjoy the images, you download them free of charge and that’s all!”.
Categories: clip_media, interviews, medicine, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint, powerpoint_flash, wildpresenter Colby Devitt is the president and co-founder of Wildform, a multimedia software company based out of Los Angeles, USA. In this conversation, Colby discusses WildPresenter, their Flash authoring product that integrates so well with PowerPoint content.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, Wildform, and WildPresenter.
Colby: I'm the president and co-founder of Wildform and one of my main responsibilities is to oversee the marketing at Wildform. I have a liberal arts background. I grew up studying ballet very seriously, got a BA in Classics from Barnard and a masters in religion from Harvard. I've spent many years writing and in theatre, exploring the intersection of art and technology. An installation project I was working on led me to learn advanced animation programs (Alias and Wavefront) and from there I immersed myself in technology. Before starting Wildform in 1999, I worked at www.nytimes.com and before that I was in charge of marketing for a document imaging company. I have tried to retain my sense of what it is like for someone to use our products who is not enamored with technology and views it as a tool. We have always tried to make our products as easy and fun to use as possible. We have also created products that we ourselves would have wanted to use.
In many ways, WildPresenter is the synthesis of all of the technology we have developed so far. It contains a media importer that converts all images, audio and video to Flash. The origin of this technology was our original Flash video converter called Flix, which we sold to ON2. WildPresenter also has a text effects tool, which is basically our standalone product, WildFX. The timeline in WildPresenter and the ability to combine any kind of SWF file together had its origins in a previous product called Linx. WildPresenter though is much more powerful than Linx because it now contains hundreds of built in shapes, objects, flowcharts, animations, slide transitions and a whole set of drawing tools, so that you can now build entire Flash web sites with the program. In addition to being a media converter, a text effects generator, and basic Flash site builder, WildPresenter contains an entire screen recording program, like Camtasia, a quiz creator, and last but not least for your readers, a PowerPoint to Flash converter, which creates very accurate conversions with the smallest possible file size.
So, really WildPresenter is like having six major programs in one. There is nothing like it on the market. It is exactly the program that I fantasized about having when I was producing for the web at the New York Times Digital -- an easy to use multimedia program that would let me quickly combine video, audio, images, and text, so that I could create something original and compelling and post it rapidly to the web, concentrate on producing great content and not get bogged down in struggling with the software.
Geetesh: What are the new PowerPoint specific features in WildPresenter 3.3 -- and can you give us case studies of end users who create outputs from their PowerPoint presentations with WildPresenter.
Colby: WildPresenter has been a powerful PowerPoint to Flash converter for awhile, generating accurate conversions and small file sizes. What's new in version 3.3 is that we have added a "Combine Your PowerPoint and Video" wizard. We added this because we have many customers who like to combine their PowerPoint files with video and convert their projects to web-friendly Flash. The wizard streamlines the process for them. They can now execute what is technologically a very complex process in three easy steps –- select a PowerPoint, select a video and click “Next”. Once they have completed the wizard, they can change the layout and design of their project if they like. WildPresenter also comes with other wizards and we will continue to add more based on what our customers tell us they most want. Wildform has a lot of fans and we like to honor them. You can read testimonials from our customers and we feature customer examples in the Customer Gallery section of our blog.
Categories: interviews, powerpoint, powerpoint_flash, wildpresenter
Labels: interviews, powerpoint, training Claudyne Wilder is guest lecturer at conferences, business shows and corporate events. She is the creator of three presentation seminars: "The Winning Presentations Seminar," "The Winning Presentations Sales Seminar;" and "Creating PowerPoint Presentations That Get Your Point Across." She offers "The Winning Presentations Seminar publicly about six times a year. She also licenses this seminar to companies and consultants to teach.
Geetesh: Do you do PowerPoint training classes? What problems do you address in your class?
Claudyne: Well, yes and no. I call my classes Creating PowerPoint Presentations That Get Your Point Across. Showing them PowerPoint hints they don’t know is just one part of the class. This may be only about 2 hours of the whole class. The first exercise has nothing to do with PowerPoint. Participants write up objectives, goals, themes, key messages for the presentation they brought. Then they analyze that presentation based on the goals and objectives. So many times people realize that the presentation they created will not help them achieve their objectives and goals.
For example, a woman’s department had redone the company website and she had created a presentation to encourage people to use it. But the presentation was all about the work they had done, very boring to listen, not to mention slides with words no one understood. She had to redo her whole presentation focused on her objective and the key messages she wanted to get across.
This exercise encourages people to write first their messages and how they want the audience to react. Then they can think about creating slides.
I also show people how to logically organize their content using the formats in my CD Presentations in a Hurry: 26 Formats That Persuade. When people are asked about their experience of most PowerPoint presentations, they will usually say that the presentations are not logically organized. They can’t follow the presenter. They feel the presenter has just written down everything he or she knows on different slides…without considering a structure to organize the content. I teach people that if they are selling, they need to organize information different than if they are presenting a strategy recommendation.
We lay out all the slides on tables and the floor and people look at their organization. I have checklists we go through. Most often, once a person sees on his or her slides on the table, a realization hits that there really is no organization. Maybe opening, background, results and next steps organize the talk, but within that, the content is just one sentence after another. There’s no order.
People get very excited when they begin to see that by re-organizing and/or redoing their content, they can be better presenters. They can emphasize certain words. They can slow down and speed up when mentioning key points. They can include stories as they have cut out the unnecessary content.
Geetesh: What do typical attendees take back with them -- emotionally, learning-wise, and physically.
Claudyne: Many people do not understand how to use the slide master. Once they realize they should not make text boxes all over their slides, they get very excited. They begin to realize they will save hours of time as well as have more professional looking slides.
Also, very few people know about custom shows. A custom show is one of the best features in PowerPoint. A presenter can have many versions of the same presentation in one file. This works very well for people who have a high level talk of only 6 slides and then more details with 12 slides. They can have all this in one talk.
I ask everyone to make a one slide executive summary of his or her talk. I give them slide designs to use. At first, everyone is confused. They just want to keep listing data for slide after slide. I tell them that many executives want a one-slide summary and after that may be more open to listening to details. Sometimes we only make the executive summaries and sometimes people read them out loud. The power of hearing a presentation summarized on one slide is wonderful. People get how impactful it is to really summarize a talk.
And here are some typical comments about the class: “ Thank you for the before and after examples of our company presentations. I can use them. I’m going to save hours of time creating my presentations in the future. I may even have time to practice out loud.”
Categories: interviews, powerpoint, training