PowerPoint Blog
Labels: online_presentations, powerpoint, silverlight
With the proliferation of PowerPoint to Flash converters everywhere, you might have wondered why there are almost no PowerPoint to Silverlight converters anywhere. After all, Silverlight is considered by many as Microsoft's response to Adobe's Flash. Add the fact that PowerPoint and Silverlight are both from the Microsoft stable, and the complete absence of PowerPoint to Silverlight converters is like a puzzle with no solution!
Luckily, someone listened and created the first ever PowerPoint to Silverlight converters -- and in this review we are looking at Convexion, a PowerPoint add-in from Electric Rain.
Read the review here...
Categories: online_presentations, powerpoint, silverlight
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. Rashmi blogs at www.rashmisinha.com about social software and running a startup.
In this conversation, Rashmi talks about the new Channels feature on SlideShare.
Geetesh: What exactly are SlideShare Channels, and how can they help target content for an audience?
Rashmi: SlideShare channels are custom branded spaces for businesses and brands. If you have content on SlideShare, this gives you a place to have all your content in one place in with a highly customized look and feel.
Channels are less about targeting and more about branding. The targeting is a core part of SlideShare - you put up a piece of content. It reaches people who are interested in through tags, search, sharing on networks. Channels let you have more control of the exprience people have when they land on your SlideShare page and content.
Geetesh: Can anyone create a Channel? Or is there a process that involves approval?
Rashmi: Channels are for businesses and brands who want to have a rich presence on SlideShare and interact with the community. Right now, you do need to talk to us in order to setup a channel. Each is a custom project based on the needs of the business.
The channels available now range in variety of content and organizations. For example,
We're also rolling out topical Channels that are curated by our content team. For example we have channels on Cloud Computing and Social Media. These types of channels will be curated by our content team. You'll more of them in the coming months as we roll out new topics.
Categories: interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint, slideshare
Labels: design, interviews, powerpoint 
Paul Tumey is the founder and director of Presentation Tree, a 10-year old PowerPoint design company in Seattle, Washington. Paul's background includes notable achievements in graphic design, writing, public speaking, publicity, and marketing consulting. In this conversation, Paul shares some wisdom about creating PowerPoint presentations, and talks about Presentation Tree, how it was founded and the type of work they do.
Read the interview here...
Categories: design, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: brainshark, interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint 
Joe Gustafson, CEO of Brainshark, Inc., founded the company in 1999 to help knowledge experts accelerate the flow of information to their audiences in a highly effective format. Under Joe's leadership, Brainshark has become a leader in on-demand business communications and a successful Software-as-a-Service company, with more than 1,100 world-class customers, including a third of the Fortune 100. Most recently, Joe has led Brainshark to a series of significant company milestones – with Brainshark presentations netting more than 25 million views, and the company doubling its profits in the last year.
Geetesh: In a recent announcement, your company declared that 25 million Brainshark presentations were viewed since the launch of your flagship product, and 1 Brainshark presentation is viewed every 5 seconds by users around the world. Those type of stats would make anyone proud – what else does it mean to you?
Joe: Not only is it a great milestone for our company, but it’s indicative of how multimedia has become a part of the way people want to communicate and share information – in both our business and personal lives, it has become pervasive. And the most popular content of all on the Web is user-generated – not high production value content – but that which engages and is authentic, because it is created by everyday people who have something to say. And I think businesspeople like me look at this trend, or they see what their kids are creating and sharing over the Web and think, how can we leverage the power of this in business? If you make it easy for any businessperson to communicate in more powerful ways, and make it possible for their organizations to manage that process across their enterprise – and, at the same time, make it more enjoyable and convenient for their audiences to experience these messages – they will embrace it. That’s what those numbers mean to me.
Geetesh: With such a successful business model for a product that’s not free, what made you decide to go ahead with myBrainshark, that’s a free albeit less powerful version compared to Brainshark?
Joe: We think we’ve developed the easiest way for any businessperson to communicate using multimedia. But just seeing a Brainshark presentation doesn’t nearly illustrate the possibilities. We want you to try creating one. When you record your very first presentation, and hear your own voice coming back to you over the speakers while you watch it, you’ll see how easy it is to use and how fast it is to create. From that experience, we expect that many users will think about how this could be applicable to their business to get their message out quickly and cost-effectively. Some myBrainshark users will be interested in talking to us about our enterprise offerings – and some won’t; and that’s okay too! We hope they love our free site and tell their friends and colleagues about it.
Our goal with myBrainshark is to get more people exposed to our technology and to how it can be so powerful for business yet be so easy to use. And thousands already “get it” today – more than 1,100 companies whose names you’d recognize already use Brainshark across their organizations and to communicate to global audiences, along with thousands of additional myBrainshark individual users. More than 8 million minutes of content are viewed each month. In an economic climate where everyone is trying to do more with less, it’s silly not to use myBrainshark to tell your story.
Categories: brainshark, interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint
Labels: brainshark, interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint 
Andy Zimmerman, VP of Business Development, is responsible for developing and managing strategic partnerships and programs for Brainshark, the leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution provider for on-demand presentations. Andy played an integral role in the launch of myBrainshark.com in September 2009 and continues to drive the initiative. Prior to Brainshark, Andy launched SaaS offerings for other software providers including Theikos, a leading Salesforce.com partner (acquired by Astadia) and e-billing provider Edocs (now part of Oracle). Andy earned his BA from Brown University and MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
In this conversation, Andy talks about myBrainshark.
Geetesh: Tell us about the raison d'être for myBrainshark – how did it evolve?
Andy: Brainshark has experienced substantial commercial success over the years – serving as a critical communication vehicle for more than 1,000 companies across industries. We conceived of myBrainshark as a way to reach out to a much larger audience of business professionals, enabling individuals to tap into the benefits of our product with absolutely no price barriers.
Registration is simple and free – then it’s an easy process to create and share on-demand multimedia presentations. You simply upload a PowerPoint presentation or other content, and dial a Brainshark-provided number to add your voice narration or upload MP3 audio. If you’d like, you can also add in video, survey questions and attachments to enhance your presentation. Then, it’s time to share it You can send out a link to your target audience, embed the presentation in your webpage or blog, or share it through social media tools including LinkedIn and Twitter. myBrainshark’s reporting capabilities also enable you to see when people are viewing your presentation, how often it has been viewed and even from where in the world it’s being viewed.
myBrainshark offers a way for people to communicate on and off the job – delivering far-reaching messages at no cost, but with maximum impact to promote themselves, promote their products/companies, and share expertise. We’ve been pleased with the site’s reception and with the creative ways people are using myBrainshark to showcase content –creating everything from sales and marketing materials to training content to “talking résumés” to real estate listings to holiday greetings and much more.
Geetesh: How is myBrainshark different from Brainshark, and the other slide sharing sites like SlideShare, SlideBoom, authorSTREAM, etc.?
Andy: Among our key differentiators as compared to slide sharing sites is the ability to easily incorporate phone or MP3 audio – which has been one of Brainshark’s hallmarks throughout the last decade – helping users create high-quality, personalized presentations. Also, our service preserves PowerPoint animations, so it’s very easy to time your audio appropriately with those animations to deliver maximum impact.
Additional distinguishing features include our ability to support various media types – going beyond PowerPoint presentations to also include documents, videos, web pages and audio-only podcasts. In addition, myBrainshark enables you to incorporate interactivity – such as survey questions – within presentations, and see how your audience responds. With these analytic capabilities, you can even view dashboards showing how, when and from where people are engaging with your presentation Furthermore, presentation pages are search engine optimized – helping more people find your content.
Here’s another unique feature – through myBrainshark, users who are experts on business or training topics can apply online to become “Learning Providers.” As such, they can price their content if desired, while site visitors can preview and/or buy it. The premium content available on myBrainshark currently spans topics including leadership, selling skills, compliance and more.
Of course, myBrainshark is also backed by the Brainshark brand and proven infrastructure, meaning it’s built by a company with the highest standards of quality, reliability and security, which has been helping businesses succeed with on-demand presentations for more than a decade. In fact, this makes for a good transition into the other part of your question – concerning our commercial offerings and differences from myBrainshark.
Like our commercial offerings, myBrainshark has a powerful feature set that lets users differentiate and extend the reach of their communications. Use of myBrainshark is completely free, and content created on the site is publicly available – letting users easily communicate with a worldwide audience. Brainshark’s paid offerings, meanwhile, are geared toward organizations (versus individuals) that often need to share private or proprietary content with their own target audiences.
Brainshark’s commercial offerings also include other enhanced functionality for businesses. Through Brainshark, organizations can easily manage and organize content created by any number of users and manage their access permissions. The tracking and reporting capabilities available to our enterprise users also provide much more granular reports and viewing details. In addition, our enterprise editions provide numerous optional features such as learning management, marketing campaign management, content approval, content archiving, and offline viewing – as well the ability to integrate with CRM, LMS and other software applications.
With both Brainshark and myBrainshark, we continue to help businesses and individuals create far-reaching, high-impact communications that resonate in a measurable way with their audience.
Categories: brainshark, interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint 
Shawn Toh 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 2009.
Geetesh: What happens as part of the PowerPoint Heaven eConvention 2009? Tell us more about this whole concept?
Shawn: PowerPoint Heaven eConvention 2009 is an annual online convention where PowerPointers get together to discuss, review and submit their latest PowerPoint works We have receive many great works such as games, artworks and animations from our members and PowerPoint communities in China, and also demos of their upcoming games.
There's also an eCon Award, which is a form of recognition to recognize a contributor for his hard work and effort for the previous year. The winners are determined through public voting.
Geetesh: How is the 2009 event different than the same eConvention in 2008? And what plans do you have for the next similar event?
Shawn: In this year's eConvention, TrainSignal has sponsored us with copies of PowerPoint 2007 Training Packages which we will giveaway as prizes to the winners. In addition, PowerPointers who have submitted their works on eConvention will also get a chance to win the prize. We will be looking for more sponsors on our next eConvention and if you are interested, start submitting your works on PowerPoint Heaven!
Categories: interviews, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint 
Ellen Finkelstein is author of several PowerPoint, Flash, and AutoCAD books -- she has just launched a new campaign that she calls Campaign Against Death by PowerPoint.
In this conversation, Ellen talks more about this campaign.
Geetesh: Tell me what the Campaign Against Death by PowerPoint is, what made you get started with this one, and what you hope you achieve?
Ellen: The Campaign Against Death by PowerPoint is an effort to help presenters present more effectively, so that they meet their audiences’ needs, instead of boring them and being irrelevant. I was working on my white paper--putting my thoughts and knowledge on presenting together with the results of a survey on people’s experiences with Death by PowerPoint. The results of that survey were especially thought-provoking and made me wonder why there are still so many poor presentations being given day after day, when there’s so much good knowledge available about how to present effectively. The survey responders were members of an audience and I realized that many presenters simply don’t know that they’re causing Death by PowerPoint. Without that knowledge, they don’t even look for information on improving their presentation skills.
So, the idea came to empower audiences to offer the white paper to presenters. In my personal experience, negative feedback has been crucial to spurring me on to realize I needed to improve and doing something about it, but no one ever offered me a resource to help. That would have been so appreciated and useful! So I decided that, in addition to offering the white paper – which is like a mini-course in presentation skills – free to anyone who was interested, I would reach out to audiences and suggest to them that they offer the white paper to presenters. It’s a very gentle and constructive way to indicate to a presenter that improvement is needed. That’s how the Campaign Against Death by PowerPoint started.
Geetesh: You do provide a full page invitation along with an ebook at the Campaign Against Death by PowerPoint site – tell us more.
Ellen: Yes, at www.tellnshow.com, anyone can download a one-page invitation to give to a presenter. The invitation invites the presenter to download the free white paper at www.tellnshow.com/whitepaper.html. Any presenter who downloads the white paper will find a great resource with advice on what to avoid and simple steps to take to improve presentations, including content, design, and delivery. You’re right, the white paper is more of an ebook than a white paper—it’s just over 40 pages!
Categories: interviews, powerpoint
Labels: brainshark, online_presentations, powerpoint
Almost everyone these days is comfortable creating a set of slides using PowerPoint, but tell those same users to create online presentations or e-learning content, and you'll find them not too happy! myBrainshark is a free online application that makes it easy to create on-demand online presentations with just your PowerPoint slides and a phone connection to add voice-overs -- it all works very intuitively, and you can create your first online presentation in less than an hour.
So how does myBrainshark fare? Read on to learn more...
Categories: brainshark, online_presentations, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, charting, interviews, powerpoint
Dr. Markus Hannebauer is think-cell’s Managing Director and in-charge of Marketing, Sales, Operations and Finance. Markus has studied computer science and business and holds a doctoral degree in Artificial Intelligence from the Technical University of Berlin.
In this conversation, Markus talks about how think-cell chart can help PowerPoint users create effective charts.
Geetesh: Tell us about think-cell, and your PowerPoint add-in products.
Markus: While working for a well-known consulting firm, my colleague and co-founder Arno Schödl faced a lot of problems in creating data-driven charts using PowerPoint. The consultants often struggled with small details like integrating graphical elements into charts and getting label-placement right. Arno and his colleagues were also frustrated because at that time, there was a dearth of decent tools which would alleviate this daily grunt.
Eventually he asked me if I was interested in building something to make the consultants’ lives easier. Arno is my friend since school and we knew each other very well; besides this, his idea sounded really convincing to me. Thus in the year 2002, think-cell was born.
After carrying out experiments at various partner firms, we launched our first product called think-cell chart. The users were happy with the fact that they could create various PowerPoint charts like Gantt, Marimekko, waterfall and many more within their well-known working environment with minimum effort. What they appreciated most was that after chart creation, it was really easy to edit them and to share them with colleagues and clients. Presently, we are working on a new tool to automate the entire layout of conceptual slides, where the layout is automatically calculated by understanding the user requirements and constraints.
We have come a long way since 2002. An excellent development, support, and sales team is responsible for think-cell’s spectacular growth. Over the last three years we have continuously been featured in Deloitte’s annual Technology Fast 50 ranking, securing the fourth place in 2009 with a revenue growth of 3,154% over five years. Four out of five top consulting firms and a majority of the companies in the Fortune-100 are think-cell’s customers.
This journey has been our reward and the best satisfaction is helping people solve real world issues with our software. think-cell’s users are our greatest assets since their feedback helps us craft our products to a high quality. Arno and I believe that supporting students and non-profit organizations is a good way to give back to our user community. Moreover, this also prepares students for future consulting and related career paths. Licenses of think-cell are available free of charge for students and researchers.
Geetesh: How easy is the think-cell chart product to use, compared to creating the same charts in PowerPoint or Excel alone without using think-cell chart? Explain more.
Markus: The main difference to traditional PowerPoint charting is the user interface and the degree of automation. This is where we put all our efforts, because it makes our software easy to learn and quick to use. A very influential customer once desired some changes in a particular user interface component of think-cell chart. We had to alter and field-test the respective component at-least five times, but finally we achieved the perfect solution. Experience gathered by our users is taken really seriously and we always try to go the extra mile to help them enjoy their work with think-cell.
Claims do not carry much value unless there are measurements to support them. So we conducted case-studies with some of our customers to see if think-cell really improved the users’ PowerPoint experience. A test set containing business data visualization tasks in PowerPoint was supplied to a sample group. Using PowerPoint with templates and macros alone required more than ten hours of work. Less than three hours were invested to finish the same tasks using PowerPoint with think-cell chart.
Consequently, after six months of experimenting, it was confirmed that even PowerPoint veterans achieved efficiency gains by factors of 3 to 5 by using think-cell chart as compared to their chosen existing methods. Today, thousands of users trust our products in their day-to-day work and we intend to continue the tradition.
You can start using think-cell and get proficient using the program even if you are using it for the first time. Making a chart with think-cell chart is like scribbling the same on a piece of paper or whiteboard. The documentation and screen-casts on our web site will help you quickly in getting started with think-cell chart.
I can only invite your readers to try think-cell themselves and see their productivity go up while creating PowerPoint charts. Once at a party in Berlin, Arno came across a consultant who really liked an add-in she was using to create charts in PowerPoint. He let her talk about it for a while and then responded with a smile: "Glad you liked it, that’s us!"
Categories: add-in, charting, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, powerpoint
It's often very time-consuming and expensive to record voice-overs with professionals -- of course you can record your own voice these days but not everyone is entirely audible and has the proper pronunciation, vocal control, and confidence to do that. And trust me -- lots of users want to add high quality narration to their PowerPoint presentations so that these can be shown as a sequential walkthrough without a live presenter. Fortunately, a product that we have reviewed in the past has been updated to make this task automatic, easy, and usable!
Read our review of Speech-Over Professional 4...
Categories: add-in, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, excel, interviews, powerpoint
Aurelian Laic has worked in software development and IT consultancy since 1997 creating many business and enterprise applications. He's been working as consultant for large companies listed in DAX and M-DAX and has been writing articles for various security magazines. He is now the owner of a software company that creates XL-Addin.
In this conversation, Aurelian talks about how XL-Addin can help PowerPoint users.
Geetesh: Tell us about your XL-Addin product and how it works with PowerPoint.
Aurelian: XL-Addin is an Excel add-ins suite designed for business and enterprise use.
All components are designed for business users, not experts or technologists, but the results will look as made by experts. The main purpose of XL-Addin is to improve the productivity by spending less time involved in tasks that could be easy automated.
One component of XL-Addin is Export to PowerPoint, a feature that automates the export of Excel ranges into new or existing PowerPoint presentations. Export to PowerPoint allows user to transform Excel workbooks into professional PowerPoint presentations with progress bars, content slide, navigation etc. using existing presentations or new presentation.
Geetesh: What are the scenarios in which this Excel add-in can be useful to PowerPoint designers -- how does it make their work easy and their workflow faster?
Aurelian: XL-Addin is helpful especially when you regularly have to create or update PowerPoint presentations using data stored in Excel workbooks (financial or budgeting data, monitor HR changes; sales data, project management data).
Normally this operation is done manually, by copying the ranges and charts from Excel and then pasting it to PowerPoint slides. But this operation is time consuming and the quality of the export is poor in many cases.
By using XL-Addin the copy/paste procedure became totally automated and the user can create large presentations in less than a minute. For exporting to PowerPoint, XL-Addin uses a different approach: it saves the ranges/charts as images, process them and then inserts the images into slides. This technique assures a good compression level keeping the quality of the images very high.
Furthermore the user is able to set exactly the format, position and sizes for each exported range. A special feature of PowerPoint exporter allows the user to visually adjust the position and size using a preview of the slide where the export will be done. Anything can be customized: the user can create custom presentations by selecting the slides to be exported with just a few mouse clicks; the slides/page order can be changed very easy, the picture format or sizes and positions for all slides can be adjusted/changed quickly. All settings for export are saved and stored in workbook for later use.
Categories: add-in, excel, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: books, design, interviews, powerpoint 
Dr. Carmen Taran's presentations and workshops help business professionals to use communication and presentation skills to increase revenue, train or motivate others, and overall to stand out from too much sameness in the industry. A published author, Carmen is frequently invited as a keynote speaker at various conferences. In this interview, she talks about her book, shares ideas about creating better presentations, and then discusses imagination and sincerity.
Read the interview here...
Categories: books, design, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: outline, powerpoint, powerpoint_2007, text, tutorials
I already covered this concept using PowerPoint 2003, and now will be exploring the relationship between text boxes and text placeholders in PowerPoint 2007. But maybe someone just said stop, and asked me these questions: Aren't text boxes and text placeholders the same? Are they really different? And why should I bother even if they are different?
All these are valid questions, and the answers to them form one of the most important foundations in learning to create more structured presentations.
Read more here...
Categories: outline, powerpoint, powerpoint_2007, text, tutorials
Labels: outline, powerpoint, powerpoint_2003, text, tutorials
Aren't text boxes and text placeholders the same? Are they really different? And why should I bother even if they are different? All these are valid questions, and the answers to them form one of the most important foundations in learning to create more structured presentations.
In PowerPoint slides, text can be found in many places: text placeholders, text boxes, tables, charts, Notes pane, and more places. However, the text within a text placeholder has characteristics that set it a class apart from all other text. So what exactly is a text placeholder, and how is it different from text within a text box or anywhere else?
Learn more here...
Categories: outline, powerpoint, powerpoint_2003, text, tutorials
Labels: outline, powerpoint, powerpoint_2003, tutorials
In the PowerPoint 2003 Interface page, I already showed you the different parts of the program interface -- in this page, we'll focus on one particular area of the interface: the Slides/Outline pane, and it is normally placed on the left side of the interface. The Slides tab is normally active, but to get to the Outline tab, all you need to do is select the second tab shown in the pane.
Learn more here...
Categories: outline, powerpoint, powerpoint_2003, tutorials
Labels: animation, powerpoint, techniques
Ellen Finkelstein is the author of 101 Advanced Techniques Every PowerPoint User Should Know. This book contains several, cool PowerPoint tips, and one of them is excerpted on Indezine as an exclusive. Recently, it occurred to Ellen that the words "slide show" came about because early presentations looked like they were sliding as the slides were moved on and off the screen. Here's a technique that makes your presentation look as if it's sliding.
Learn more here...
Categories: animation, powerpoint, techniques
Labels: opinion, powerpoint
"Oh, no, not again! Don’t tell me I have to sit through another boring meeting staring at line after line of text on a wall," she mumbled. "Why can’t these people learn how to make their PowerPoint presentations more interesting?" We've all wondered the same thing, but monotonously bullet-pointed, text-filled slides continue to be the norm in most presentation venues. Be different: Show, don't tell.
This article by Robert Lane and Dr. Stephen Kosslyn provides you with better options that will allow you to dump so much text! Learn more here...
Categories: opinion, powerpoint
Labels: brainshark, interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint 
Irwin Hipsman is the director of customer community at Brainshark, a leader in on-demand presentations. He has more than 20 years of experience in the cable, conferencing and collaboration industries, and has worked with communications technologies including with multi-point video conferencing; audio, video and Web conferencing; and distance learning via satellite. Prior to Brainshark, Irwin was involved in the management of public access cable television stations.
In this conversation, Irwin talks about the Brainshark Insurance Network.
Geetesh: Tell us about the Brainshark Insurance Network, how it is set up, and whom it is geared to?
Irwin: Sure. We’re very excited to have recently launched the Brainshark Insurance Network. It’s a central site for life insurance carriers and their distribution partners, such as brokerages, and enables everyone to tap into the benefits of Brainshark on-demand presentations. Using the site, life insurance carriers can equip their distribution channels with pre-approved multimedia presentations, which the distributors then use for internal product education, as well as their own sales and marketing outreach.
As background on Brainshark, our technology enables businesspeople to easily create voice-enhanced presentations that are available online, on demand. You can easily turn content like PowerPoint presentations, marketing collateral, and Web pages into interactive Flash-based presentations, incorporating animation, video, survey and quiz questions, and more. Because your audience can view the presentation at any time and have the full benefit of both seeing and hearing your message, it leads to greater reach and knowledge retention.
Now, with the Brainshark Insurance Network, life insurance carriers have a trusted network for communicating effectively and productively with their distribution channels via Brainshark presentations. From within their own Brainshark application sites, carriers can easily publish selected presentations to the Network and update them anytime, so keeping content fresh is a cinch. In addition, by letting their distributors access and send out content from the Brainshark Insurance Network, life insurance carriers can rest easy that their offerings are being communicated in a consistent and high-impact way.
Now if you’re a distributor, you can access the Network, and view and send Brainshark presentations for free. No more combing through e-mails, scouring individual portals and searching back through newsletters for your carriers’ content – everything you need from all the carriers you work with is right here, in this central, secure Network. For a monthly fee, you can also get access to advanced features, including the ability to personalize carrier content – adding in an intro and closing that includes your own voice, as well as a photo or logo to convey the value of your brand. Additional options include using Brainshark’s authoring tools to create your own presentations in a private site, and accessing best practice tutorials from Brainshark. Check out this overview presentation which goes into more detail.
Life insurance carriers and their distribution partners can also take advantage of Brainshark’s tracking capabilities. Carriers can see, for instance, which of their presentations are being used and which distributors are using them – letting them know how content is resonating. Distributors get even more granular info and receive instant notification of individual viewing activity for free – showing who watched a presentation, how much content was consumed, how any questions were answered and more – enabling them to prioritize follow-up. Distributors can also provide direct feedback to the carriers in the form of comments and ratings of content.
We’ve seen a lot of enthusiasm around the Network and already have an impressive roster of life insurance carriers participating, including American General Life, American National Insurance, Jackson National Life, Lincoln Benefit Life, Liberty National Life and United American Insurance, with others joining weekly. There’s a lot of traction on the distributor side as well – with more than 100 brokerages participating.
Geetesh: So in effect, this is a subset of the entire Brainshark content selected and geared towards a vertical industry?
Irwin: That’s a good question – the answer is yes, and much more. The Brainshark Insurance Network is an extension of what we’re doing today and what life insurers have been doing with Brainshark for several years now – using Brainshark-delivered presentations to train and educate distributors and to help them sell using multimedia presentations to tell a compelling and consistent story. And now with some unique capabilities of this new Network, participating carriers are able to increase their reach to distribution partners they haven’t done business with before and better enable distributors by providing them with the technology and content to do their own marketing and selling. In addition, both carriers and their distributors are able to measure the impact of their communications more than ever before.
Categories: brainshark, interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint
Labels: copyrights, interviews, photography, powerpoint 
A refugee from 18 years in corporate management and marketing, Rikk Flohr 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.
In this conversation, Rikk talks about photographs and copyrights.
Geetesh: Many people use all sorts of photos in PowerPoint – and most of them assume that any visuals they find from image searches on Google can be used in their PowerPoint presentations. How are they wrong, and what are the easiest alternative options available to them.
Rikk: I think this leads back to an erroneous notion that items found on the internet are either public domain, due to the magnanimous intentions of the creator, or free for the grabbing due to their public posting. It is a little like the mentality of the proponents of unauthorized wireless internet access. If a person leaves their wireless access point unprotected, they are, by default, inviting people to use it. Only people who hide their SSID, for example, do not wish to share their connection. The same could be said of internet images. By posting them, there is an assumption that free use is implied by virtue of their being visible in the first place.
It seems there is a generational effect at work here. The expectation of intellectual property seems to be proportional to the age of the both the artist and the consumer of the artist’s fruits. Younger people, especially those growing up with the omnipresence of computers in their lives, have a lower expectation of their work being an item of intellectual value. The perception grows as the audience gets younger that work is not longer fine art, but a commodity, or at worst, a freebie. One only has to look at the recent trends in the music and movie industries to see how this applies. Even my own children do not always understand my rabid defense of my own intellectual property. After all, isn’t information supposed to be free? Is that not the modern battle cry?
“What’s the harm?” they say of someone who is using my image on their website, with or without attribution. The harm for me is that my livelihood, and by extension theirs, is directly related to the marketability of my intellectual properties-including the photographs I have taken. If I don’t defend every instance of improper use, I can’t, in the eyes of US law defend an egregious and financially substantial theft.
Unless there is express permission by the images’ creator and/or copyright holder, there is generally no acceptable use of that image. A few exceptions exist but for what we are talking about today, it is the rule. That having been said, there are places where public-domain images exist. There are also places where non-public-domain images are available for use. Creative Commons licensing became popular as a way to grant usage of images to people needing an economical source of quality images. Photo-sharing sites like Flickr offer the ability to couple images displayed to a license that grants usage under conditions for certain considerations such as attribution, linking, and other considerations.
In addition to a wealth of Creative Commons and similarly “no-cost” image licensing solutions, there is the world of the Stock Image House. Stock image prices have fallen through the floor in the past ten years. An image that cost $200.00 USD five scant years ago can be had for as little as $15.00 USD today. That puts a lot of quality photography and illustration work within the reach of many budgets. Images have become a commodity and the lower prices have put them in a place where people should seriously consider foregoing the risk of legal action by purchasing a low-cost stock image. As long as there are images that a 'right-click' can capture, people will consider them free for the taking. No matter how cheap they might become from legitimate sources, the lure of the free will entice some.
Geetesh: If people started clicking their own images with digital cameras, would everything be OK – or are there still some copyright infringement issues they should be concerned about?
Rikk: The ability to easily capture images via the Digital Camera and to process them via Image Editing Software should have improved the availability of quality, pertinent images. It doesn’t always.
First, there is the problem of competency. The reason photographers and illustrators exist is that they have a skill set which allows them to create an end product superior to the layman’s. The advances in technology in digital cameras have gone a long way toward helping a novice produce a better image. The elaborate concepts of lighting, composition and attention to detail mean that a professional photograph is, at best, a hit-and-miss proposition for a novice armed with the latest extraordinary technology. Give the pro-photographer and the novice the same camera and ask them to photograph the identical subject and the difference is obvious.
Quality aside, there are a few issues of which the digital camera user must be aware. Property and people are protected somewhat by current privacy laws. In general, you are safe to shoot images just about anywhere on public property. This doesn’t mean you are free from hassle-but rather that you are within your constitutional rights. That also doesn’t mean that you won’t be accosted by police, corporate security, and angry individuals. In a world containing the threat of terrorism, you can be viewed as suspicious anywhere you photograph. You must be prepared to be detained by authorities, explain yourself, and understand your rights.
In the corporate world, things are different. Once you leave the domain of public property, you are at the mercy, more-or-less, of the persons responsible for order and security. Many companies have policies (written and unofficial) regarding people photographing buildings, technologies or employees. On the recent PowerPoint Live 2009 Digital Photography Field Trip, I, as the tour organizer spent a significant portion of the trip running interference. Four times during the two hour expedition, I was forced to explain what we were doing to hotel security, bank security guards, Atlanta’s MARTA police and people who asked what we were up to. Content which might appear in a digital photograph may be sensitive or even protected.
As a photographer, I carry model and property releases for items which I may decide to photograph with the intent of using at a later date. Without those releases, I open myself to liability should I click a digital image of a person or a property. If recognizable people appear in your image, you will need a release to use the photo. If a trademarked or copyrighted item appears in your photograph, you need a release to use the photo. Think about a Coke™ bottle. The logo is trademarked. The shape of the bottle is even protected. You can get out of paying usage fees to a photographer or a stock house by taking your own image but you still don’t have the rights to use that image containing the trademarked bottle and logo without Coke’s permission-in most cases.
The same holds true for works of art. Consider the Eiffel Tower. How many millions of photographs exist of the iconic Paris landmark? Did you know that, according to the trade publications I read, that you can use any image taken of the tower for any purpose-but only in daylight! After dark, the company which lights the tower holds the rights to usage of any image captured. In the daylight anyone can see the tower. At night, only the company lighting the tower, can provide you with an image by virtue of their ‘creative’ act of lighting. It doesn’t mean you can’t take an image of the tower at night. Use that image in a work for profit item and you may be subject to legal action however.
You can photograph people and places and in certain instances use the resulting images. There are many exceptions to image use including, educational use, public-good, editorial and many others. The answer to just about every copyright question is ‘It depends.’ Anyone sitting in Alvin Trusty’s PowerPoint Live Copyright session would have heard those two words repeatedly. It Depends!
Bottom line: you are going to have a generally less-expensive path to an image by taking it yourself. Realize that you must have some sort of clearing process for what appears in your image. It may require a model release or a property release to completely clear your image for use. You may be in a situation where usage is considered fair without a release but make certain you are before using that image.
Categories: copyrights, interviews, photography, powerpoint
Labels: captivate, powerpoint
In an earlier post last week, I discussed Adobe Captivate's views and compared them to PowerPoint's deafult views. I also explained about the Storyboard View. In this post, I'll look at Captivate's Edit view, which in many ways is similar to PowerPoint's Normal view.
If you are not already in Edit view within Captivate, choose the View drop-down in the toolbar, and select Edit View as shown in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1: Choose Edit View in Adobe Captivate
Edit View has a tri-pane view that's similar to PowerPoint's three panes. These are how they compare:
Figure 2 shows you Captivate's Edit View. At the top of the Slide area, you'll notice an option called Edit PPT.
Figure 2: Edit View in Adobe Captivate
If you don't see an Edit PPT option, it means that the Adobe Captivate project you are working on did not originate from a PowerPoint presentation.
The Edit PPT option is actually more than one option -- click it to the menu that you can see in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Edit PPT Option in Adobe Captivate
So what do these different options mean? To find out check this space next week!
Categories: captivate, powerpoint
Labels: animation, interviews, powerpoint 
Glen Millar 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: You experiment a lot with animation in PowerPoint – in your opinion, where is the thin line that divides animation that is sufficient and enhancing from one that is too much and distracting. Is there a rule of the thumb that can act as a guideline, and what are your opinions?
Glen: Geetesh, that’s a really good question! There is a thin line between what is effective and what is gratuitous, or distracting. When I animate a presentation, I ask myself 3 questions:
Geetesh: Tell us about animation builds when successive animations play one after the other. How effective are such builds – please give examples and share your thoughts.
Glen: Successive builds are critically important! I’ve recently been quite concerned about the lack of continuity in our presentations and our graphics. Let me demonstrate with an example. The following two graphics are available as download-able clip art within PowerPoint.
Individually, they are great photos and display very good concepts. However, when I put them side-by-side I realized they contain the same people, but in different clothes. Now, professional movie makers employ continuity folks- people who check every feature of a shot to make sure it is consistent. You don’t want an actor walking down a road to suddenly appear in with a new shirt. Now, while this example is dramatic, it illustrates how important consistency is across a movie.
So, how do you get real consistency? Well, I love breaking stories into logical components, and a classic example is some experimental work I have done recently on time-lapse.
The following is some work to encourage people to read a book. I’ve added just three frames from the 43 frame sequence.
If you look carefully, you will see someone (in this case, my son Chris) turning a book. What a powerful way to tell a story! Every second, a new image fades in over the previous one. You can see him turn the pages! While the output image has been modified in a graphic program, it is so powerful!
You can download the presentation from here...
Categories: animation, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: powerpoint, training
I often do PowerPoint training sessions in India for corporates -- and yes, that information is nowhere on this site! To make amends for that omission, I am going to speak about my training sessions in this and some future posts.
First, let me talk about my two-day training session on PowerPoint 2007. This is my most successful course and it is geared towards an audience that creates PowerPoint presentations in a typical office environment. On each of the days, I do 4 sessions that talk about PowerPoint usage and creation. The entire course comprises of interactive exercises -- and the goal is to help you create better presentations in less time. Along the way, you learn PowerPoint best practices and options that are buried within the PowerPoint interface. For those of you who have just moved to PowerPoint 2007, it's a great way to learn all the new options available in this version of the program.
If you would like to learn more and want details regarding the curriculum and pricing, please feel free to get in touch through the feedback form on this site.
Picture Courtesy: Rikk Flohr -- taken during PowerPoint Live in Atlanta, October 2009
Categories: powerpoint, training
Labels: powerpoint, seo 
Peggy Duncan has a way with words, and that influences how she expresses herself. At the recently concluded PowerPoint Live conference in Atlanta, she went out of her way sharing all her secrets with everyone -- her topic was Shameless Self Promotion. And I guess there's no one better qualified than Peggy to do a session on a topic of that sort -- she's a rare combination of being humble and confident at the same time. She's not scared of speaking her thoughts aloud, and she shares her fears too.
What did I learn from Peggy's session? Her session was about promoting yourself in the online world by promoting what you know in order to boost your organic search engine rankings. Although much of the content in session was familiar, I still felt like I was hearing something altogether new in her session. Why was that? Partly because it's the way in which Peggy makes all that stuff sound: fun and important! She also links all those concepts together and is motivating enough for the audience to want to do something immediately. She also speaks about how these concepts helped her land and stay on the first page of major search engines and how that led to international media coverage and new business. Her command over intuitiveness and timing is perfect, she springs surprises often, and she seems simple, human, and successful at the same time.
Most importantly, I liked her do-it-now message a lot!
Here's a subset of the slides from her Shameless Self Promotion session.
Categories: powerpoint, seo
Labels: captivate, powerpoint
Let me imagine that you started your e Learning project with a PowerPoint presentation -- and then you imported that presentation into Adobe Captivate. Worth noting here that Captivate 4 includes this great PowerPoint roundtrip workflow that I discussed in an earlier blog post.
OK -- now that you have imported your PowerPoint presentation into Captivate, it's time to get working. First of all, let me tell you that at least two of the three views in Captivate look and work exactly like PowerPoint's own views although they are called different names.
Now about the Storyboard view in Captivate 4 -- you can see it in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1: Captivate's Storyboard View
In this view, you can drag and reorder slides just like you can within PowerPoint -- you can also right-click any of the slides to be presented with a menu that provides some familiar options (see Figure 2) such as Hide Slide, Cut, Copy, Paste, etc. In addition, there are some options here that PowerPoint does not provide (and I wish it did!) -- this includes the Lock Slides and Properties options.
Figure 2: Slide Right-Click Options
Now let me choose the Properties option in the right-click menu. This brings up this cool Properties dialog box that seems to include everything except the kitchen sink! Look at Figure 3, and you'll see that there's an awful lot you can do with your slides in Captivate.
Figure 3: Slide Properties in Adobe Captivate
Here are some of the options available to you within the Properties dialog box:
I haven't covered all the options in the Properties dialog box -- but as you can see, these are quite extensive and powerful.
You can get a free trial copy of Adobe Captivate here...
Categories: captivate, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, powerpoint, slideshare Peggy Duncan is an international conference presenter, personal productivity expert, consultant, and author. She’s also the founder of The Digital Breakthroughs Institute, an Atlanta, Georgia (USA) training center whose mission is to improve technology and productivity skills of small business owners and professionals. Media appearances include CNN, Today, O-The Oprah Magazine, Smart Money, Fortune Small Business, Black Enterprise, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many more. Links to free articles and her award-winning technology blog are at www.PeggyDuncan.com.
In this discussion, Peggy discusses her Shameless Self Promotion concept, and how it has a PowerPoint angle.
Geetesh: Tell us more about what you mean by Shameless Self Promotion, and how it helps?
Peggy: At first glance, you might think I mean boasting to everyone who will listen about how wonderful you think you are. But I'm referring to promoting what you know, and doing it online, to boost your search engine rankings.
This whole notion started when I continued to get emails and calls from journalists wanting to interview me and public relations agencies wanting to hire me for their clients as a product spokesperson. They all mentioned finding me in Internet searches for my expertise (personal productivity expert, time management expert, email overload expert). Hmmm. I hadn’t realized that I was on the first page of major search engines.
When I started to investigate to see what was showing up, I realized that my how-to tips were getting indexed. I started writing and publishing more, using good keywords that people would actually type into the search engine.
I had no idea of what search engine optimization or SEO was, but I knew that whatever I was doing was working. I’m now sharing my do-it-yourself tactics in seminars, Webinars, and an ebook. I totally enjoy discussing how all this happened, and audiences love it that I offer ways to improve their SEO without spending one, red cent.
Geetesh: I remember you recommending the upload of PowerPoint presentations to sites such as SlideShare as a way to increase popularity on search engines -- can you tell us more about this concept?
Peggy: Popular Websites such as Slideshare.net show up well in search engines because of the number of incoming and outgoing links. When you post your content there, it gets indexed quickly by search engines because they like fresh, topical content. I recommend that people take articles they’re giving away and turn them into PowerPoint slides, tagging them with appropriate keywords. Before you know it, you’ll start to get rankings for that topic.
Plus, when visitors view your slideshow, they’ll see a link to your Website or blog for more information.
There are many do-it-yourself ways to boost your search engine rankings. For the same reasons as mentioned above, you should also have a blog, online press releases, and full and active social media profiles. (It’s not important anymore to publish your content to the thousands of article sites you’ve probably heard of.)
Categories: interviews, powerpoint, slideshare
Labels: delivery, powerpoint
As you can make out from the title of this post, this is just one possible formula to creating a successful presentation. There are literally tons of other formulas, and to be honest not all formulas work for one presenter. Situations change, the audiences may be different, or perhaps the concept of your presentation may require another approach. Having said that, let me share one of my successful presentation formulas with you:
Categories: delivery, powerpoint
Labels: giveaway, powerpoint, raptivity_presenter
It's always good to associate a face and a voice with an e-mail address! So it was great meeting Nachiket Khare of Harbinger Systems in Atlanta last week during the fabulous PowerPoint Live conference. Nachiket is involved with Harbinger's PowerPoint add-in products such as YawnBuster and Raptivity Presenter, and I have been in touch with him for a while now. I'll probably want to do a small conversation with Nachiket in a future blog post, but there's some great news that I can share with you right away!
Harbinger has tied up with Indezine to give away five completely free copies of their Raptivity Presenter product. Yes, there's nothing here to read between the lines, all you need to do is fill up this form and tell us what you think about Indezine, Raptivity Presenter, or even PowerPoint! And before you know, you might have won yourself a full copy of Raptivity Presenter. Do this quick, we have these five copies that we want to give away soon, and someone else might snap them up if you are not real quick!
I would also like to thank Amitabh Ramani of Harbinger for facilitating this giveaway.
Categories: giveaway, powerpoint, raptivity_presenter
Labels: brainshark, interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint 
Joe Gustafson, CEO of Brainshark, Inc., founded the company in 1999 to help knowledge experts accelerate the flow of information to their audiences in a highly effective format. He is an experienced leader in the technology-based training industry, and prior to Brainshark, was the founder and CEO of Relational Courseware, Inc. (acquired by Gartner). Under Joe's leadership, Brainshark has become a leader in on-demand business communications and a successful Software-as-a-Service company, with more than 1,000 world-class customers, including a third of the Fortune 100. In this interview, Joe talks about the new myBrainshark site.
Read the interview here...
Categories: brainshark, interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint
Labels: online_presentations, powerpoint, presentation_samples, slideshare
SlideShare's annual presentation contest continues showcasing changes in PowerPoint design -- and also design in relation to SlideShare's social media evolution. The winner for this year's World’s Best Presentation Contest is a presentation called Healthcare Napkins All, created by Dan Roam with Dr. Tony Jones.
You can see all the winning entries on the SlideShare site.
Finalists were chosen by a panel of judges comprising Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco, Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures, and David Armano, founding member of Dachis group and author of Logic + Emotion.
Also, read SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha's thoughts on this contest in this Indezine exclusive interview.
Categories: online_presentations, powerpoint, presentation_samples, slideshare
Labels: interviews, powerpoint, slide_management
Liber Rodriguez-Florez works as the Sales Director of Novatrox AB where he is responsible for the technical sales towards international customers. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but is resident in Sweden and holds a Master of Science in Engineering Physics. 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 the new 2.9 version of Novatrox's Slide Executive product.
Geetesh: The new version 2.9 of Slide Executive Desktop includes a convenient search option inside PowerPoint 2007 – can you tell us more about this feature?
Liber: Anyone who has ever tried to find a slide among previous presentations, knows that it is a very time consuming task, if even possible. The Slide Executive Add-In gives you an advanced search tool right at your fingertips from within PowerPoint. This means it is easy for you to find and re-use slides you have made before. Better so, you can add slide(s) right from the search result into your presentation.
Furthermore imagine the possibilities if you are a group of people sharing presentations on a shared drive, i.e. a slide library at your fingertips. Well used this could be a huge boost of productivity for your work group.
Geetesh: What is your other, new favorite feature or improvement in this release?
Liber: Between the search relevancy and the greatly improved indexing speed I will have to choose the greatly improved speed of indexing. You can now index huge amounts of presentations in a relatively short time. In one of our tests Slide Executive Desktop indexed over 100 presentations in 20 minutes. And this was on a 3 year old portable…
Categories: interviews, powerpoint, slide_management
Labels: interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint, presentation_samples, 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. 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: Three presentation contests in as many years – how has SlideShare’s World Best Presentation Contest evolved over the years?
Rashmi: The first year, it was a straightforward contest - to identify great presentations. But we realized that there were different categories of presentations and introduced categories (Tech, Education, About Me, Business, Creative / Offbeat), the second time. This time, we have new judges - people who are social media experts and understand the power of presentations as web media. And that is the focus of the contest this time: Presentations as social media.
Geetesh: Tell me about the winner?
Rashmi: The winning presentation is one of those that that makes an impact on you straight away. Health care is such a complex issue. Its really hard to get one's head around it. Dan Roam has done a remarkable job of summarizing how health care works in America in 57 slides. Its quite impressive.
I wish there would be a series of such presentations explaining complex topics in simple terms.
Geetesh: Tell us more about the Best Acrobat Presentation subset that’s being organized as part of this contest.
Rashmi: Adobe is helping make the contest happen on a much larger scale than before. We have been able to organize it on a bigger scale, offer some great prizes for SlideShare users - all thanks to Adobe. Adobe recently introduce Acrobat 9, a new platform for creating presentations, and we wanted SlideShare users to have a chance to explore this new platform.
See Also: The World's Best Presentation Contest 2008: Conversation with Rashmi Sinha
Categories: interviews, online_presentations, powerpoint, presentation_samples, slideshare
Labels: cartoons, clip_media, interviews, powerpoint
Joel Mishon is the co-founder and co-director of CartoonStock Ltd. Prior to starting the business more than 10 years ago he was a freelance cartoonist in the UK producing work for national titles such as Private Eye, The Times, Readers Digest and The Spectator. He lives and works in Bath, UK. In this conversation, Joel discusses the CartoonStock web site.
Geetesh: Tell us more about CartoonStock, and how the media provided by your site can be used in PowerPoint presentations.
Joel: CartoonStock is the world's largest cartoon library that allows instant licensing and downloading of cartoons. We represent more than 500 professional cartoonists and animators from around the world, and license their work to everyone from major international publishers and advertisers to private individuals and organizations for education and presentation use. We work with artists whose work appears in well known titles such as Reader's Digest, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and The Times so presentation clients wishing to utilize our collection have access to some of the best cartoons and cartoonists in the world at fees that reflect the more modest usage. To license use of a top quality cartoon for a presentations for up to a year costs just USD20. There are more than 150,000 cartoons to chose from and they are all searchable and downloadable instantly at CartoonStock Ltd.
Cartoon used with permission from: CartoonStock.com
CartoonStock started as a company specialising in print cartoons for publishing and presentation use. However as the demand for more multimedia content has increased, CartoonStock now offers professional animations as well. This means that clients can enliven their presentations not just with still images but with full professional animations. Before the service existed there was no easy, reasonably priced, legal way for clients giving presentations to gain access to this sort of material so we are creating a new market, and hopefully providing a very useful service.
All our images are high resolution JPEG files and animation files can be downloaded at the resolution and in the format you choose, so both can be slotted into a PowerPoint presentation in seconds.
Geetesh: About your foray into cartoon animations – how is it a win-win situation for users and creators of these animations?
Joel: Users gain from access to very good quality animations for presentations. This is the sort of high quality content they wouldn't have had access to previously. Creating animations is a very expensive a time consuming process that requires a great deal of talent. It would be very rare that someone could afford to commission new work from an animator, but for a small fee they can now legally used appropriate work.
Cartoon used with permission from: CartoonStock.com
New technology has allowed animators to create more content more quickly than they did before but it remains a time consuming and expensive process and the new work that is being creating previously had no obvious outlet and had been hard to monetize. Animators might display it for free on sites dedicated to animation, or might wait for the work to be picked up by one major media client, but with a service like CartoonStock's they can now make lots of smaller sales rather than a) only allowing viewing or b) waiting for one broadcast client.
Categories: cartoons, clip_media, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, powerpoint, slide_management
If you work with tons of PowerPoint slides from clients, reviews, and samples like I do, you may soon land yourself into a slide nightmare. Slide nightmare is a state of slides (and mind) where you know that you do have the particular slide you want, but can't locate the presentation deck that contains that slide! It's time to invest in a slide management program like Slide Executive. In the past, I have reviewed previous versions of this program -- and this new review will focus on improvements and new features since the core program is relatively the same.
Read the review here...
Categories: add-in, powerpoint, slide_management
Labels: powerpoint, presentation_samples, shapes
Concept Slides are ready-made slides that you can use to create opening and closing slides, or any other slide to illustrate a concept, relationship, or idea. Most of these are sets of ready-made shapes created in PowerPoint or imported from another source. All these concept designs are owned by Indezine.com.
This first-in-this-series sample comprises a six segment circle -- you can change the individual segments as well as the thin do-nut shaped circle around the segments using fill techniques for PowerPoint 2007 and PowerPoint 2003.
Download this free concept slide here...
Categories: shapes, powerpoint, presentation_samples
Labels: graphics, powerpoint, smartdraw
I found this cool video clip on creating simple graphics really quick using SmartDraw -- these can be then used in your PowerPoint slides. Watch Daniel Hoffman take you through this walkthrough.
Categories: graphics, powerpoint, smartdraw
Labels: powerpoint, shapes, tutorials
Since there is no easy, intuitive way to create semi-circles in PowerPoint 2003, I already showed you three ways to create them! And now here's one more way to do just that but this might be the easiest of them all. Thanks to PowerPoint MVP Echo Swinford who sent me these steps and allowed me to put them up on this site.
Learn here...
Categories: powerpoint, shapes, tutorials
Labels: books, legal, powerpoint 
This exclusive Indezine excerpt is from PowerPoint for Court, a book that has been the definitive manual for preparing and presenting digital material in a court of law since 2002. Used by universities, attorneys and government agencies throughout the world, PowerPoint for Court has now been updated in 2009 for use with the latest version of PowerPoint.
Here are couple of excerpts, reproduced here with permission from Herbert Rubinstein, author of the book. Read here...
Categories: books, legal, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, powerpoint
Many PowerPoint users have a fascination with Flash but still prefer PowerPoint's ease of use and logical workflows rather than dabbling with Flash that has a longer learning curve compared to PowerPoint's almost zero learning curve. Yet these same users like to insert Flash files into their PowerPoints, and sometimes they look for a way to export Flash files they have inserted within the PowerPoint presentations. However, that's not always easy since changes made by Microsoft to file formats from the PowerPoint 2003's PPT to PowerPoint 2007's PPTX have made everything uncertain. A new add-in for PowerPoint tries to overcome some of these issues -- does it succeed?
Read on to learn more...
Categories: add-in, powerpoint
Labels: powerpoint, shapes, tutorials
An Indezine reader asked me if he could create three circles next to each other, and make sure that they looked like this: The first circle should be filled-in full (entirely), the second circle should be half full, and the third and last circle should have no fill (empty). The first and third circles are easy -- all you need to do is ensure that the first circle has both an outline and a solid fill, and that the third circle has only an outline with no fill. The second circle though is an easy challenge that I'll teach you create in this one page tutorial using PowerPoint 2003.
Learn to create a half circle in PowerPoint 2003...
Categories: powerpoint, shapes, tutorials
Labels: powerpoint, shapes, tutorials
PowerPoint 2003 and previous versions don't allow you to draw a semi-circle shape although that's not an issue within PowerPoint 2007. In this tutorial, I'll show you three ways in which you can add a semi-circle to your PowerPoint 2003 slide -- whichever way you choose, make sure you save one semi-circle so that you can copy-paste and reuse it again whenever required.
Learn here...
Categories: powerpoint, shapes, tutorials
Labels: powerpoint, tables, tutorials
Tables can be animated within PowerPoint -- but either the entire table can be animated -- or nothing! Yes, that's a case of extremes -- either you have it all or don't have it. To get over this problem, the workaround is to ungroup the table so that your table gets converted to a collection of shapes -- and then you can animate every individual shape as you want.
Learn how you can ungroup tables in PowerPoint 2003 here...
Categories: powerpoint, tables, tutorials
Labels: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
Anthony Dunleavy is CEO and founder of Atrixware LLC, a New Jersey company that develops e-learning software tools and learning management systems used all over the world since 1997. In this conversation, Anthony discusses their PowerPoint Flash Quiz Maker product.
Geetesh: Tell us more about the your PowerPoint Quiz Maker product, and the new improvements in the latest update.
Anthony: First, we redesigned the interface to look more like PowerPoint 2007 – with the Ribbon Interface toolbar along the top. We then implemented improved workflow and question banking ability by integrating the same workflow and question management abilities as we offer in our more expensive Easy Quiz Maker product (things like project based workflow, spellchecking, easy copy/paste of entire projects, quizzes, or groups of questions, assign images to questions, and a bunch more useful features). We changed the Publish-to-PowerPoint feature to use pre-designed PowerPoint Templates. PowerPoint Quiz Maker comes with a handful, but users can make their own (inside of PowerPoint) that work with PowerPoint Quiz Maker. Lastly, we added the ability to publish the quizzes to a web document so you can place it up on your website, and it will collect the student responses, email you the results, and even store results (this feature requires a subscription to our popular Quiz Management Service).
Geetesh: Most PowerPoint quizzes are done using VBA or through inserting Flash quizzes – your approach is different. Can you tell me more about the benefits of this approach?
Anthony: VBA doesn’t really work well for quizzes because it does not work in the PowerPoint player, and also does not carry over when PowerPoint presentations are converted into Flash (which many people do). While there are some nice software tools out there that let you insert a quiz question into PowerPoint, they are typically more expensive than our PowerPoint Quiz Maker, and users will need to use that tool to make the modifications to the question(s) in regard to layout, whereas with PowerPoint Quiz Maker, the questions are in fact PowerPoint Slides, so you can use PowerPoint to modify them, which for many people, is much easier since they already know how to work with items on a slide inside PowerPoint.
See Also: Atrixware PowerPoint Quiz Maker 2009: The Indezine Review
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 v4 release of Instant Effects Presenter.
Geetesh: Tell us more about the new Presenter v4.
Don: With this new release of Presenter, we’re offering even greater control of the key elements needed to produce fantastic speaker support and event graphics.
We’ve continued to build on our hallmark capability of providing modern broadcast looks, complete with custom branding through dynamic logos, branded transitions, and full motion backgrounds.
With version 4, we also offer the ability to include dual low-latency live video feeds, use multiple projectors to produce high-resolution output at reasonable cost, and we allow your presentations to be rendered in stunning stereoscopic 3D, just like the new feature films being released today.
By tightly integrating functions that are normally handled by expensive Audio/Visual equipment, we both lower the cost of producing an event while simultaneously increasing the creative options. This leads to a better visual result, while keeping tight reins on your production budget.
Presenter remains an open and extensible system. In a world where almost all presentations look the same, Presenter offers almost unlimited creative freedom to help your presentations get noticed, stand out, and be remembered. Frankly, it’s quite thrilling to see what others have done with Presenter when it comes to high-class, exciting output.
Geetesh: What are S3D Presenter, Event Presenter, and Master Presenter – are these extras or are they part of the Presenter v4 product?
Don: Presenter has always been based on a real time 3D rendering system, similar to those used in advanced computer games or for movie special effects. With Release 4, Presenter now consists of a family of four software products, all built on the same core foundation.
With OfficeFX Presenter, we use the core functionality to provide fresh ways to render your PowerPoint content. This allows your presentations to benefit from the visual expressiveness common in broadcast television graphics while still offering the benefits that come from using PowerPoint to enter and edit your content and control your presentation flow.
Event Presenter extends the feature set of OfficeFX Presenter. It uses the power of our real time rendering system to add support for dual HD video streams, including support for live, low-latency video input in HDMI, HD-SDI, or component form. It also adds the ability to “edge blend” sub-images so that multiple lower resolution projectors can be used to produce very high-resolution displays.
S3D Presenter builds on OfficeFX Presenter in a different direction. It includes support for rendering separate left and right views to produce high resolution, full color stereoscopic 3D output for display on a broad range of S3D projectors and monitors. Since we still support the use of 2D assets (images, text, video), S3D Presenter provides an interesting way to give new life to current content. And by including animating 3D models along with stereo 3D images and video, you can produce state-of-the-art results while still employing PowerPoint workflow – complete with the ability to make changes right up to the last minute.
Master Presenter combines the features of OfficeFX Presenter, Event Presenter, and S3D Presenter in a single, comprehensive package. Because different users have different needs, the products are sold separately, but you can easily upgrade with no need to alter any of your existing presentations.
See Also: Instant Effects Presenter v3.5: Conversation with Don Brittain
Categories: add-in, interviews, officefx, powerpoint
Labels: powerpoint, templates
PowerPoint has been around for nearly two and a half decades now, and quite possibly many viewers are tired of seeing the same PowerPoint designs. Styles come and go with unfailing regularity, and there's always the human urge to experiment and play with something different. This human urge extends to PowerPoint as well -- and PowerPoint designers are always on the look out for something more contemporary. Enter Motion Templates from PresentationPro, a set of designs that include animated elements that attract attention while still being subtle enough to not make the presentations loud. How can these be used, and what is our opinion -- read more to learn.
Read the review here...
Categories: powerpoint, templates
Labels: add-in, powerpoint
While PowerPoint is equipped with more options that what any person can use in their lifetime, there's always some features that are missing -- or are available in some deep dungeon within PowerPoint that's not visible to mere mortals. I recently came across this cool add-in for PowerPoint called OfficeOne ProTools that creates some new options within PowerPoint. Let's see how it fares.
Read the review here...
Categories: add-in, powerpoint
Labels: digital_asset_management, interviews, powerpoint 
Steffen Setzer is Director of Marketing at Canto. Canto is a leading supplier ofdigital asset management solutions and has been dedicated to helpingcustomers fully utilize their digital assets since 1990. In this interview, Steffen discusses the new Canto Cumulus 8, 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.
Geetesh: Tell us more about Canto Cumulus 8 and the new improvements.
Steffen: Cumulus 8 was the most significant architecture update ever for the product line. Just on the subject of performance alone, users are seeing exponential increases. The user interface was overhauled to provide a more efficient, friendly experience for users, and we also added user commenting on assets, statistics and much more. Among the new add-on products is a module that enables users to catalog new assets via email, which is a real benefit for those who work remotely, or even those who use smart phones to capture photos, like Realtors or insurance adjusters. Overall, I'd say Cumulus 8 has been an extremely popular release for customers.
See more here...
Geetesh: There's no new feature for PowerPoint users in Cumulus 8 -- but I'm sure they can benefit from the overall improvements to the program? Tell us more.
Steffen: Actually, because catalog performance in Cumulus 8 is far faster than ever, those who catalog PowerPoint presentations that are divided into individual asset records per slide, can see fantastic speed gains. In addition, we have a new built-in Image Editor that enables users to convert previews into brand new assets. So, users can use this utility to create web ready JPGs or other images from their PowerPoint slides. Or, they can even have Cumulus create watermarked variants of their presentations, saved as images or PDFs, even over the Web.
Categories: digital_asset_management, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, powerpoint
Indezine is pleased to share with you information about YawnBuster. YawnBuster is an interactive PowerPoint® add-in by Harbinger Knoweldge Products that brings alive your slides with group activities such as audience polls, games, group exercises and competitions. And best of all, you can add all this stuff on your slides without leaving the familiar PowerPoint environment.
We are giving away 5 copies of YawnBuster -- all you need to do is fill in this form. Winners will be announced on the Indezine site, and individual winners will receive their licenses by e-mail!
Categories: add-in, powerpoint
Labels: elearning, powerpoint
We have been using the Adobe eLearning Suite extensively lately -- trying out the individual products within the suite, using them within a PowerPoint centric workfklow, and creating tutorials using these concepts on this site.
Many Indezine visitors and subscribers would like to know how they can get the product, and try it out before deciding whether they want to buy it or not -- and for a product that costs northwards of $2000 for the full version, that's a very wise approach indeed.
You first need to visit this page on the Adobe site: Adobe eLearning Suite -- this will bring you to a page that looks like what you can see in the screenshot below:
The screenshot above is smaller in size than the actual web page you will get to -- but the most interesting options are the three listed on the top left -- and we explain them below:
That's for now -- in a subsequent post, we'll explore more facets of this suite of programs.
Categories: elearning, powerpoint
Labels: online_presentations, powerpoint, slideshare
SlideShare announced the 3rd of their successful presentation contest series -- this one is called the World's Best Presentation Contest '09. 
You need to submit your presentation as part of this contest that runs from August 3rd to September 8th, 2009. There are three contest judges: Padmasree Warrior is CTO of Cisco, David Armano of the popular Logic + Emotion blog, and Guy Kawasaki, a well known author. There are exciting prizes to be won, including an Apple MacBook Pro, an Amazon Kindle DX, and an Apple iPhone 3GS. There are also 5 category prizes comprising copies of Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro software.
More info here...
Categories: online_presentations, slideshare, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, powerpoint
There are no two opinions about this: your audience will be more engaged if your PowerPoint presentation has some sort of relevant interactivity that adds extra value to the content. Whatever you may want to show: complex information, business visuals, or pictures -- if it is presented in an interactive, non-linear style, it has the potential to make your audience more engrossed in your presentation. The product I am reviewing, Raptivity Presenter lets you create impressive interactions right within PowerPoint. Let's evaluate how it fares.
Read the review here...
Categories: add-in, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, powerpoint
We all use search engines like Google. Some of us use the advanced search options to fine-tune our results like searching for only PowerPoint presentations rather than all web page results. Although that's a great option, the results are all text, and hardly intuitive for PowerPoint users who are used to seeing thumbnail sized representations of their slides. Enter a new slide search engine that indexes slides online, provides search results with thumbnail slide views, and shows these to you. And all this for free!
Read the review here...
Categories: add-in, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, movies, powerpoint
There are many times when I want to convert my PowerPoint presentations to video clips. This could be because I want to upload these video clips to YouTube and other video sharing sites, or maybe I want to create a DVD from my PowerPoint presentation. Whatever my motive, it's never an uncomplicated task to convert PowerPoint slides to a video format. Acoolsoft PPT2Video Converter claims to make this task simple and easy -- in this review, we will explore how it fares.
Read the review here...
Categories: add-in, movies, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, interviews, powerpoint 
Vikas Joshi founded the Harbinger Group in 1990, where he serves as the Chairman and Managing Director. His leadership at Harbinger has resulted in innovations in interactivity software. Vikas has his own blog that focuses on Interactivity. One of Vikas' patent-pending inventions led to Raptivity, a rapid interactivity builder, which makes e-learning interactive, engaging and fun. Harbinger’s other products includes YawnBuster, TeemingPod, Elicitus and Offline Content Player. Their newest offering is called Raptivity Presenter, which is the subject of this conversation.
Geetesh: How did Raptivity Presenter evolve and how it can help everyday PowerPoint users make their slides more interesting and captivating?
Vikas: Good presenters are good dialog creators. Millions of sales people, consultants, speakers, government officials, association members and managers aspire to create winning presentations everyday. They understand that a two-way dialogue with the audience is pivotal to keep the engagement going. However, they also understand it is not the easiest thing to do.
This problem of building interactivity quickly and easily is not unique to presenters. Professionals in e-learning have faced it for a while now, and have found a solution too. Their solution consists of using ready-made interaction models and customizing them quickly using a tool like Raptivity. As the use of Raptivity spread, we found some of our users building interactivity for their presentations using Raptivity! With this we realized it was time we broadened the scope of Raptivity beyond e-learning.
Presenters’ needs are unique in many ways. We talked to a lot of presenters and determined their pain points. They need to gain and retain attention, cut to the chase quickly, tell compelling stories and show diagrams that help visualize. They need tight integration with PowerPoint, so that they don’t have to leave the familiar PowerPoint work environment. They need the convenience of a single .PPT file containing all interactivity, so that there is no need to handle Flash files separately.
Piece by piece, we built to all these requirements, and the result is Raptivity Presenter, which introduces the phenomenon of interactivity to PowerPoint users. It makes it easy for PowerPoint users to include Flash interactivity in their presentations without the need of any Flash programming. With interactivity, now PowerPoint users can really think beyond graphics and animations. They can now jazz up their slides, get audience engagement, simplify complex ideas, display slide information selectively and even change the flow of the presentation as per the need. Raptivity Presenter can be useful for every person in the world who wants to transform his/her presentation into an interactive experience.
That is how we adapted the successful and proven paradigm of rapid interactivity to the world of presentations.
Geetesh: Tell us more about Raptivity Presenter and who can use it.
Vikas: Visualize this. You want your show to build up a fairly complex diagram part-by-part, and after it is built up you want to refer to any part and drill down to additional information – all on one slide. This is how you do it. While inside PowerPoint, select a ‘diagram buildup’ interaction from Raptivity Presenter, select the picture, indicate the parts you wish to build up in sequence, type in narration, record your voice if you like, and save the interactivity on your slide. Run the presentation, and you get a step by step diagram built up, with voiceover if you like, and with detailed drilldown information accessible by rolling your mouse over any part of the diagram.
Let’s do another example. You have a product line with four different models, and you are helping a customer make the right selection. It is time to use the ‘comparison chart’ interaction model. Again, the process is very simple. Select the interaction, enter product names and features or benefits, and what you get is a Flash-based comparison chart that is interactive.
Raptivity Presenter provides a library of ready pre-built interactions that can help in getting active audience participation. The interactions can be created using a very simple interface. The user doesn’t need to know VBA programming or any other programming language. With its easy to use and quick to learn interface, Raptivity Presenter becomes an ideal tool for a busy presenter.
Raptivity Presenter can be used for making presentations for various functions such as sales, marketing, consulting, change management, finance, human resources and training across verticals.
Categories: add-in, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, powerpoint, youtube
Most of us are familar with PowerPoint to Flash conversion -- this happens automatically on slide sharing sites like Slideshare, Slideboom, Authorstream, etc. and there are tons of add-ins available that do the same locally on your computer. However, converting PowerPoint to a video format and sharing it on a video site like YouTube has never been as easy as the PowerPoint to Flash option. The product I am reviewing today addresses this area and also converts your PowerPoint presentations to the MP4 format so that you can upload it to YouTube or watch it on your iPod. And did I mention that the product is free!
Read the review here...
Categories: add-in, powerpoint, youtube
Labels: captivate, powerpoint
I have been playing with the Adobe E-Learning Suite for several days now, and the Adobe Captivate 4 program bundled as part of the Suite continues impressing me with its logical workflows and options. In this post, I'll focus on Captivate's new Roundtrip PowerPoint workflow feature.
You start Captivate normally, and choose the "From MS PowerPoint" option within the "Create Project" area of the startup screen, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Start an Adobe Captivate project with a PowerPoint presentation
This brings up an Open dialog box from where you can navigate to, and choose any PowerPoint presentation. Both the new PPTX and older PPT file formats are supported. If you choose a PPTX file, Captivate launches PowerPoint behind the scenes although you won't see the PowerPoint interface while it imports all the slides.
At this point of time, you can select individual slides from the presentation that you want to import, or just import all slides (see Figure 2). One important option here is the "Linked" checkbox. If you enable this option, your Captivate project will be dynamically linked to your original PowerPoint file. Any changes made to the original PowerPoint file will reflect in your Captivate project.
Figure 2: Dynamically linked PowerPoint files in Captivate
Thereafter click the OK button, and Captivate will bring in all your PowerPoint slides into a new project (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: Imported PowerPoint slides in Captivate
Note: Remember that the dynamically linked PowerPoint slides options (also known as Roundtrip PowerPoint Workflow) only works with PPTX files, and Captivate does not import any PowerPoint animations within the new project.
Categories: captivate, powerpoint
Labels: christian, powerpoint, templates
PowerPoint presentations or other projected content in churches don't always follow the rules laid down for corporate presentations. Although the presentation backgrounds used in churches should also be non distracting from the message, you can still use a busier background with flowers, skies, people, religious symbols, and other nature elements. The new Christian backgrounds and worship themes from PowerFinish aim to fulfill that requirement with their graphic styles and contemporary Christian concepts. You can use all of the designs in this product for PowerPoint presentations or within any other worship or church presentation software.
Read the review here...
Categories: christian, powerpoint, templates
Labels: office_mac, powerpoint
Microsoft's new Service Pack 2 update for Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac has ushered in improvements that are a pleasant surprise. Topping the list is the option to add motion path animations in PowerPoint that have been available to Windows users of PowerPoint since PowerPoint 2002 (XP)! All this while, Mac versions of PowerPoint have been able to view motion path animations added by their Windows-based colleagues but they have never been able to add or edit them. This changes everything -- look at Figure 1 below to see the new motion path animations option in PowerPoint 2008.
Figure 1: Adding Motion Path Animations in PowerPoint 2008 for Mac
I still don't see the preset motion path options that are available to Windows users of PowerPoint, but that may be a blessing in disguise?
Other improvements in SP2 include the ability to now choose your own default theme including custom themes. Also, when you double-click in any part of a slide, you can start typing. Animated GIFs work as expected (learn more here about the earlier problems), and dynamic guides work better! The last option is still not available to Windows users of PowerPoint.
Categories: office_mac, powerpoint
Labels: add-in, powerpoint
Many of us need to create non-linear PowerPoint presentations where all slides are interlinked to each other using hyperlinks. Think of creating kiosk style PowerPoints or just something that makes a PowerPoint presentation function as a web page. The most important part of such a presentation is to decide how many levels deep you want your slide hierarchies to go, and then creating the actual structure of slides that contain all your content. Something like this is prone to error, even if you do all the planning in the world -- and an automated solution that can help you with something like this is a welcome feature. Enter the InterActiv™ Presentation Wizard, a PowerPoint add-in that does just something of this sort!
Read on to learn more...
Categories: add-in, powerpoint
Labels: legal, opinion, powerpoint
A lot is at stake—power, money, reputation, future plans, justice. You need to win this case. Your presentation materials surely will play an important role in helping the judge and jury experience the sights, sounds, and details of the case … or not. The choice is up to you, says one tech-savvy attorney. It all depends upon whether you are willing to push PowerPoint beyond its normal boundaries to maximize its interactive and persuasive potential. 
This article by Robert Lane and Bruce A. Olson provides a better idea of using PowerPoint in court.
Read this now...
Categories: legal, opinion, powerpoint
Labels: google, powerpoint, tutorials
Google is a web search engine which indexes all sorts of information on the World Wide Web. Search results on Google typically contain results that consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. What many users don't know is that Google allows you to restrict your search for a particular file type, such as a PowerPoint presentation! In this tutorial, I'll show you how you can search for PowerPoint presentations only using Google's Advanced Search option.
Learn more now...
Categories: google, powerpoint, tutorials
Labels: add-in, powerpoint
Out of the box, Microsoft builds little or no integration or relationships within PowerPoint to other Microsoft Office applications. To provide a quick example, PowerPoint users have nothing close to the mail merge options in Word or Outlook that can access data from an Excel or database source. And that's sort of sad, since PowerPoint is one application that can act as a glue to all sorts of content -- from text to pictures, and movies to charts! Our review product, PPT Merge does try to cover this vacuum -- does it succeed?
Read more to find out...
Categories: add-in, powerpoint
Labels: powerpoint, tutorials
Why would anyone want to password protect their PowerPoint presentations? There are many reasons, and here are some of them. A presentation with confidential content is safe if it is password protected -- nobody without access to the password can open it. Also, the password protected presentation is more safer to share -- you can provide the password to the person whom you are sharing the presentation with. In addition to providing a password-to-open option, PowerPoint provides a less restrictive password-to-modify option. So your presentation can be opened by anybody, but can't be modified - this makes your content non editable.
Learn more now...
Categories: powerpoint, tutorials
Labels: design, powerpoint, shapes
Continuing my discussion on circles (see Circles I and Circles II), this time I look at creating circles in an application outside PowerPoint.
Specifically, my office team was helping me with a review of Artlandia's new SymmetryWorks plug-in for Adobe Illustrator that lets me create organic looking patterns from all shapes. Since we are biased towards circles at this point of time, we decided to create a repeating circular pattern using SymmetryWorks. These patterns were intended as a starting point for PowerPoint backgrounds.
Look at these patterns here -- they are all uploaded to my Flickr account so feel free to click on these thumbnails to see larger previews:
Since this was a fun project, we also made a presentation-full-of-circles with the first pattern -- we uploaded this to SlideBoom so that we could embed it within this post:
So what do I do with circles next? Wait and watch -- or send me your thoughts and feedback...
Categories: design, powerpoint, shapes
Labels: design, photoshop, powerpoint, shapes
I shared a few "circle" thoughts with you in the first post in this series: Design Shapes: The Circle, Part I -- and now it's time to look at some more circles. What could be better than an entire book on circles, and my favorite is a book that's entirely filled with color pictures of any sort of circular pattern that you might have seen!
The book is called Circles and Dots: Communicating with Pattern, and it contains 250 pages worth of circular inspirations for you to feast on.
This is a book that will inspire every individual in a way that's different for each reader. Some people may get ideas about doing crafts and hobbies, others may launch their PowerPoint or Photoshop, and start creating circles -- and others might just start doodling. But each of them will have their own circle of inspiration.
So how does it inspire me? I love to see how color and texture can make so much of a difference between one circle and the other -- how light alters a circular concept in a photograph, and how many circles we have around us all the time that we are not even aware of!
Categories: design, photoshop, powerpoint, shapes
Labels: design, powerpoint, shapes
In this new Design Shape series of posts, I'll look at concepts that are not limited to PowerPoint alone, although you can expect me to relate them to PowerPoint in some way or the other because as you must have guessed it, I am in a circle that revolves around PowerPoint!
Talking about circles, that's also the shape that I talk about in this post. There are many reasons why I like circles:
Of course, there's so much more that I can tell about them -- but for now, let's just leave them here as far their virtues are concerned.
I searched a few visuals depicting circles, and here's what I found on Shutterstock, a well known stock photo site:
Picture Courtesy: Shutterstock
So will the visuals of circular concepts shown above work in PowerPoint? Will you have to adapt or edit them? And would you do those edits in PowerPoint, or another program? That's a lot of questions, even if I am prone to thinking aloud! But that's also a direction for future posts in this series -- watch this space!
Categories: design, powerpoint, shapes
Labels: online_presentations, powerpoint, slideshare, templates
At last count, I found that there were at least 3 PowerPoint presentation contests happening online.
Picture Courtesy: Shutterstock
On the top of my list is Microsoft's own PowerPoint Template Contest called Create a Spark. The rules are simple enough:
The second contest from SlideBoom is called the SlideBoom Presentation Contest 2009. They have fewer rules, but that's not always an advantage:
The third contest is from SlideShare, and is called the Tell A Story Contest. They seem to be offering the best prizes! The rules are:
So if you have created a cool presentation that you can share, there are at least three places that they can be uploaded to -- wish you all the best!
Categories: online_presentations, powerpoint, slideshare, templates
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: design, opinion, powerpoint
A prospective customer has invited you to showcase your company's products and services, and the stakes are high. This contract could be huge. Your marketing department and executives have been fretting over the necessary PowerPoint slides for weeks. Every word has to be perfect. Every slide must be in exactly the right order. Your mission is to lay down a faultlessly planned and executed sales strategy that persuades this customer to buy exclusively from you ... but you are worried! 
This article by Robert Lane and Andre Vlcek explains how you can sell better using PowerPoint.
Read this now...
Categories: design, opinion, powerpoint
Labels: animation, powerpoint, tutorials
Many times, users just remove an animation and apply another one instead. The need to change an animation may arise for several reasons: You realize that another animation type would work better in a given slide, or you want to make all animations across the entire presentation consistent, or you want to use a more subtle or exciting animation. Whatever your need may be, you need to remove an animation, and then add another one -- PowerPoint's Change animation option makes this a one-click step.
Learn more now...
Categories: animation, powerpoint, tutorials
Labels: powerpoint, slideshare
SlideShare announced the very interesting Tell A Story in 30 Slides contest that invites participants to submit a story about themselves, their travels, or something they love. Just tell it with words and pictures and in 30 slides.
Everyone who enters the contest gets a free Fuze Meeting account ($270 value). Learn more about how to enter contest here...
Jonathan Boutelle of SlideShare adds: "We launched a new contest yesterday that will be of interest to your readers. The theme is "tell a story", and the top prize is $5000. The judges include Om Malik, Pete Cashmere (Mashable), Ann Handley, Don Tapscott, and Tony Hsieh (Zappos). There's already some really nice entries up, and I think the theme is going to elicit some very interesting work this time (PowerPoint as narrative device).
Categories: powerpoint, slideshare
Labels: powerpoint, training
Need to learn how to create outstanding presentations, from start to finish? Ellen Finkelstein is offering a 3-day, intensive workshop that covers content, design, and delivery.
You’ll get personal attention in a small group. If you live in the U.S. or Canada, I suggest that you check it out here...
Categories: powerpoint, training
Labels: animation, powerpoint, tutorials
As part of the animation tutorials series, I have showed you how you can add an animation to any slide object in PowerPoint. However, there's more to animating text than just adding an animation since PowerPoint provides specialized options for animating paragraphs and bulleted text. In this tutorial we will learn how you can use these special options to animate text sequentially by words, by letters, and by paragraph levels.
Learn more now...
Categories: animation, powerpoint, tutorials
Labels: animation, powerpoint, tutorials
In PowerPoint you can animate any slide object, but some objects have extra animation options. These objects include charts and bulleted text, and in this tutorial we will work with chart animation in PowerPoint. Since animation is largely unchanged in PowerPoint versions 2002 through 2007, we'll cover all those versions in this tutorial.
Learn more here...
Categories: animation, powerpoint, tutorials
Labels: microsoft_office, office_online, powerpoint
Julie Terberg who is a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP has been busy doing this cool video with Microsoft Office Online as part of their new Office Intervention series. In this particular video, Julie shows a law student how she can effectively use PowerPoint effectively to create a compelling presentation.
Yes, the finished video looks amazing -- so I embedded it here on this blog post!
Categories: microsoft_office, office_online, powerpoint
Labels: online_presentations, powerpoint, slideboom
SlideBoom, a presentation sharing site from the makers of iSpring announced the SlideBoom World Presentation Contest. This contest, open to everyone requires participants to submit any PowerPoint presentation (or another compatible file format) on the SlideBoom site. All participants need to be members of the site, and basic membership is free.
Applicants can submit their works from 18 May to 21 June inclusive. Winners will be announced on 30 June 2009.
The contest winners will be judged by a panel of 5 presentation professionals including yours truly.
More info can be found on the contest site...
Categories: online_presentations, powerpoint, slideboom
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: add-in, microsoft_office, nxpowerlite, powerpoint
NXPowerLite 4 is the new version of a well known file optimizing product that reduces the size of Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and JPEG images. The files remain in their original format, with almost no loss of quality. Also NXPowerLite works integrated within Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express or Windows Mail. In this case, NXPowerLite will automatically optimize email attachments as they are sent and the file recipients don't need NXPowerLite to open or edit the attachments.
Read the review here...
Categories: add-in, microsoft_office, nxpowerlite, powerpoint
Labels: authorstream, online_presentations, opinion, powerpoint, slideboom, slideshare
You can easily boost your business and your SEO / SEM efforts with the help of an old friend: PowerPoint. All you need to do is pick a topic that you want to relate your business to, prepare a presentation on that topic and then publish it on presentation plattforms like SlideShare, Slide.com, etc. You can then bookmark your online content and enrich it with keywords and descriptions to further promote your content and boost your SEO / SEM efforts.
Jörg Hahn tells you more in this Indezine exclusive article...
Categories: authorstream, online_presentations, opinion, powerpoint, slideboom, slideshare
Labels: elearning, online_presentations, powerpoint
Adobe is a name well known to anyone who works with graphics and media content -- and they bundle several of their award winning programs in suites that contain a set of applications geared towards a specific use. Adobe already has such suites for the Creative and Production categories -- and their newest Suite offering is squarely aimed for the burgeoning eLearning market. The main products in the Adobe eLearning Suite are Captivate, Acrobat, and Presenter. These work directly with Microsoft PowerPoint whereas other products in the Adobe eLearning Suite such as Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Soundbooth, etc aid in making the Suite sweeter and more integrated.
In this review, we'll take a closer look at the Adobe eLearning Suite.
Categories: elearning, online_presentations, powerpoint
Labels: photos, powerpoint
Engaging or boring? What effect do your presentation slides have on your audiences? Can images help? That's the topic of this webinar organized by ReadyImages. Julie Terberg of Terberg Design hosts this online seminar that will help increase the effectiveness of your visual communications. Julie will provide guidance on the proper selection and use of images, and she’ll offer real-world design tips for using PowerPoint.
Attendees will gain next-level design skills and the opportunity to receive 100 complimentary images from ReadyImages.
You can sign up here...
Categories: powerpoint, photos
Labels: add-in, online_presentations, powerpoint, powerpoint_flash
Adobe Presenter 7 is a PowerPoint add-in that allows you to create high-impact Adobe Flash presentations and eLearning courses from PowerPoint. In addition, you can also create high fidelity PDFs using this add-in. You can add narration, edit audio, add multimedia capture video, animations, interactivity, quizzes, surveys, and software simulations to eLearning courses created using Adobe Presenter -- all inside PowerPoint. Output can be customized as presentations published to Flash, PDF or Adobe Connect Server.
Read the Indezine review here...
Categories: add-in, online_presentations, powerpoint, powerpoint_flash
Labels: microsoft_office, online_presentations, powerpoint, slideshare
SlideShare, an online presentation sharing site now ups the ante by supporting more file formats including:
And all sorts of PDFs and PowerPoint presentations can still be upoaded -- a few months ago, SlideShare added support for Apple Keynote presentations as well.
All such documents can be easily embedded in WordPress and other blog platforms, as well as on LinkedIn networks.
Categories: microsoft_office, online_presentations, powerpoint, slideshare
Labels: add-in, crystalgraphics, powerpoint
Imagine a presentation with moving rather than static backgrounds. Will it add even more value? It all depends on many factors -- whether the movement is subtle enough, or just a haphazard jumble of disparate elements and colors. What you use is certainly a decision left to you, but in this review we are going to show you how these moving backgrounds can be added to PowerPoint presentations with a third party add-in called PowerPlugs: Video Backgrounds from CrystalGraphics.
Read the review here...
Categories: add-in, crystalgraphics, powerpoint
Labels: photos, powerpoint
If you use many images in your PowerPoint slides, you will find this webinar interesting. Copyright Clearance Center is hosting a webinar on copyright and the licensing of images next Wednesday, the 29th of April, 2009. The webinar will include a demo of ReadyImages.
You can sign up here...
Categories: powerpoint, photos
Labels: powerpoint, templates
A PowerPoint presentation is a great platform -- it lets you create a framework for the content you are presenting. However, since most PowerPoint presentations look so similar and static, there's been a move to use animated, yet subtle backgrounds for slides. Now I am not a very big fan of adding animated backgrounds, yet I do believe that if you use the right animated loop, you can achieve a different, contemporary look. Again, everything works best in moderation.
The product I am reviewing is looping video backgrounds from PowerFinish. These video backgrounds can be directly used in your presentations, or can be used through third party video engines that we explore later in this review.
Read the review here...
Categories: powerpoint, templates
Labels: powerpoint
Vnunet reported concerns about a flaw in Microsoft PowerPoint that may be exploited by malware writers.
The post adds that:
"This PowerPoint exploit is in the wild right now," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "It comes in the form of a presentation showing naked Japanese girls bathing in rockpools, or as an IQ test, to lure the user in. We're hoping Microsoft will patch this soon."
Categories: powerpoint
Labels: design, opinion, powerpoint
This article by Robert Lane and Andre Vlcek explains why including pictures in presentations is a simple and powerful way of expanding your expressive potential as a speaker. Pictures communicate at levels beyond the descriptive possibilities of words and bathe the brain in much desired visual stimulation. At the same time, not all pictures are created equally.
Choosing the right images, and using them in the right ways, can greatly impact your effectiveness.
Read this now...
Categories: design, opinion, powerpoint
Labels: authorstream, online_presentations, powerpoint
authorSTREAM, a leading slide sharing site launched their Premium services that offers many options over and above the free services. The free services are still available, and are unnchanged with the launch of the new Premium services.
Premium services are available in two flavors:
Jagdeep Singh Pannu of authorSTREAM sent me this link that explains the differences between all their services
Comparison of Free, Pro and Plus Premium Memberships
And here's an embedded presentation that explains more.
Categories: authorstream, online_presentations, powerpoint
Labels: positioning, powerpoint, tutorials
Before starting this tutorial, make sure you have a group of slide objects. Thereafter, follow these steps to ungroup objects in PowerPoint 2002 and 2003.
Read more here...
Categories: positioning, powerpoint, tutorials
Labels: memorabilia, powerpoint
Spring cleaning my computer hard disk is something that cannot get over in just one season -- the time factor aside, I need to decide what to do with all the stuff I save. A case in point is this small walkthrough of PowerPoint 3 that I made years ago using TechSmith's Camtasia Studio 2. It was a retrospective thing when I made it, it's even more of a retrospective now! So I uploaded this to the Community Clips section of Microsoft's Office Online, and embedded it on this page in Indezine's Memorabilia section.
Note: Now I need to do something similar for PowerPoint 1 using the old Powerbook Mac that allows me use that program -- now that's even more retro!
OK -- this way to the PowerPoint 3 retro...
Categories: memorabilia, powerpoint
Labels: freepath, playlists, powerpoint
We all live in a world where media assaults at every angle -- be it in the form of television and online video, or even in the form of digicam pictures and music tracks. And of course, this can be extended to something much more huge by the plethora of file formats inhabiting everybody's computer hard disks in the form of ubiquitous PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, Excel sheets, Adobe PDFs, Flash movies, and more.
So how does one create logical collections of such photos, document files, music tracks, and video files in one place, and will this collection be easy to maintain and share? That's a challenge we all face each day. Take an iPod for example -- it comes with iTunes that allows you to make some sense of your huge music collection by creating manual and intelligent playlists so that they can be played in an organized, arranged, and presequenced manner. Freepath, the product which I am reviewing tackles many of these challenges by extending the playlist metaphor to all your document and media formats, including all the formats discussed in the preceding paragraph. In addition, it also tackles QuickTime movies, YouTube videos, and live websites.
Read the Indezine review of Freepath 2.0 here...
Categories: freepath, playlists, powerpoint
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: positioning, powerpoint, tutorials
When you have many (or more than one) slide objects on a slide that you want to manipulate in the same way, you might want to consider grouping them. Grouping can be helpful in the several scenarios: You want to animate several slide objects at the same time as a single object, or you have too many objects on the slide, and want them all grouped so that you don't have to select them individually all the time, or maybe you just like to have all objects on your slide organized.
Learn more now...
Categories: positioning, powerpoint, tutorials
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: animation, powerpoint, tutorials
You need to re-order your animations mainly because you might have more than one animated object on a slide, and you discover that some re-sequencing of animations as they happen in relation to each other may provide a better result. For something of this sort, PowerPoint provides a Re-order option that lets you play with the sequence of the animation.
Learn more now...
Categories: animation, powerpoint, tutorials
Labels: animation, powerpoint, tutorials
Before you start with removing an animation, there is something you need to decide:
Learn more here...
Categories: animation, powerpoint, tutorials
Labels: animation, powerpoint, tutorials
When you add animation to any slide object, and set the animation event for it to occur, the next thing to do is set the speed of the animation. In this tutorial, I explore speed presets in PowerPoint that determine how long an animation takes to complete.
Learn more now...
Categories: animation, powerpoint, tutorials
Labels: animation, photos, powerpoint, presentation_samples, tutorials
Learn how to animate a series of headshots -- very useful for an opening slide sequence. You can also use the same technique for product shots or vacation pictures -- just substitute the headshots!
Learn more now...
Categories: animation, photos, powerpoint, presentation_samples, tutorials
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
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