A PowerPoint Blog

Effective Animation: Conversation with Glen Millar

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:19:00 +0000

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:

What kind of presentation am I building?

If it is a kiosk presentation, I give myself more licence to be more �animated�- that is, a kiosk presentation is the animated interface between the story and the audience. So, I have more scope to be a bit exciting.
If it is a live presentation (which is the majority of what I do) I will subdue the animations somewhat so they don�t compete with the presenter. The live speaker is the animated interface between the presentation and the audience. The animations must not distract from the presenter.

What is the practical level of animating? I first work out my storyboard and what elements demand being animated. For example, a complex concept can be broken into sub-parts and each sub-part animated in. My audience can then discover each component, without being distracted by all of the elements at once.

What is the artistic level of animation? Once my presentation is fully animated, I then look for artistic opportunities. For example, I have a bunch of cogs spinning on the slide. I use an Emphasis animation, Spin to show motion or effort. When I want to remove them, if the story does not dictate how to do it, I go for an artistic effect. An example would be a slow fade out. I could choose a different type, but not a new animation. That would not be supported by my story.

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

PowerPoint Training Sessions: Two Day PowerPoint 2007 Course

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:32:00 +0000

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

PowerPoint Live Sessions: Peggy Says Do It Now!

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:58:00 +0000

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.

Shameless Self Promotion: Do It Yourself PR presented by personal productivity expert, Peggy Duncan

View more presentations from Peggy Duncan.

Categories: powerpoint, seo

Reframe For Mac: The Indezine Review

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 06:46:00 +0000

Let us imagine that you have some video that you want to show within a PowerPoint presentation -- and the format is not something PowerPoint can accept. Looking at another example, what do you do if you want to create some video for display on a web site or mobile applications. I won't go into technical terms like frame rates or aspect ratios that video geeks use all the time -- but I do agree that there's still the need to convert videos between formats and other definitions all the time. Luckily, Reframe from Miraizon is one application that keeps things simple for me.

Read the review here...

Categories: movies, sounds

Adobe Captivate's Storyboard View: Similarity for PowerPoint Users

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:56:00 +0000

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.

Captivate's Storyboard view is similar to PowerPoint's Slide Sorter view
Captivate's Edit view is roughly the same as PowerPoint's Normal view, and I'll cover this in a future post.
Captivate does have a third view called Branching that I'll discuss some other time -- and of course PowerPoint also has another view called Slide Show that well, just plays all the slides full-screen.

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:

Label: You can change the name of your slide.
Display Time: Set the slide display time.
Transition: Not half as many transitions as within PowerPoint -- but the simple ones are covered.
Quality: Set the image quality -- important here since Captivate outputs to Flash and you'll want to create files that have a smaller output size.
Hide Slide and Lock Slide: Mean just what they say!

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

Shameless Self Promotion: Conversation with Peggy Duncan

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:52:00 +0000

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

PowerPoint Live 2009: Conversation with Rick Altman

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:41:00 +0000

Rick Altman is a presentation consultant based out of Pleasanton, CA. Rick is well known as the host of the annual PowerPoint Live User Conference and has a strong sense of the needs of the presentation community. In this conversation, Rick discussed the recently-completed conference that was held in Atlanta, October 2009 and the big news he made for 2010.

Geetesh: Seven conferences in four cities -- how has the journey been, and tell us more about the just concluded PowerPoint Live conference in Atlanta.

Rick: The journey has been almost magical. I have been organizing user conferences similar to this one for 20 years, and I have never met a community of professionals so willing to meet, interact, and connect in such meaningful ways.

The 2009 conference was comprised of over 2/3 first-timers, but by the middle of Day Two, you would think you were attending a 20-year reunion. It was as if they had known each other for years. I'm proud to be the one who has created this opportunity, but I take credit for none of the magic that we saw in Atlanta. The patrons get all of the props for creating an extraordinary atmosphere and environment in which to learn, share, and bond.

Geetesh: The next year's conference moves back to San Diego with a new name -- what does this change of name mean for the attendees?

Rick: Our debut of the Presentation Summit in 2010 does not signal our intention to change our content; it reflects a metamorphosis that has already taken place. I think back to our first year in 2003 -- we were just all about PowerPoint. But since then, our offerings have been much more broad, and becoming moreso each year. Now our seminars focus on crafting strong messages, telling impactful stories that resonate with emotion, designing presentation content that focuses on the audience's needs, and designing slides that invite the audience in and help the presenter engage. We still have a track on software technique, and of course, there is the Help Center, which is the ultimate haven for PowerPoint junkies.

We recognize that 99% of our patrons use PowerPoint and that is likely to be the case for years to come. But that is not all they use and that is not all they need to know. Our rebranding is an acknowledgment of the growth that we have experienced over the past six years, not an indication that we are about to move in some radical direction. We're not -- it's not broken, and we don't need to overhaul it.

Geetesh: Any photos available from this year.

Rick: Hundreds. I think the best ones are part of our memories video that we played the morning of the final day: www.pptlive.com/video.htm.

Categories: interviews, powerpointlive

PowerPoint Presentation Formula 01

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:58:00 +0000

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:

Start with a simple idea -- Your idea should be so simple that the audience should either wonder if this idea will ever work, or be amazed that this is such an amazing, yet simple concept -- and why they never thought about it before! Either way, you haven't promised them the sky, the moon, and the stars and have managed to hold their attenton. That is good!
Be sincere and relate to the audience -- don't approach the audience as if they were a herd of goats. Establish eye contact with each person, and certainly ask each of them to introduce themselves if you are addressing a small group, and do have that sort of time. Tell something about yourself, and don't boast too much -- be humble and show willingness to understand the audience's problems. Also tell them that you will do your best to help them -- don't promise anything at this point of time!
Explore problems with solutions -- as I explained earlier, make no big promises and then explore some huge or small problems that this audience has -- as long as you have solutions for them. Don't give them solution at this point of time -- that happens after a while. Some suspense is always good.
Give a little more about yourself -- this is important so that the audience can associate you with credibility. Again, associate your credibility with the desire to help people rather than placing yourself on an ivory tower!
Involve the audience further -- now that they trust you more, it's time for them to speak about their problems. Be a good listener!
Surprise them with a quick and easy solution -- this is a very important part of this presentation formula -- and if you don't have a solution, it's best not to use this formula at all!
Talk about success stories -- especially ones that use the solution you just explained. You need to be convincing, yet not appear to be desperate. The audience's benefit is paramount at this point of time.
Provide a call to action -- this needs to be spelled out well, even if you think the audience already knows it! There may be some questions from the audience -- that's good, and go for it!
End with some contact info -- how the audience can get in touch with you. If you charge for more involvement, make that clear at this point of time. Alternatively recommend some books and web resources, including any of your own. This assure that your session is a new beginning, not an end!

Categories: delivery, powerpoint

Raptivity Presenter Giveaway: 5 Free Copies for Grabs!

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:36:00 +0000

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

FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0: Conversation with Nate Anderson

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:39:00 +0000

Nate Anderson is Senior Product Manager at balesio AG, a leading provider of file optimization and compression solutions. He is a software industry veteran and was part of the core development team of the company�s new FILEminimizer Pictures software.

In this discussion, Nate discusses the new FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0 product.

Geetesh: Tell us more about FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0, and how everyday computer users can benefit from the program.

Nate: FILEminimizer Pictures is one of the small utilities that makes your everyday computer life a lot easier. The software is able to compress your images, photos and pictures by up to 98 percent making them a lot smaller and ideal for the Internet. Whether you want to send some pictures to your friends or upload your latest photos on facebook, there have always been problems. You can send only one or two pictures via email because email size limitation and if you want to upload your photos to facebook, it takes hours until they are uploaded and processed. FILEminimizer Pictures is great because it saves you a lot of time and frustration. You can batch optimize your photos and images and share them easier via Email and Internet. While there are some freeware tools out there which resize your images and decrease image quality and size, what makes our tool stand out and special is our lossless compression which is greatly appreciated by our users.

Geetesh: What is lossless compression, and why is it an important feature in FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0?

Nate: FILEminimizer Pictures features a unique image optimization technique which works on the single image and optimizes this image based on the image characteristics. We achieve file size reductions of over 80 percent without resizing the image or affecting the quality. Lossless compression means that you have still the same beautiful image after the optimization, in the same size, with the same quality. It is just a lot smaller! I cannot tell you more technical secrets about our lossless compression technique but I want to encourage at this point all users to try it out for their own.

Categories: interviews, photos

myBrainshark: The Joe Gustafson Interview

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:23:00 +0000

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

Learn PowerPoint 2007: Adding New Shapes to Existing SmartArt Graphics

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:55:00 +0000

As you work with SmartArt within PowerPoint, you'll find that you need to add some more components to your SmartArt graphics -- maybe there's a change required in an organization chart, or you need to add a new shape within your diagram to reflect some other change. Fortunately, SmartArt lets you maintain the changes happening in the world around with just a click or two! This is normally achieved by adding extra shapes to your existing SmartArt graphics.

Learn more here...

Categories: powerpoint_2007, smartart, tutorials

FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0: The Indezine Review

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:53:00 +0000

Imagine this scenario: you try uploading your vacation pictures to a social network site, or send it via e-mail to share it with your family and friends. And then you end up with an error message complaining about the file sizes and dimensions being too huge. Well, it's not your fault but that's what you get with 12 megapixel digital cameras! Fortunately, there is FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0.

Read the review here...

Categories: graphics, photos

Healthcare Napkins wins SlideShare�s World�s Best Presentation Contest for 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:42:00 +0000

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

Slide Executive 2.9: Conversation with Liber Rodriguez-Florez

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:08:00 +0000

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

The World's Best Presentation Contest 2009: Conversation with Rashmi Sinha

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 07:04:00 +0000

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

Learn PowerPoint 2007: Text Pane For SmartArt Graphics

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 09:16:00 +0000

Although SmartArt contains text, it is not too easy to edit, add, or delete text contained within a shape inside a SmartArt graphic. Thankfully, the Text Pane available to edit text in a SmartArt graphic makes it a whole lot more intuitive! This page explores options for working with the Text Pane for SmartArt graphics in PowerPoint 2007.

Learn more here...

Categories: powerpoint_2007, smartart, tutorials

CartoonStock: Conversation with Joel Mishon

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:35:00 +0000

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

Learn PowerPoint 2007: Convert Bulleted Text to SmartArt

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:06:00 +0000

In a previous tutorial, I showed you how you can insert SmartArt in PowerPoint 2007. However that works only when you are creating a new slides. Many times you may alraedy have your slides that contain bulleted text. This tutorial shows how you can convert such bulleted text to a SmartArt graphic in a jiffy within PowerPoint 2007. Follow these steps to convert existing bulleted text on a slide to a SmartArt graphic in PowerPoint 2007.

Learn more here...

Categories: powerpoint_2007, smartart, tutorials

Learn PowerPoint 2007: Inserting SmartArt

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:31:00 +0000

SmartArt is the name of the new diagram component within PowerPoint 2007. This tutorial shows you how you can insert SmartArt graphics within PowerPoint 2007. If you are new to this, do take a look at the What is SmartArt? and SmartArt Samples pages.

Learn here...

Categories: powerpoint_2007, smartart, tutorials

Learn PowerPoint 2007: Some SmartArt Samples

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 06:35:00 +0000

On this page you can see some samples of SmartArt created within PowerPoint 2007. Each sample has a caption that tells you the name of that particular SmartArt graphic variant.

Look here...

Categories: powerpoint_2007, smartart, tutorials

Learn PowerPoint 2007: What is SmartArt?

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:02:00 +0000

SmartArt is a new component within PowerPoint 2007, and replaces the diagram options in previous versions of PowerPoint. Other than that, SmartArt also allows you to replace boring bullet points with info-graphic content using text-within-shapes that's more logical to view and present.

Learn more here...

Categories: powerpoint_2007, smartart, tutorials

Slide Executive Desktop 2.9: The Indezine Review

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:30:00 +0000

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

Concept Slides: Six Segment Circle

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:17:00 +0000

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

SmartDraw Guided Tour with Daniel Hoffman

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 06:22:00 +0000

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