The PowerPoint Ezine - 70

by Geetesh Bajaj, September 1st 2006

Giveaways and More

This time, DesignScience is giving away two copies of their MathType equation editing software -- to win, all you need to do is fill in this form. Winners will be able to decide if they want a Windows or Mac version of MathType -- this giveaway ends on September 6th.

And Ppted is giving away ten copies of their Stepping Stones collection of PowerPoint templates. To win, all you need to do is fill in this form. This giveaway also ends on September 6th.

You can see the names of last month's winners of the NXPowerLite and Grid Horizons giveaways here...

Congratulations to all the winners!

Also, check out my new site at Freeppttemplates.com for more PowerPoint templates....

Capture v2 Promo

Multidmedia is offering Indezine readers 20% off Capture v2, their screen capture and PowerPoint to Flash conversion software. Readers can receive their discount by entering the following coupon code J43020. The offer will last two weeks.

Do check out the Indezine review of Capture 2 here...

Learning PowerPoint -- Formatting Embedded Excel Sheets

PowerPoint allows to work with text and figures created in another application like Microsoft Excel. Many users just like to place an instance of the Excel sheet inside the PowerPoint slide since this avoids link problems, missing files, and any other similar problem.

Fortunately, you can embed an entire Excel sheet in a PowerPoint slide -- this gives you the best of both worlds because although your Excel sheet stays within PowerPoint, you can still use Excel's editing tools and formulae to work with the figures. Needless to add, all changes made to the Excel sheet (spreadsheet) show up on your slide(s). I'll show you how you can do this in this tutorial.

But that's not the whole story -- many users just place a bare-bones Excel sheet on their slides with no consideration to integrating the look of the Excel component with the look of the presentation. I'll show you how you can make them look better too. Learn here...

Advanced Graphics for PowerPoint

What happens when laptops include graphic equipment that's good enough for gaming, and a graphic major like ATI merges with AMD? Or when media types merge all the time, and even Macs run Windows? It's probably time to look at the small things that happen unnoticed as a result of these huge advances -- such as the fact that machines have enough power these days to make advanced graphic products for PowerPoint presentations more mainstream?

If this tempts you to learn more, then check out this Indezine exclusive article by Mike Wilson of Instant Effects who takes you on a small trip to presentation-magic-land. Read here...

News and Happenings

Read reviews -- FlashSpring Pro creates Flash movies from PowerPoint presentations and provides nice customization options, Ovation from Serious Magic metamorphoses your presentation to something more akin to television style moving graphics without altering anything in your PowerPoint PPT file, Rich Chart Builder lets you create amazing Flash SWF charts and it also places them inside PowerPoint presentations for you, and ActiveSlide Thunder is a great companion program that creates small Flash components that can be inserted into PowerPoint slides -- these components even allow you to interactively use your mouse on live PowerPoint slides.

Read interviews -- Dr. Christopher Peri of Vyew.com discuses Vyew, the new collaboration tool that's so easy to use and requires almost nothing apart from a browser, and Johan Rosenquist of Headset Presenter discusses how a small piece of inexpensive software can let you use your mobile phone as a PowerPoint remote.

Read conversations -- Tobias Windbrake of ActiveSlide discusses how ActiveSlide can be used within PowerPoint, Tony Dunckel of TechSmith tells you more about the new SnagIt and die-hard SnagIt users, Bob Mathews of DesignScience shows how you can bring in your equations into Microsoft Office programs, Kurt Dupont of PresentationPoint explains how you can send an email from Bangkok that can instantly show up as a PowerPoint slide in California, and Manuel Fernandes of Blue Pacific discusses Rich Chart Live, the cool, new charting application that's actually a web site!

End Note

More PowerPoint related info on the PowerPoint Blog and PowerPoint Notes. And free PowerPoint templates for all of you...

And here's a link to the previous issue of this newsletter...

Until next time - have a great day. And keep the feedback coming...

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