PowerPoint and Presentation News - Issue 035

Contents

Freebies Again
Tony Dunckel talks about SnagIt, PowerPoint and Microsoft
Trigger Animations in PowerPoint
Quick News
Events & Seminars

Freebies Again

Let's get started with the best things!

All subscribers of this mailing list can download two free PowerPoint backgrounds that are going to be part of new unreleased PowerPoint template collections at ppted.com - all you need to do is go and download them!

Start downloading now.

Tony Dunckel talks about SnagIt, PowerPoint and Microsoft

Tony Dunckel, Product Marketing Manager of TechSmith SnagIt speaks about using SnagIt to capture content for PowerPoint presentations. Here are some excerpts:

Geetesh: Can you explain how SnagIt helps people incorporate the two worlds of screenshots and presentations?

Tony: When you look at the different types of learners, visual comprehension is an essential component of almost all of them. The fact is people remember what they see longer than what they hear, and putting those words and pictures together makes for a lasting impression. To that point, using SnagIt to add screenshots, images, logos, and many other media types to PowerPoint presentations helps create that perfect balance between visual and non-visual communication.

SnagIt provides a multitude of ways in which people can capture different shapes and formats of media on their computers, from images of windows, menus, scrolling windows, icons and objects to text, video, Web sites, and even printed output. The flexibility these various options offer enables users to capture whatever content complements the presentation's message.

SnagIt has also enhanced the integration of screenshots into presentations by including an add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint. This add-in, which resides directly on a user's PowerPoint toolbar, provides the most important capture options to users and allows them to capture images and automatically embed them into PowerPoint with just a single mouse click. SnagIt will even allow users to specify if the image capture should be inserted as a graphic within an existing slide or to start a new slide, with all the common slide types available. And for those that have had difficulty turning a screen capture image into a complete slide, SnagIt offers a handy feature that will take an image and stretch it to fit the entire slide. The goal of adding these conveniences has been to create better integration between the screen capture process and presentation authoring.

Geetesh: Do you use SnagIt - how do you use it.

Tony: Honestly, I use SnagIt almost hourly. That's the great thing about a useful utility product - you can always find ways to use it to make things easier. In the office, the ways I use SnagIt are really endless and although my profession calls for the use of numerous screen captures, I've found just as many ways to use the product in my personal life. To show you how integral it is, I've broken down how I use SnagIt into a bit of a timeline:

Morning

• Reading e-mail, I capture important articles I find in newsletters and ezines and share them with the staff.
• While monitoring our Web content, I capture areas that may contain typos or need slight changes and mock them up in SnagIt's image editor. Then I send to the Web staff as an attachment in an e-mail.
• I capture graphics, logos, and even special charts from Microsoft Visio or Project to implement them into PowerPoint presentations I am creating.
• While creating sales reports, I will capture data that cannot be copied from our reporting system and embed that content directly into Microsoft Excel for easier manipulation.

Afternoon

• I capture images of SnagIt itself and use its editor to demonstrate new design ideas.
• I capture screenshots of important content from webinars I participate in - especially since that information is gone once the presenter changes slides.
• If I find bugs while testing software, I use SnagIt to capture the error messages and send them on to our Quality Assurance department.
• When doing competitive research, I will capture images of competitor's banners, promotions, and even pricing to enable me to keep an electronic library of my competition's marketing activities.

Evening

• I use SnagIt to capture receipts of online purchases.
• I snap pictures of items I may be bidding on in online auctions.
• While on mapping sites, I capture an image of the directions.
• I use it to edit and organize photos from my digital camera.
• I can create visual shopping lists of items I need or want.

This is certainly just a sampling of the ways I routinely use SnagIt, but it provides a flavor of the diverse ways in which SnagIt helps me do tasks that would be otherwise impossible - and makes communication with colleagues and within presentations clearer than ever.

Read the complete interview here.

Trigger Animations in PowerPoint

Trigger animations work with PowerPoint 2002 and above. In this exercise, we'll look at a basic trigger animation. You can download the sample presentation here. (around 75 kb)

You'll need two images to illustrate the trigger animations - I've used images downloaded from Microsoft Office Online's Clipart section.

1. Create a new presentation (Ctrl + N) and insert a blank slide.
2. Insert two images of the same size within this slide - choose Insert | Picture | From File. Keep both of them in different areas of the slide.
3. 
3. Right-click one of them and choose Custom Animation from the resultant menu. This will activate the Custom Animation task pane.
4. 
4. Click the Add Effect button and then choose an Entrance animation. I've chosen the Appear animation since that provides the most optimum clickover effect.
5. 
5. By default, PowerPoint chooses On Click for the Start options. That's what we want so don't alter that.
6. 
6. Below that option, you'll find the name of your image in a listing of animations. Besides the name, you'll find an arrow that reveals a drop-down menu on being clicked. Choose the Timing option in that menu.
7. 
7. This will open the Timing tab of the animation dialog box. Click the Triggers button so that more options are visible. Choose the second option that reads Start effect on click of: and choose the name of the second image we inserted within the slide. Click OK.
8. 
8. Place both the images one on top of the other (that's why we chose images of the same size) and play the presentation. Clicking on the visible image should show us the other image. If that doesn't work, right click the image that's visible and choose Order | Send To Back (or Send Backward multiple times depending on how many objects you have onscreen).
9. 
10. Save your presentation.

Quick News

Read the PowerPoint Blog here

Events & Seminars

Winning Presentations Seminar
January 15 and 16; February 19 and 20, 2004, Boston, USA
Claudyne Wilder, Wilder Presentations

Presentations / Training 2004 Conference & Expo
March 1 to 3, 2003, Atlanta, USA
VNU Expositions
Training Conference

PowerPoint Live
October 10 to 13, 2004, San Diego, California, USA
Rick Altman, R Altman Digital Consulting
PPT Live

Credits

During the preparation of this issue of the PowerPoint Ezine, I received assistance, content or feedback from Claudyne Wilder and Tony Dunckel (all in alphabetical order). I would like to use this platform to thank them for their help.