PowerPoint Blog
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
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
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: interviews, powerpointlive 
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
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