For those of you who read Indezine  - there’s a special offer on right now.

“This book is worth its weight in gold. Once you buy it, you’ll have, in one place, a fantastic resource that can unlock for you all the secrets of the greatest presenters. It not only covers the 3 Ts (presentation tips, techniques and technologies) it also helps you to understand and connect with your audience so that you can be a much more successful and relaxed presenter than you may have ever thought possible. And, thanks to Claudyne’s enthusiasm for the subject, you’ll find Point, Click and Wow! to be a fun read, as well!”
- Dennis Ricks, President & CEO, CrystalGraphics, Inc

You can order the book now directly from Claudyne, and receive a free Delivery Skills job aid card, plus one of her PowerPoint formats from her CD: Presentations in a Hurry!!

This offer ends on January 31st, 2009.

This sample presentation shows you how you can use motion path animations in PowerPoint on ungrouped vector objects to create a very effective introduction or section slide.

Learn more here…

Categories: animation, powerpoint, presentation_samples

I just read TechCrunch’s coverage on SlideSix.com, a new presentation sharing site that lets you upload and share your PowerPoint presentations and other file formats such as ODP (OpenOffice), PDF, QuickTime MOV, etc.

At first glance, this looks like an interesting site not too different from other presentation sharing sites like SlideShare, authorSTREAM, and SlideBoom. But SlideSix’s Todd Sharp says there’s a difference. He adds: “Simplicity and identity are keystones of our presentation sharing community. Social networks, more often then not, are utilized by people looking to create a unique web identity. The motivation for the desire to create such an identity varies. Some people use social networks for personal reasons – to keep in touch with friends and relatives or reconnect with others whom they may have lost touch with. Others use them for business reasons - to create an online presence for a company or product. Often folks use them for a combination of business and personal reasons. SlideSix is a social presentation sharing community that caters to everyone.”

Categories: online_presentations, powerpoint

Here’s a list of the updates, provided by Joel Harband of Tuval Software:

Bundled Premium TTS Voices: In addition to SpeechOver, a software for generating narration in PowerPoint presentations with text-to-speech voices — customers receive a high-quality, natural sounding text-to-speech voice that is automatically installed for immediate use with SpeechOver. This is a marked improvement over the regular version of SpeechOver, which comes only with the basic quality text-to-speech voices provided free by Microsoft.

Low Cost Commercial License: The Acapela TTS voices in Speech-Over Plus come with a commercial license that allows you to produce narrated presentations for internal business requirements such as corporate education and training, e-learning, and marketing presentations, — and you can put the material on an internal corporate network. For the price, this is an excellent value and can help businesses save costs in these difficult economic times.

Additional Voices and Languages: Acapela Group produces 50 premium TTS voices in 25 languages. Right now, US English and Danish versions of SpeechOver Plus are available and different language versions are being added all the time. A basic language version includes one TTS voice in that language (for example, the US English version includes Heather) and TTS voices in the same language or in different languages can be purchased and added to the basic version. In fact, any vendor voice can be added as long as it is SAPI-compatible.

More info and free trials can be found on the SpeechOver site…

Categories: add-in, narration, powerpoint, sounds

Check out the post and screenshots here.

Step 1: Open your presentation file in Slide Show mode to setup the exact time duration for each slide. There are two ways of doing this:

a) Use the “Record narration” feature if you want to include audio in your presentations. Record your voice as you move through the slides and click ‘yes’ when you are prompted to save the changes.

b) Use “Rehearse timings”  for silent PowerPoint videos. This option lets you define how long a slide should display on the screen before the presentation move to the next slide.

Enhance your ppt first of all

Step 2: To continue with the process, you will need to register (for free) at www.authorstream.com and upload the PPT file you saved in Step 1. AuthorStream is a hosting service where you can upload PowerPoint files as large as 1GB

Step 3: Once registered, click on the ‘Upload PowerPoint’ tab and follow the instructions:

authorstream upload screen

Step 4: Once uploaded, AuthorStream will convert the PowerPoint file into a MPEG4 video (mp4) that can be uploaded to YouTube or can be watched on an iPod.

This is not an instantaneous process, but depending on the file size, you will get an email notification as soon as your PowerPoint video is ready for download from the web.

Success!

Step 5: Log in to YouTube and upload your newly created MP4 file, ready for broadcasting and sharing with the world!

Business PowerPoint takes a look below at how to change it…

To change the color scheme, click on the Office button on the top left hand corner.

Click the PowerPoint Options and highlight the Popular tab. Here you can find the color schemes.

Colour scheme drop down

Note that if you change the scheme for PowerPoint 2007, it will also change in Excel 2007 and Word 2007 too.

This is how the different colours look:

Silver scheme

Black scheme

Go on and be adventurous - you might enjoy it…

Typically, you go to a slide, insert > image from file > browse to the image > insert > resize it, align it on the page and then move on to the next one. If you’re doing this for 20 images - it’s going to take 20 minutes. If you then need to go back and change the style for each of them - there’s another 5 mins gone from your day.

I’ve just created a deck with 50 images in it, neatly sized, framed and aligned in 10 seconds… Let me show you how it’s done using PowerPoint 2007 (although the same functionality is in PowerPoint 2003:

Create a new deck and then choose Insert > PhotoAlbum > New PhotoAlbum.

Add a new PhotoAlbum

A pop-up window opens. Select the photos you want to insert in the album. After adding the photos, you can rotate them or change brightness/contrast if you wish. You can also choose how many to place on each page. The full screen option is really useful.

Photo Album dialogue

You can also select a theme for the photo album from the theme folder which should open by default.

Once completed, click “create” and your photo album is ready for distribution.

The finished product

You can now prepare for that 21st birthday speech or board presentation and worry about the jokes, rather than the formatting.

Keyboard shortcuts are always handy if you use an application regularly. If you’ve ever watched an experienced designer operating Photoshop - you’ll know what I mean - it’s a blur of fingers. If you are a serious Business PowerPoint user, you will appreciate how useful it is to know the right shortcuts.

With PowerPoint 2007, you can learn the shorcuts as you go - just by pressing the “ALT” key. Try it - your screen will look like this:

The power of the ALT key

As an example, if you wanted to insert a text box: Click “ALT” and you will see N under the title ‘Insert’ in the menu bar. Press “N” and you will be taken to the ribbon options for Insert and there you will see again all the keyboard shortcuts for different features. “X” is used to insert a text box.

Some cool shortcuts

Whilst I could give you a huge long list of keyboard shortcuts for you to memorise for PowerPoint 2007 and earlier versions, I thought I’d just give you some ‘cool’ ones… well I think they are anyway.

When editing…

It’s annoying when things ’snap to grid’ when you don’t want them to. Next time that happens when you are dragging or resizing things - press “ALT” at the same time - and you will find you have then got complete control over what you are moving.

To resize an object but retain its proportions, hold down “SHIFT” at the same time as dragging.

Watch a presentation from the slide you are on in slide show mode when editing CTRL F5

Whilst actually presenting…

Go to Slide <number>          <number> ENTER
Black/Unblack Screen            B or .
White/Unwhite Screen           W or ,
Show/Hide Pointer                 A or =
Erase Screen Annotations      E

‘pptPlex’ is a research prototype as an exploration of an alternative method of presenting Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 slides. This plug-in allows you to arrange slides on a canvas then zoom between the slides during the presentation. You can move around the canvas and show groups of slides, individual slides, or even zoom in to show a particular section of a slide.

It was originally demonstrated by Bill Gates at the MS CEO Summit 2008.

The best way to see what it is all about is to watch the video. It’s a short 1′12″ video (I just wish the presenter didn’t have a cold!)

If you like what you see, click here to download, install and play!