Break up or Blow up

"Have you ever wanted to have a picture appear on your screen as one thing and then blow apart to separate elements? It is a great technique for explaining parts of a process, photo, or structure in detail.
We are going to step through blowing apart pictures, but this same idea can be used for expanding organization charts, process diagrams, and all kinds of other elements."

Labels: Animation, Tips

Review before you're reviewed

• Speak their Language (Know the Audience)
  
  
• Be Utterly Prepared (No excuses)
  
  
• CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT (Have some)
  
  
• System Setup (Be unique, but don't be nuts)
  
  
• Speaking (Um ...)
  
  
• Accessibility (Two words: Font Size, and this means YOU!)
  
  
• Demos and Tools
  

Labels: Performance, Presentation

Install more

A small amount of sample clip art images was included The 2007 Office systems and Office 2003 and is part of the "local collection" that is searched when you do not have Internet access to the Microsoft Office Online Clip Art and Media Web site. Office 2003 no longer included a media content CD with additional clip art. However, the Microsoft Office XP Media Content CD can still be installed locally or on a network share.

The Office XP Media Content CD contains approximately 35,000 clips that are a subset of the clips that are available on the Microsoft Office Online Clip Art and Media Web site. The Office XP Media Content CD was included with Microsoft Office XP Professional, Microsoft Office XP Standard, and Microsoft Publisher 2002 Deluxe Edition.

To install the contents of the Office XP Media Content CD on a computer, follow these steps:

1. Exit all programs that are running
   
   
2. Insert the Office XP Media Content CD into the CD drive or into the DVD drive
   (Hold down the SHIFT key to prevent the program from automatically starting. If Microsoft Windows Installer automatically starts, click Cancel)
   
   
3. Click Start, click Run, type the following command, and then click OK:
   

   msiexec.exe /i CD_drive:\CAG.MSI ADDLOCAL=ALL /qb

(CD_drive is the letter of the drive that contains the Office XP Media Content CD)

Labels: Graphics

Explicit protection

1. Open a module (start the VBA Editor)
   
   
2. Choose Tools>Options from the menu bar
   
   
3. On the Editor tab of the Options dialog box, select the Require Variable Declaration check box in the Code Settings panel
   
   
4. Finally, click OK

Labels: VBA

Make it easy for everyone

"People who use screen readers will need to have the slides in HTML format in order to access them. This is the only format that can be considered reliably accessible to the various brands of screen readers on the market. Some screen readers can read PowerPoint slides on the Web to some degree, but not well enough to be considered truly accessible.

As for the other disability categories, those who are deaf will be able to access the slides without any problems, unless there is embedded multimedia. In such cases, captions and/or transcripts will be necessary. Those with motor disabilities will have no special difficulties. Even those who cannot use a mouse will be fine, since the slides are keyboard-accessible. Those with cognitive disabilities will not have any particular difficulties, although text-only presentations may be difficult in some cases. "

Labels: Presentation, Tips

Diet tips

The size of a Word document may be 20 to 50 times larger than a PowerPoint presentation when you send the presentation to Word.

1. Start PowerPoint.
   
   
2. On the File menu, point to Send To, and then click Microsoft Office Word.
   
   
3. Click Paste link, and then click OK.
   
   
4. In the resulting Word document, click Links on the Edit menu.
   
   
5. Select all the links that are listed, and then click Break Link.
   
   
6. Click Yes when you are prompted.
   
   
7. Save the Word document.

When you eliminate the OLE overhead, you can reduce the size of the Word document by 90 percent

Labels: Tips, Troubleshoot

Choose a topic

• Would you do business with your own company?
  
  
• When Should You Use PowerPoint?
  
  
• PowerPoint Does Not Make You a Speaker
  
  
• How many slides is too many?
  
  
• How to Get Better Images on Slides or Web Sites
  
  
• How to Select and Use Fonts on Presentation Slides
  
  
• How to Write Powerful Bullet Points
  
  
• Using Graphs and Tables on Presentation Slides

Labels: Instructional, Tips

Avoid wasting time and resources

"If we assume some relatively conservative meeting parameters of four people per presentation, a half-hour presentation on average and the wasted time due to a poor presentation is one-quarter of the presentation time, we arrive at a waste of 15 million person hours per day. At an average salary of $35,000 per year for those attending the meeting, the cost of that wasted time is a staggering $252 million and change each day."

Labels: Presentation, Tips

Not a walk in the park

• Showing presentations without the need for a computer
  
• Distributing your slideshows to friends and colleagues
  
• Unattended exhibition presentations, that automatically repeat/rewind
  
• Giving your presentations more of a TV feel
  

Labels: General, Presentation, Tips

That was no font, that was my typeface

Words into Type

Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works

The Elements of Typographic Style

by Robert Bringhurst ISBN 0881791326

A font can be defined as a collection of characters with the same style and size. A typeface is the design of the characters regardless of size or style. The terms are used interchangeably today.

Labels: Fonts

More than just a PPT tutorial

• Organization and preparation
  
• Delivery and
  
• Slide tips
  

". . . presentation skills are worthy of extreme obsessive study."

Labels: Presentation

Search with Excel, Word, PowerPoint

"Google Search 6.0/7.0 places a new sub-menu item under the Help menu of whatever program you call it from. When that item is selected, up pops a user-friendly interface. This allows a largely intuitive completion and execution of a Google Search.

On clicking the Search button a lot goes on behind the scenes.

• Your default (i.e. your usual) web browser is loaded and, without further instructions,
  
• It's off to the Google Advanced Search Page.
  
• It then fills in an Advanced Query to your specifications
  
• Executes that query.
  
• Once results are found (or not found) you are shown those results just as if you had carried out all of the steps of the process."
  

Labels: Addin

What the other guy says has weight

"In my presentations, I may have several slides which feature a quote from a famous (sometimes not so famous) individual in the field. The quote may be a springboard into the topic or serve as support or reinforcement for the particular point I'm making. A typical Tom Peters presentation at one of his seminars, for example, may include dozens of slides with quotes. "I say that my conclusions are much more credible when I back them up with great sources," Tom says."

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
Pablo Picasso"

Labels: Tips

How to make truly horrendous PowerPoint Slides

"Of course, there comes a time when the PowerPoint amateur discovers two very dangerous tools indeed. Custom animations and slide transitions have recently been classified by the UN as 'weapons of mass destruction' and cited at the War Crimes tribunal in The Hague on more than one occasion. As far as both of these tools are concerned, my advice is the same: pick a style and stick to it.

Potentially there is boredom if every slide element skates in from the right or fades in from the background. It might be tiring for each slide to segue into the next using a diagonal wipe. But if the alternative is a dizzying combination of mismatched zooms, shrinks, checkerboard wipes and pirouettes then boredom is a very small price to pay."

Labels: Presentation, Tips

Fit any need

What is in a Custom Template?

• Slide background
  
• Slide Layout- which placeholders appear and their positions
  
• Color Scheme
  
• Formatting of placeholders
  
• Formatting of text and bullets
  
• Slide transition
  
• Placeholder animations

Labels: Templates, Tips

Date an Octothorpe

"Bell Labs engineer, Don Macpherson, went to instruct their first client, the Mayo Clinic, in the use of the new (touch tone phone system). He felt the need for a fresh and unambiguous name for the # symbol. His reasoning that led to the new word was roughly that it had eight points, so ought to start with octo-. He was apparently at that time active in a group that was trying to get the Olympic medals of the athlete Jim Thorpe returned from Sweden, so he decided to add thorpe to the end."

Labels: Fonts, Shortcuts

Embed directly

Labels: Addin, Graphics, Tips

Colorize without Adobe

" Have you ever wanted to fill a picture with a gradient - or another picture in PowerPoint? Have you wanted to blend two pictures in PowerPoint to create a montage?

Labels: Color, Formats, Graphics, Tips

Move it!

"Need to make content appear, change or disappear out of order? Need to control the order that things appear while in front of your audience? Playing games? You need to play with PowerPoint's Triggers option for custom animations."

Trigger Happy Animations in PowerPoint
By Kathryn Jacobs.
(Kathryn has been a PowerPoint trainer and consultant for over 10 years. She is a Microsoft MVP for PowerPoint.)

Also:
Office.Microsoft.com:
Use triggers to create an interactive slide show in PowerPoint

"Let's get past the term, first: A trigger is nothing more than an item on your PowerPoint slide-- it could be a picture, a shape, a button, or even a paragraph or text box-- that sets off an action when you click it. The action might be a sound, a movie, or an animation, such as text becoming visible on the slide."

Combine animation techniques to create stunning PowerPoint slides
By Ellen Finkelstein

"Indeed, with the addition of motion paths, new trigger effects and the ability to add two animation behaviors to one object, PowerPoint has become capable of creating sophisticated animations that rival complex animation software."

Labels: Animation, Instructional, Tips

Worth a lot more than you pay for it

"There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave."
-- Dale Carnegie

Labels: Presentation

Labels: Formats, General, Tips

Make data more moving

"You can add some animation to your chart for dramatic effect. You can animate the chart as a whole or animate elements of the chart."

1. In normal view, display the slide that has the chart you want, and then select the chart.
   
   
2. On the Slide Show menu, click Custom Animation to open the Custom Animation task pane.
   
   
3. In the Custom Animation task pane, click the Add Effect down arrow, point to Entrance, and then click an effect.
   
   
4. In the Custom Animation task pane, select the animation you applied to the chart, click the down arrow, and then click Effect Options.
   
   
5. On the Chart Animation tab, in the Group Chart list, click By element in series.
   
   
6. Click OK.
   
   
7. Now, if you click Slide Show and click through the presentation, you’ll see the animation in real time.

Labels: Animation, Graphics, Tips

Live on tape

• Unfortunately they are usually offered at inconvenient times for people with real jobs.
  
  
• Fortunately they are offered in a form that you can download or watch "on-demand".

"This Support WebCast will define troubleshooting issues in Microsoft PowerPoint and provide an overview of when and how to use available resources such as product Help and Microsoft Knowledge Base articles. We will also discuss how to determine where a problem is occurring and how to troubleshoot specific issues such as printing, opening a file, installation, movies, and starting the program."

Labels: Troubleshoot

It's Probably Because People No Longer Really Listen

"Not only is it easier to throw together a stack of PowerPoint slides than it is to write that 10,000-word document, it is much easier to leave out or gloss over parts of the project that might not survive close scrutiny if they were described in complete sentences. Can you say "weapons of mass destruction?" If we cut to the heart of this current controversy about whether Iraq really had WMD, whether the U.S. honestly believed Iraq had WMD, and who got it wrong, I'm sure we'll end up with a guilty PowerPoint stack. In that stack, you'll find a slide containing the words "Iraq" and "WMD" but taken out of context, there is no way of knowing what the presenter even intended the slide to mean. Thus, we have plausible deniability through PowerPoint."

For eight years from 1987-95, Robert X. Cringely wrote the Notes From the Field column in InfoWorld, a weekly computer trade newspaper. He is also the author of the best-selling book Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date.
Most recently, Cringely is the host and writer of the hit PBS-TV miniseries "Electric Money."

If We're in Trouble

Robert X. Cringely (www.pbs.org/cringely/)




See all Topics

powerpoint

Labels: General, Presentation

Dual Masters and more schemes

Labels: Formats, Tips

Accessibility Shortcuts

Several resources are available to help increase speed and effectiveness for keyboard users. Here are keyboard shortcuts for leading Microsoft products that help save time and effort and provide an essential tool for some people with mobility impairments.

• Internet Explorer 7/6/5/4
  
• Office (2007/2003/XP/2002/2000/97)
  
• PhotoDraw
  
• PowerPoint
  
• Producer
  
• Publisher
  
• Windows (Vista/2003/XP/2000/98/ME/NT)
  
• Windows Media Player
  
• Windows Movie Maker
  
• Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005

Labels: Shortcuts

From another point of view

"Holding the honorary title of "Microsoft Regional Director" for Chennai over the last 6 years, I have delivered hundreds of presentations and lectures. Doing this, I have learned that doing successful presentations is an Art, which can be acquired only over time and by practice."

There are 3 basic ways to learn this art:

1. Listen to great speakers: Attend as many programs of great speakers as possible. Subject spoken is immaterial here, what you are learning is the "Master's" way of doing it.
   
   
2. Read about doing presentations: There are now plenty of books on doing effective presentations and Internet has numerous pages on this. Read them.
   
   
3. Keep Doing it: Get on stage as many times as you can and just do it. As they say, your mistakes teach you more than anyone. So as you keep doing more and more presentations, you will learn on your mistakes and improve.

• General Tips:
  
• Health/Life Style Tips:
  
• Doing Technical Presentations:
  
• Authoring Power Point Slide-Decks:
  
• Laptops, Audio-Video & Systems:
  
• Sharing the stage:
  
• Answering Questions — Q & A:

Labels: Presentation, Tips

Remember it the way you want to

"Most communities in the fifties had small town print shops that doubled as printers of local news and advertising papers. These printers could not afford graphic artists so they used stock clipart supplied by large companies who distributed common graphics for use in advertising sections of the papers. They were provided for the printer in lots of categories to meet any advertiser's needs."

Labels: Graphics

More suggestions

Rule #1:

Don't give PowerPoint center stage.

Rule #2:

Create a logical flow to your presentation.

Rule #3:

Make your presentation readable.

Rule #4:

Remember, less is more.

Rule #5:

Distribute a handout.

Labels: Presentation

Audience antagonizers

"According to the survey, conducted on the CommunicateUsingTechnology.com web site, the most common complaints are:

• Speakers reading their slides to the audience (62% of respondents cited this item),
  
• Text on the slides is too small to be readable (46.9%)
  
• Slides hard to see because of color choice (42.6%) and
  
• Full sentences were used instead of bullet points (39.1%).

This survey is one of the first to investigate how presentations are seen from the audience point of view. Of those respondents who see 100 or more presentations per year, more than half said that 50% or more of the presentations they see suffer from one or more of the annoying traits. The costs of poor presentations are in the time wasted by those who attended and in the extra work that must be done to communicate the intended message again since it was not done properly the first time."

Labels: Performance, Presentation

Sprinkle carefully

• Display clip-related toolbars
  
• Customizing your clip art
  
• Cropping
  
• Sizing
  
• Adding text wrapping
  
• Blurring
  
• Rotating and flipping
  
• Adding a drop shadow

Labels: Graphics