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PowerPoint News

The most widely used presentation software anywhere

Amazing! Grand opening of Virtualis conference center in Second Life
Review of PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit
New e-booklet! "7 Steps to Great Images"
New poll on which versions of PowerPoint you use
Prezvision: An interview with Wataru Sugawara, CEO of SoftAdvance
Recent seminars and webinars (updated)
PowerPoint Live 2007 Report
Interview with Geetesh Bajaj, author of Cutting Edge PowerPoint
Interview with Tim Hards of Perspector
Webinar, "Creating Interactive Quizzes in PowerPoint"
How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 published
Review of PowerPoint 2007
Archive: Report on PowerPoint Live 2006
How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003
Archive: PowerPoint 2003 new features
Presentations
Articles on PowerPoint

Amazing! Grand opening of Virtualis conference center in Second Life

On April 23 and 24, 2008, I attended the grand opening of Virtualis, an amazing new conference center in Second Life. I was new to Second Life until about 3 weeks ago, so there was that amazement to get past. If you don't know, Second Life is a 3D virtual world that lets you build practically anything, script objects (using Second Life Script, or SLS), interact with others using an avatar (your persona in Second Life), by text or speech, and even conduct business! You can purchase virtual land and create your own world, keeping it private or making it public, as you choose.

In fact, many businesses have locations in Second Life. Here's a short list:

You can find a more complete list at New Business Horizons. I've also read that many universities teach classes in Second Life.

The people of Virtualis

Virtualis is the dream-come-true of Dan Parks, its owner. Dan is President / Creative Director of Corporate Planners Unlimited, Inc. and a member of MPI (Meeting Professionals International) and several other meeting/ conference/ travel-related organizations. Working closely with Dan is Gloria Nelson, CSEP (Certified Special Events Professional), who has her own event design and meeting management company, Gloria Nelson Event Design, LLC. Several other people are involved as well, but I can't list them all.

Over the last couple of years, the team has designed, built, and programmed the most incredible conference center, one that can hold many types of events. They've created both traditional (as traditional as something can be in Second Life) and outrageously creative meeting places. The facility can be used for conferences, meetings, parties -- practically any type of get together you can think of. They've already done a priviate birthday party, with live music, dancing, and virtual food!

What you could do with Virtualis

Do you arrange meetings or conferences? Imagine the possibilities! People who can't travel can attend via the Virtualis conference center. They can see live streaming video of the live conference. You can even do the opposite -- stream a video of the Virtualis group into your live conference. People from around the world can meet there for smaller meetings. They even have a yacht! Virtualis can set up an exhibition hall, highlighting speakers, with working links to their Web sites. After the meeting, attendees can enjoy entertainment such as music, dancing, even fireworks!

If you have a chance to present in Virtualis, or any place in Second Life, first read my tip on best practices for presenting in Second Life.

The grand opening

The grand opening included presentations throughout the two-day period. Here's a partial list of the speakers:

• Joan Eisenstodt, Chief Strategist with Eisenstodt Associates, LLC
• Jim Carroll, futurist
• James Hogg
• B. Joseph Pine II
• John Foster
• Barbara Dunn

Look at the gallery of screenshots I took, and be amazed. I was!

That's me in the foreground (my avatar, actually), watching a slide in the ballroom.

Me again, but now you're looking the other way, so you can see the rest of the ballroom. Each avatar's name floats above his or her head.

The ballroom again, from a different angle. The speaker is at the podium and a slide is on another screen.

A special breakout room with the theme of creativity. On the ladder is Joan Eisenstodt, the speaker. I'm sitting on a palette, listening. The screen is to the left.

Here's another view of the creativity meeting room.

Joan Eisenstodt on the ladder, speaking on the topic "Is PowerPoint Evil? I had to include that one!

Gloria Nelson speaking from the floor. A flower arrangement is in the foreground.

Here I am "reading a book" outside the conference center, under a tree.

Here we're watching live, streamed video on the screen.

Time for some entertainment! I changed the world setting to midnight to show you the fireworks.

Partying on the outdoor dance floor. The lights swirl continuously. The music can be recorded or live. By clicking a scripted ball, you can make your avatar dance!

Here's a movie (4 sec.) of Jodiah Jensen, a programmer, showing on the spot how he can rotate a cube in the air.

Here's another movie (13 sec.) showing the dance party. Note that the movie is"laggy" because of the process of capturing it. When I viewed it at the time, the motion was smooth and up to speed.

If you're interested in using Virtualis for a conference, meeting, or party, contact Dan Parks.

Review of PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit

A new book by Geetesh Bajaj and Echo Swinford, PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit, is both unique and uniquely useful. PowerPoint 2007's interface, the ribbon, is so different from what we're used to, that running through a tutorial like this one will make the difference between tearing your hair out while staying up until midnight and smoothly, efficiently getting the job done on time.

Both authors are PowerPoint MVP's (Microsoft Valuable Professionals) and experts in their field. If I could distinguish the two, I'd say that Echo is the technical expert and Geetesh is the design expert. The individual talents that each author brings to the book is part of what makes it so valuable. Each makeover combines both workflow magic and design artistry so that you'll learn much more than you expect.

Warning: Don't try to read this book on your morning commute! I tried reading the book on its own and it wasn't very satisfying: the authors don't always show you before and after for each and every step. This book is a tutorial and you need to put the excellent CD in your CD drive and do the exercises. It's in the actual execution of the makeovers that you see the results on your screen. Meanwhile, you get a feel for the fastest way to correct major problems in a presentation and how to make it look much better.

The book has an easy humor which I found appealing. Here's a quote from p. 87:

"Every company has folks who are either too busy or too lazy. They don't want to do anything until the last minute, and the third presenter in our group presentation—Dan Klipkoos—is one of them! His slides look like a hurried, five-minute job. His reasoning is that he'll add the content after the presentation has been through the makeover that the design agency is doing!

"So, yes, you could fret and insist that Dan send the content now, but that won't help. Therefore, in this section, we'll show you how you can work with incomplete slides."

The CD includes all of the presentations that you'll work on. The authors have done something pretty amazing: they've saved each presentation at every step of every chapter so you can start at any point. This means that you don't need to go through an entire chapter if you don't want to. But I encourage you to do so, because the transformation that you'll see is very satisfying.

The CD also includes images, music tracks, templates, and themes.

If you go through this book, not only will you know PowerPoint 2007 a whole lot better, but you'll never look at a presentation in the same way again. You'll learn to apply a broad viewpoint that will enable you to vastly improve all of the presentations that you deal with.

Another plus is that the book is in full color! I'm very jealous, as none of my publishers has let me create a book in color. At least not yet. But for PowerPoint, the result is stunning. You really can see the difference between that blue and that gray.

If you've recently upgraded to PowerPoint 2007 and want to not only learn how to use it well but to improve your presentations, I highly recommend this book.

New e-booklet! "7 Steps to Great Images"

E-books make great take-homes for conferences and meetings. Recently, a conference organizer bought 40 copies of my 101 Tips Every PowerPoint User Should Know, to give each attendee one on a flash drive. What a great idea! And more useful than the tee shirt you usually get.

Read more about it!

New poll on which versions of PowerPoint you use

The results of the poll are in. With 97 people responding, here are the results:

The percent of people using PowerPoint 2007 is steadily rising. Some people are upgrading, but others are buying new computers that come with Microsoft Office 2007 and thus upgrade by default. I've been including instructions for PowerPoint 2007 for months, but now I'll start including an occasional tip that applies specifically to 2007.

Prezvision: An interview with Wataru Sugawara, CEO of SoftAdvance

Prezvision (actually, prezvision, with a lower-case "p") is an exciting new 3D animation program that starts with PowerPoint content and creates an amazing transformation. Because you start with PowerPoint, you can easily create 3D animation that would otherwise involve very expensive software and a huge learning curve.

Wataru Sugawara, CEO of SoftAdvance, the company that created Prezvision, and Ron Radcliff, VP of Business Development, showed off the software's capabilities at PowerPoint Live in New Orleans, in October, 2007.

Wataru Sugawara agreed to be interviewed by e-mail.

EF: What gave you the idea to create prezvision?
WS: The motivation to develop 3D presentation software was for my use first. I had been selling my products, including system integrations professional services. I could not well explain what I wanted to say with 2D drawings, because 2D is not natural as our physical world. We need 3D with motion and with multimedia including video, audio and picture to explain well whatever new idea, plan, vision, product, etc. we have. I always imagine everything with 3D and the time dimension. There was no software in the world that provided what I needed.

EF: Give us a brief overview of the features of prezvision.
WS: It is 3D multimedia presentation software. It helps you to present your plan, idea, product, etc. visually instead of with text. Here's a list of the major functions that you can do with prezvision software:

• Create 3D animation: You can easily develop 3D animation without learning or using Adobe Flash.
• Incorporate Motion: You can demonstrate movement & state of change, like a door opening / closing.
• Add special effects with "Zooming" features: You can incorporate a zooming effect which includes depth and motion (small-to-big, deep-to-front or hide-to-appearing) in order to keep your audience focused and engaged.
• Customizable 3D Slide Designs: You can design 3D images, with varied shapes, sizes, directions and depth on a slide canvas.
• Develop creative picture shows: You can develop an unique album with 3D pictures & special effects.
• Build Multimedia presentations: You can incorporate pictures, videos, sound and other input sources into your presentations. You can export your presentations as Quicktime Movies, SnapShots, Image sequences & PDF.

Here are two other important features:

• Offers Microsoft PowerPoint compatibility: You can import data from PowerPoint (today) and in the future you'll be able to export data into PowerPoint presentations.
• Utilizes a user friendly, defacto, graphical user interface: You will find prezvision's GUI is based upon an industry defacto standard. The user friendliness makes it easy to create and manage the prezvision 3D multimedia presentation software.

EF: How is Prezvision unique?

WS: Prezvision is unique in several ways:

1. It's easy to create animations, 3D and multimedia presentations. The moving slide-show like telop used in TV news shows can be created with the same result and working time in PowerPoint. [Editor's note: "telop" is a projection device that projects and superimposed images or text over the TV image.]
2. Prezvision automatically recognizes any difference in two consecutive slides and creates a motion transition as animation. This function is called 'Seamless transition." There are a lot of functions that make this type of animation easy to create. For instance, all shapes on a slide are named by ID. The shape of the same name on two slides is changed. The user can freely rename a shape to control the animation. We are applying for an international patent for this feature.
3. Meaningful animation: The essence of animation of prezvision is different from the animation of PowerPoint. It is not eye-Candy. It makes an animation of your product, result, plan, idea, etc. All animations created by prezvision are meaningful.

EF: How do you envision people using Prezvision? By that I mean, for what purpose?

WS: We are targeting all types of people who must impart to others a clear visual message in a short time. For instance, you can imagine the following people:

• A teacher at an elementary school who wants to develop original teaching material with 3D and seamless transitions. This can help the kids' imagination. Instead,a teachers now show pictures in 2D and reduce the kids' creativity because they translate from the natural 3D world to artificial 2D pictures.
• A marketing expert who must communicate with the media to introduce a new product without misunderstanding.
• A CEO who must communicate his plan, target, vision, schedule of the future with visualization to the stockholders or market.
• Officers or managers who wants to explain a new business model to concerned parties.
• The salesperson who wants to propose a new service to a customer.
• Postgraduate students or professors who wants to rouse the audience's attention at an academic conference.

EF: What are your future plans for the software?
WS: First of all, prezvision must be used by users in U.S. After we achieve this, I want to achieve the following.

• Improved of power of expression: Power of expression can be improved more if we use latest technology of real-time 3D. The critical point is to balance the power of 3D acceleration of mobile PCs.
• Improved convenience: Especially, I want to improve cooperation with office software.
• Strengthening of network functioning : I want to enable prezvision to operate, and to refer to the created file, in a Web browser. However, I must wait for a standard and efficient 3D rendering platform to appear.
• Correspondence to business solution: It will be important that prezvision be equipped the interfaces with solution packages as a front end of visualization of business applications. This story might exceed the frame of prezvision.
• Internationalization: Action on the world-wide market. Language localization itself is not a big problem. I want to make software that corresponds to the difference of culture in each country.
  

EF: Do you have some samples on your Web site?
WS: The latest information is at the following URL. http://www.prezvision.com/en/. In addition, you can see it on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAfLj5uqb90.

EF: What background do you have and what previous work have you done?
WS: I am a software designer, system integrator, and professional IT consultant who leads the IT strategy from management strategy. My boast is that I was the lead programmer of a system integration project using NeXT-computers. Perhaps it was the first case in Japan. It was exciting every day as the lead programmer.

Note: Version 1 is available now from www.prezvision.com/en. Version 2, which has more features like Graph from Excel, CAD import and so on, is due out in April.

Recent seminars and webinars (updated)

I wanted to let you know about some of the recent talks I've given, in case you might find a similar event useful for your organization. I've started to give webinars (web-based seminars) and seminars at conferences. The webinars have been on the following topics:

• Designing PowerPoint Slides Like a Pro
• Making the Upgrade to PowerPoint 2007 Easy
• Creating Interactive Quizzes in PowerPoint

The webinars are generally 1 to 1-1/4 hours long and include a Question and Answer period. I provide a downloadable handout covering all the material, as well as the PowerPoint presentation I'm using. These webinars take a hands-on approach; I go into Normal view and show participants exactly how to create the effects I'm discussing.

The seminars were on Creating Effective Presentations; the PowerPoint 101 session took a basic approach, and the Advanced PowerPoint session covered video, Flash, and animation.

I've received unsolicited comments like:

"I enjoyed your webinar yesterday and have already used one of the things I learned."

"Thanks for the presentation, yesterday. I found it very helpful!"

"Thank you for an informative presentation– your techniques are good."

"I WAS AMAZED HOW MUCH STUFF COULD BE DONE."

"We enjoyed your presentation today. It was very thorough and clear."

"Thank you for the presentation! It was very informative. I’m so glad that you focused on 2002-2003 versions. I look forward to getting the tips and sharing them with those who were with me. We had 10 people in the room."

Other possible topics are:

• Animation Techniques
• Tips Every PowerPoint User Should Know (Based on my e-book, 101 Tips Every PowerPoint User Should Know)
• PowerPoint Design for Non-Designers

I can easily create a customized webinar or seminar to meet your needs. Training directors and conference planners may find these sessions especially useful.

Please contact me if you're interested in scheduling a seminar or webinar.

PowerPoint Live 2007 Report

I've just returned from PowerPoint Live 2007 in New Orleans. This is my second year, and each time I've felt that I learned so much! This time I'd say that the underlying theme was creating audience-centered presentations. (That's my term; I didn't hear it at the conference.)

Rick Altman

PowerPoint Live offers 3 sessions at a time, for 3 days, and I couldn't attend all of them, of course. The 3 tracks are:

• Tools and Techniques
• Design and Deliver
• Beyond PowerPoint

You'll be seeing some tips, techniques, and articles come out over the next few months that are based on what I learned. For now, I'll review some of the highlights of the sessions I attended.

Jim Endicott of Distinction Communication, Inc., gave the keynote address on Monday morning, "We've Come a Long Way: The Coming of Age for the Presentation Professional." An important point was that we need to switch from focusing on "giving" presentations to focusing on audiences "getting" them. He made the point that companies spend $100,000's on printed materials and their Web site, but often don't do the same for PowerPoint presentations, even though those presentations are just as crucial to the company. He said that companies are just starting to realize how much is lost with bad presentations.

Julie Terberg of Terberg Design spoke about developing PowerPoint templates for larger corporations. However, the points she made were useful for anyone who creates many presentations that have shared features. She explained how to create sets of slides for various situations and concepts that can then be used over and over. One point that she made that I heard several times was the importance of not putting too much content on a slide. This is because people simply can't grasp so much at one time. The solution is to split up the content into multiple slides.

Julie Terberg and Nancy Duarte

Sandy Johnson of Presentation Wiz did a session called, "Living with Bullets: When you must use bullets in your slides." The title says it all: bullets are not the ideal format for slides. However, she went through some pointers that can help make bullets a little more palatable, including:

• Reducing the number of bulleted items on a slide (she recommends 5 maximum of 5 words each)
• Putting sub-bullets into Speaker Notes, not on the slides
• Highlighting important words or phrases (see my tip on this subject)
• Being sure not to read the slides (this point was repeated many times during the entire conference)

For designers who are told that they must use bullets, she recommended an excellent technique; return to the person with a bulleted slide and an optional graphics slide (containing the same content). He or she will almost always choose the graphics slide.

Julie Terberg of Terberg Design also gave a fascinating demonstration of some of her animation work, slides that were done in PowerPoint but looked like they were done in Adobe® Flash®. She works in a precise way, using a grid and guides to precisely position objects, and then adding multiple animation effects to the objects. She plans these complex animations on paper first, and some take many hours to complete. You had to witness these creations to appreciate just what PowerPoint can do.

Jim Endicott of Distinction Communication, Inc., also gave a second session, "The Mother of All Makeovers: Using images, not words, to tell a story." Jim talks a lot about telling stories and about the fundamentals of persuasion. To make the point that slides shouldn't be overloaded with content, he related a 2000 study at Columbia University. Here's an article, "Too many choices?" about that study. When people had a choice of a table with 24 jars of jam and another with 6 jars of jam, more people went over to the table with more jars of jam, but they bought less jam from that table! The table with fewer jars of jam had fewer visitors, but sold more. Jim spoke about the importance of finding out what the audience wants, and knowing what you want the audience to do after the presentation. Buy something? Call for a consultation? He covered his "Seven-Step Persuasive Message Model," which shows a presenter how to organize an effective message.

Each year the participants meet with representatives from Microsoft and get to ask lots and lots of questions. This is very fulfilling! (Haven't you wanted to tell Microsoft what you think about PowerPoint?) Not only did we get answers, but we learned a lot about how the PowerPoint team thinks and why some requests are hard to fulfill.

The Microsoft PowerPoint Team

Nancy Duarte, of Duarte Design, gave the second keynote presentation, called "Shift Happens: New changes in global technology will impact presentations." Some of the talk was inspired by her recent visit to India. Nancy worked on Al Gore's famous presentation, "An Inconvenient Truth." She spoke about several trends that are affecting presentation design today, including the global economy, the proliferation of electronic devices, and social networking. She also mentioned an interesting study showing that companies that consider design important ("design-driven companies") do better financially than those who don't emphasize it. This is the importance of branding and presentations are a part of it.

George McCaskill, CTO of Perspector, a 3D add-in for PowerPoint, gave a fascinating talk called, "Lessons from the Rocket Scientists: Building presentations that take off." It looked at presentations from a systems point of view, including:

• Thinking about the problem before the solution
• Focusing on the presentation as well as the slides
• Understanding the role of modeling

He discussed Requirements Management, which involves collecting the requirements, or needs, for the presentation and managing the process to meet those needs. It uses processes like project management to ensure a higher rate of success.

Glen Millar, of PowerPoint Workbench, introduced a fantastic, new animation technique, which I'll reveal later on, perhaps next month! Keep an eye out for it. He calls it the false background.

Rick Altman, of R. Altman & Associates, also the organizer of PowerPoint Live, and Sandy Johnson produced a "play" to show how a PowerPoint expert in a company could respond to poorly-made slides that come from presenters. Topics included:

• How to convince them to reduce the amount of text on a slide (pity the poor audience!) - highlighting main concepts, changing bullets to headings, using animation, and splitting content into several slides.
• Creating charts that are comprehensible, including formatting, animating ,and ungrouping them
• Transforming text into "infographics," which use graphics and animation to develop a model and tell a story
• Animating tables to introduce the concepts first and then bring in the data.
• A tip on converting a presentation to a text file when there's text in text boxes and AutoShapes. You'll see that as a new tip on my site, soon! This is helpful when a presentation is so awful that you want to start from scratch, but without retyping all the text!

Dave Paradi of Think Outside The Slide wound up with an excellent talk on "The Research Behind Effective Visuals." He explained the research and reasoning behind the following principles:

• The importance of structured content for understanding
• Why contrast and color selection are important
• How to choose the right font
• How to calculate the minimum font size that your audience can read
• The process of selecting what to present for maximum retention
• Ways to transform text to visuals, or, how not to annoy your audience
• Types of visuals that you can use, depending on your content: trends, processes, comparisons, stories about people and locations, and so on.
• Making the point stand out without using a laser pointer, and why
• The importance of rehearsal, or, why not to tweak those slides just before you present!

As you can see, the overall message was that effective presentations consider the audience first and design around them. Just shoving text and data out there doesn't work very well.

If you need to create effective, memorable presentations, I highly recommend attending PowerPoint Live next year.

Interview with Geetesh Bajaj, PowerPoint MVP, author of Cutting Edge PowerPoint For Dummies

Geetesh Bajaj is the owner of Indezine.com, one of the best PowerPoint web sites around. He has also written a couple of books on PowerPoint, been the technical editor for several of my books, and is a PowerPoint Most Valuable Professional. I asked him several questions about his book, Cutting Edge PowerPoint for Dummies, to discover what this book is really about.

Ellen: Please explain what Cutting Edge PowerPoint For Dummies covers.

Geetesh: Cutting Edge PowerPoint does not cover every feature in PowerPoint. And nor does the term "cutting edge" means creating sci-fi style presentations with amazing sounds and metallic backgrounds. Now that I have told you what it doesn't cover, let me tell you about what you will learn in the book.

The book is based on my belief that any presentation is a sum of its elements -- and these elements can be slide objects like text, shapes, pictures, info-graphics, and multimedia; or they can be abstract like the flow, navigation, interaction, or color. So each of these topics gets a chapter all to itself where I teach how a PowerPoint presenter or presentation designer can benefit from using these elements in concert with each other. That is what I call "cutting edge" -- so readers can quickly create presentations that look professional, and are also effective. I think color is the most important element that readers to need to be aware of -- nothing can make or break a presentation more than its colors.

There are also chapters on templates, masters, themes, distribution, and add-ins -- and the usual Top Ten chapters in the For Dummies style.

There are two versions of the book available: one called Cutting Edge PowerPoint For Dummies is addressed to users of PowerPoint 2000, 2002, and 2003 while the new Cutting Edge PowerPoint 2007 For Dummies was rewritten for PowerPoint 2007.

Ellen: Why did you see a need for this type of material?

Geetesh: I found that all existing PowerPoint books focused on PowerPoint's menus and commands rather than the elements that make up a slide. And since all slide elements have to work together and exploit the synergies created, there should be a book that looks at the art of creating presentations with the "elements" approach.

Also, I have been working with PowerPoint for almost a decade now -- and I have been an awarded Most Valuable Professional (MVP) from Microsoft for 6 consecutive years. I have learnt so much that you can't find in print. I wanted to share that information with everyone. I feel a book that contains this type of material will help break the monotony of similar looking presentations, and encourage users to experiment and try out newer ideas.

Ellen: Could you provide an example of content from the book that's unique?

Geetesh: Essentially, the entire book is different. This book is not addressed to the user who needs to learn where the menus or tabs are -- or those readers who need a screenshot that shows them how they can save a file. Fortunately, with computing being so prevalent these days, many users don't need that sort of information. This allows me to use the extra pages saved by not including that info for content that is unique and useful. Even then, I ended up with more pages than what the publisher would allow -- so we squeezed in as much as I could, and added a bonus chapter that we put on the CD that's included with the book.

Speaking of the CD, that alone is worth more than the cost of this book!

This book can be used by all PowerPoint users -- be they new users or advanced presentation designers -- that's something unique about the book.

Ellen: In your opinion, what 3 (or so) things could people do to improve their PowerPoint presentations?

Geetesh: I'll say they need to work on 4 areas:

First, as I said in one of the earlier answers, they need to be aware of what color can do. Color is powerful stuff -- ignore it at your own peril.

Secondly, they need to make their slides look more consistent with the use of masters, templates, themes, and slide layouts.

Then they need to be more imaginative -- they need to experiment more and not stay confined to those rules. But to be aware of what rules you are breaking, you first need to know the rules -- that gives you the freedom to break them!

And finally they need to learn a few tricks so that they can quickly makeover a drab presentation to a lively one -- this book has plenty of such tricks.

Note: You can read Chapter 1 for free on the publisher's Web site.

Interview with Tim Hards of Perspector

Perspector is a new add-in for PowerPoint that offers powerful 3D capabilities. (Read on for a special offer!) Because I work in 3D in AutoCAD, I often wish that PowerPoint would do more with its 3D features. For example, you can easily create a 3D diagram like this one:

Here's another graphic. Don't you just want to turn over the cube and see the other sides?

You can find more information at the Perspector Web site, and specifically see more slide examples on their Example Slides page.

I was intrigued enough to ask Tim Hards, the principle developer of Perspector if I could interview him for this site. Here are my questions and hi answers:

Ellen: Why did you create Perspector?

Tim: When communicating an idea or set of ideas to an audience, it is easier to grab and keep their attention if you have stimulating images to illustrate or otherwise entertain them while delivering your message. Adding 3D images to your presentation helps with both engaging their emotions and conveying information. Perspector started as a means to help communicate complicated information by enabling presenters to create their own 3D images. We now see that our mission is wider; we want to help a presenter not only to explain, but also to entertain.

Ellen: Briefly explain what Perspector adds to PowerPoint.

Tim: We add the extra "3rd" dimension to PowerPoint. With the success of movies like Toy Story and Shrek, not to mention computer games, nearly everyone is aware of the 3D capabilities of computers. The major change in the last half decade is that even very ordinary computers used for business purposes are capable of rendering impressive 3D graphics in real time. So while we are all now used to consuming 3D graphics, it is still a very exclusive club that creates new 3D images. Perspector opens the door of 3D image creation to anyone mildly familiar with the PowerPoint user interface. And having played a computer game won't hurt either!

Ellen: What is your favorite feature of Perspector?

Tim: When using Perspector, you don’t feel detached from PowerPoint. We have worked very hard to make the extension into 3D seamless - when looking to turn a shape in 3D, you are probably likely just to try the extra grab handle we have added to make that possible in the extra dimension rather than agonise over how to do it. There are lots of additional capabilities offered by Perspector, but we are most proud of the fact that you can find them without too much bother.

Ellen: Could you provide a scenario of how a user would gain value from incorporating Perspector into a PowerPoint presentation?

Tim: The motivating scenario behind the whole Perspector project is the "Layered Hierarchical Diagram." Our CTO George McCaskill has long been bothered by the lack of software support for drawing diagrams where you have several layers of information which have relationships between the layers which also need to be illustrated. That sounds complicated, but the pictures are much easier to understand, as shown in his hierarchical diagrams blog post. Here is a layered diagram showing the location of George’s house in Edinburgh:

Ellen: Does Perspector work in PowerPoint 2007?

Tim: Perspector not only works in PowerPoint 2007, but it also amplifies your enjoyment of PPT 2007's great new features in the 3rd dimension!

Ellen: H ave you had teachers and educators use Perspector? If so, how?

Tim: One of our very first users of Perspector was a science teacher; he submitted a great example to us which uses Perspector’s animation capability to illustrate chemical bonding (ethene polymerisation). His example is available to download from our site from here.

Ellen: Any other comments you would like to make?

Tim: Just to say thank you for this opportunity to talk about Perspector, and to urge anyone interested in learning more to check out the examples on http://www.perspector.com – hopefully we may help you with some inspiration for that next tricky presentation!

Tim is providing a special offer to EllenFinkelstein.com subscribers and visitors - 20% off on Perspector Standard Edition (normally $99) and Perspector Professional Edition (which includes 3D charts and slide layouts and is normally $299) for 1 month from Monday, August 27, 2007. To get the discount, enter ellenfinkelstein as the coupon code on the purchase page.

Web seminar, "Creating Interactive Quizzes in PowerPoint" a success!

On June 20th, I delivered a webinar to over 75 participants -- and 40 more people paid for the CD! This was one of the largest webinars ever for Eli Journals/AudioEducator.com. For that webinar, I created a tutorial covering two of the techniques -- a simple quiz and a Jeopardy-like game. You can download that tutorial free here! If you would like to see the entire recording of the webinar, you can buy the CD from the sponsor's Web site. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the option to buy the CD.

Press Release: How to Do Everything with Microsoft® Office PowerPoint® 2007 published!

How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, published by McGraw-Hill/Osborne, is an in-depth and complete guide to the most widely-used presentation software in the business. PowerPoint expert Ellen Finkelstein provides detailed information on new features in the just-released PowerPoint 2007 as well as everything readers need to know to create dynamic and professional-quality presentations.

Through clear explanations, handy tips, and knowledgeable recommendations, How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 delivers that extra edge for best practice design and organizational techniques that make presentations leap off the page. This essential resource delivers everything presenters need to get started, organize content, and add finishing touches for a top-notch presentation.

The book not only explains how to use PowerPoint features, but why and when to use them. For example, the section on recoloring graphics starts, “You can recolor images to match a color theme, to provide more contrast for text, or for any artistic reason. Recoloring pictures can be indispensable when you have a picture that does not look good against the presentation background or if you need a series of color-coordinated images.” Technical instructions are balanced with helpful suggestions, provided in the context of the wholeness of the presentation.

Written for both beginners and experienced PowerPoint users who want to sharpen their skills, the book covers a wide range of topics, including:

• Using text, graphics, sound, and animation to get the message across
• Organizing an effective outline
• Using text, color, and layout effectively
• Drawing and laying out a slide with pinpoint precision
• Creating effective graphics, tables, and diagrams
• Sharing and presenting content using a wide choice of media
• Publishing a presentation on the Internet or an intranet
• Creating interactive slide shows

In-depth coverage of new PowerPoint 2007 features includes:

• Redesigned user interfaces
• SmartArt diagrams
• New special effects
• Custom layouts
• QuickStyles
• WordArt for any text
• Compatibility and roundtripping for collaborating with those who don't upgrade
• New security features

How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 also delves into presentation skills, such as rehearsing in stages, using animation and transition effects wisely, choosing a projector, and speaking in front of a group.

Throughout the book are two types of special sections, “How To” and “Did You Know,” that provide advanced and supplementary material. As a special promotion, the content of these sections is available as a free download from the author's web site.

About the author:
Ellen Finkelstein has written several books on PowerPoint, AutoCAD, Flash, and other computer software. She maintains a Web site that includes tips, tutorials, and news on PowerPoint and AutoCAD at www.ellenfinkelstein.com. There, PowerPoint users can sign up for the free PowerPoint Tips Newsletter. Her articles have been published in numerous publications, both in print and online.

How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 (ISBN 0-07-226339-3; 432 pages; $24.99) is available in bookstores, from Amazon.com, from the McGraw-Hill Professional web site, and from the author's web site.

For quantity purchases, corporate purchases, international inquiries, please contact 1-800-262-4729.

For author interviews, please contact:
Ellen Finkelstein, author, ellen@ellenfinkelstein.com

For media or user group review copies, artwork or excerpt permission, please contact:
Bettina Faltermeier, publicity manager, McGraw-Hill/Osborne
Bettina_faltermeier@mcgraw-hill.com; 212-904-3604

Review of PowerPoint 2007

I've been working hard on updating my PowerPoint, which will be called How to Do Everything with Microsoft® Office PowerPoint® 2007. It's due out in January. As I've gone through the chapters, I've delved into every nook and cranny of the new program, and here is my review. (Note: Features could change or be eliminated before the final version is shipped, but don't expect any major changes.)

Ribbon

Much has been made of the ribbon. Essentially, it's just one big toolbar with tabs. The old toolbars and menus are gone, but the old dialog boxes and taskpanes are mostly the same. Sometimes the ribbon is annoying, because you have to display the appropriate tab before you can get to the command you want. Other times, it's more efficient. It's not customizable, but there is a Quick Access toolbar at the top of the application window that you can customize.

Themes

A major new feature is themes. They are like templates, but they can't have slides in them. They are meant to contain design information only. You can create your own themes, save them, and reuse them, just like templates. Themes are made up of sets of theme colors (like the old color schemes), theme fonts (just two, one for titles and one for slide text), and theme effects, which are various treatments of shapes. (AutoShapes are now called just shapes.) You can quickly change the entire look of a presentation by changing the theme colors and theme effects. Another benefit is that Word and Excel can use them, too, but you need to understand them well to make this work effectively.

Background styles

Background styles are very simple backgrounds -- solids or simple gradients. Their advantage is that they look sleek and they know if they're light or dark. So, if you have a light background with dark text, you can switch to a dark background style and your text automatically becomes light -- no contrast problems!

Custom layouts

You can finally create your own layouts and save them in your templates and themes. Templates and themes now include all the layouts. To create your own layout, you insert one of 8 placeholder components, then resize and place them as you want. Slide masters have 12 layouts, by default, including section slides and comparison slides. I'm very pleased, as this was an improvement that I requested.

SmartArt graphics

SmartArt graphics are an evolution of the old diagrams, which were pretty useless. They're much better now. First of all, there are many more of them. Also, they work better; for example, you can convert bulleted text into a diagram. The styles look better, too.

Quick Styles

Everything has Quick Styles. These are preset formatting for shapes, backgrounds, charts, tables, pictures, SmartArt diagrams, and more. You get at these styles through drop-down galleries. What's cool about the galleries is the (almost all of the time), you can see the result on your slide by just hovering the cursor over a choice. So, no clicking and undoing over and over.

Would you like to see this in action? I'm still new at Camtasia, which is a program that takes videos of the screen. For some reason, it didn't pick up the Picture Styles. On my screen, the styles were expanded so I could choose them. But you see the results, as I try style after style. Do you like the one I finally chose? Watch the movie. (Note: This is a 9 MB file.)

New text styles

Text has more options, similar to Word. So you can do (all caps, small caps, strikethrough, double underline, and more.

New effects

Both shapes and text have new effects, specifically glow, soft edges, reflections, and bevels.

WordArt for any text

Speaking of text, you can apply WordArt-type effects to any text.

Charts integrated with Excel (if you have it)

Charts are done in Excel, not the old datasheet, if you have it. (Otherwise, you're back to the datasheet.) This gives you more capabilities, but also makes it easier to transfer data from Excel. They also have more formatting options.

Better gradients

Gradients are much improved; you can now have up to 10 colors! And specify where each color switches to another color. Hallelujah! (This was one that I asked for.) This one has 6 "stops."

Visibility and Selection taskpane

This new taskpane lets you set the visibility and display order (front to back) of objects, but also lets you rename them. This is very helpful for animating many objects on a slide.

Compatibility& roundtripping

There are extensive features for helping people who will be collaborating with those who don't upgrade. Features can be downgraded to 2003 levels and then automatically upgraded when you open a presentation in 2007 again (roundtripping).

Zipped XML format

The file format is different, and files are generally much smaller. The file is in XML format, then zipped.

New security features: document inspector, prevent changes (mark as final),

The document inspector removes personal information from a file. You can discourage changes by marking a presentation as final (although that can be changed). You can add a digital signature.

Save as PDF

You can save a presentation in PDF format, using a separate, free download.

Wide-screen slide sizes (16:9 and 16:10)

PowerPoint includes wide-screen sizes for wide screens.

Many other smaller changes

This list isn't nearly complete. Some other nice features are:

• Paragraph level rulers so you can change settings from paragraph to paragraph within a placeholder
• Columns (two or more) in a placeholder, text box, or shape
• Convert to Freeform: You can convert shapes to freeforms, so that you can edit their points and use Béziers on them.
• You can change brightness and contrast of a background image

Publish to HTML

This feature is pretty broken, unfortunately. PowerPoint 2007 saves to the same HTML as 2003, so you don't get any of the new features. Presentations don't display properly in Firefox. Maybe Firefox will update their browser?

Removed

Yes, some features have been removed:

• AutoContent Wizard: no great loss here
• Macro recorder: a great loss, in my opinion. Apparently, it wasn't working very well, anyway. For example, you couldn't record setting up animation. With the new features, it was only going to be worse. The macro recorder is still in Word and Excel.
• Broadcast feature: This feature for displaying a presentation to multiple people over the Web or an Intranet was difficult to use anyway.
• Send for Review: Instead, you just e-mail the presentation and add comments.
• Summary slides: I thought this was a good feature. Too bad.
• The title master: There's a new title layout in its place, which is simpler to use.
• Speaker Notes: I'll miss this one, too. It was the only simple way to add audience input during slide show view.

How to Do Everything with PowerPoint 2003.

Fully updated for PowerPoint 2003 with the same thorough coverage as the previous edition. Complete, clear explanations for creating effective PowerPoint presentations. New features include full-screen video, package to CD (create an auto-run CD), and more. Lots of supplementary material in the How To and Did You Know boxes.