Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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Recently, I was running a shared screen application with a colleague and she said, "Your PowerPoint doesn't look like my PowerPoint."

I am such a showoff.

But what she was referring to is that I had a set of menu items and toolbars that weren't on her installation of PowerPoint 2002/XP or 2003.

I've written about some of these products before, but I thought I might run through a few of the new programs that make PowerPoint more of a platform than just a standalone program.

Figure 328

In this screenshot you can see that among the new toolbars there are three "visitors" inside of PowerPoint:

OfficeFX – a 3D backgrounds package that converts an ordinary slide show into a real-time rendered extravanza with swimming dolphins and 3D objects and bullets.
Apreso – a presentation capture utility that enables you to grab yourself or any presenter on video as PowerPoint is running and publish the presentation with your video online, send it via email, or distribute it on DVD or CD.
TurningPoint – the software for an ARS (Audience Response) system that monitors the answers from wireless keypads and allows the presenter to show real time feedback to the attendees.

You can turn off these toolbars as you would any others, and monitor their presence, by clicking View > Toolbars on the main menu in PowerPoint. As I said, since I like to show off, I keep them open most of the time.

Figure 329

By the way, there are many other ways to jazz up PowerPoint presentations besides OfficeFX. Crystal Graphics has been in the business of providing very cool backgrounds and other enhancements for PowerPoint for some time.

Apreso is still kind of unique, particularly in its price range, but there are other presentation capture packages, notably Impatica, that enable you to stream a PowerPoint presentation.

For high end solutions in presentation capture, you might want to look at Sonic Foundry's Mediasite which we covered in a previous update on InfoComm.

This brings me up to the other visitors, on the main menu. Apreso has a menu item that complements its toolbar, but Breeze is a product from Macromedia that is also worth investigating.

Macromedia Breeze is a hosted solution that allows you to capture and compress your PowerPoint files (and also Flash 6 video files as inserts), along with audio narration, and post them on the Breeze server.

You must have a Breeze hosted account to do this, so it's being used mainly by larger companies for training and marketing presentations.

The Breeze menu includes a wizard that will test your microphone and walk you through capturing your PowerPoint presentation as a "Breezos" (Breeze file).

Figure 330

When you're ready to post the file, you will click the Publish link and enter the Breeze site where your content is hosted, log in, and upload the file(s).

Figure 331

TIP

One dividend of loading the Breeze plug-in for PowerPoint is the Insert Flash component of the Breeze menu. This makes inserting a Flash/Shockwave object, if you pardon the obvious pun, a "breeze" – while using the Insert > Object command in PowerPoint to support Shockwave is a pain.

NOTE

To create Flash movies that will run as PowerPoint inserts in Breeze, you need to use Flash MX. Keep up with the latest developments at InformIT's Flash Reference Guide by Matthew David. One tip I can give you is to publish your FLV (Flash movie) files in an earlier version of Flash/Shockwave to make them work in Breeze – no later than Flash 6.

There are a few other programs that I really like for PowerPoint that are worth a mention.

VOX Proxy makes using Microsoft Agent characters in PowerPoint a lot easier. It has a visual interface to combine characters' voices with PowerPoint slide elements, letting character walk across the screen, address the audience, and even point out important portions of the slide.

One inevitable challenge of using these plug-ins that that sometimes they clash. This happened to me with Apreso and OfficeFX, and the respective programs are trying right now to reconcile their code.

But there are workarounds. Don Brittain, OfficeFX's CEO sent me the following way to use the two plug-ins, albeit not together.

(You wouldn't need to use them together anyway, because Apreso cannot capture OfficeFX effects or inserted movies).

Here are the steps (assuming both OfficeFX and Apreso are installed, and the Apreso menu and toolbar appear in ppt but OfficeFX doesn't work):

Start regedit (via Start | Run | Regedit)
Navigate to My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\PowerPoint\Addins
Click on PPAddinShim.ConnectProxy to highlight the entire text. (This is Anystream's entry point for their Apreso add-in.)
Press F2 (to rename the key)
Add a "1" to the end (or any other character), so that the key now reads "PPAddinShim.ConnectProxy1"
Run PowerPoint: Apreso is gone, and OfficeFX runs fine
Exit PowerPoint, go back to RegEdit, press F2 to re-edit the text, remove the "1"
Restart PowerPoint: Apreso now appears and works, but OfficeFX is comatose.

Obviously this "fix" is not for the faint of heart nor is it something you are likely to try before presenting. You can say the same thing about moving a VOX Proxy presentation to another machine or laptop; presentations created with these plug-ins need to be tested, re-tested and backed up to death.

Nonetheless, using PowerPoint Plug-ins is a great way to set your presentation apart from the mundane, distribute it more effectively, and use some very cool procedures like Audience Response, animated characters and 3D backgrounds.

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