Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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If you've followed this column for a while, you know that probably my favorite MS Office program is PowerPoint, and every year I make the pilgrimage to Rick Altman's PowerPoint LIVE show.

There are lots of reasons for this besides the free breakfasts. I get to speak, and this year I was able to promote my new upcoming book, Solving the PowerPoint Predicament: Using Digital Media for Effective Communication (QUE). I'm excited about this book and will let you know more in the next Guide update.

Since Rick has held the conference at the Doubletree hotel in San Diego for three years, it's almost like a reunion. For example, Troy Chollar was there again, this time doing sessions on web conferencing and also additional programs to enhance your productivity.

Design gurus Nancy Duarte and Julie Terberg provide insights into how to make your slides look like anything but PowerPoint. I strongly urge any non-designer who thinks they have an eye for good composition to go to these ladies' websites and look at some samples. It is guaranteed to change the way you think about design, unless you are in fact a designer.

What's great is that the attendees get into the act. There are contests (including one for the best template, which is used for conference presentations and the winner gets free travel and conference attendance) and makeovers, taking average presentations and turning them into more eye-catching and effective slide shows.

One theme this year was trying to make Office 2007 design features available in PowerPoint 2003. While the Microsoft team and some presenters showed off the next version of PowerPoint, Sandra Johnson took her inspiration and created a design template in 2003 using some of the same techniques.

She took the Metro theme that will be part of Office 2007 and used 2003 features to create a similar design template.

Figure 1111

If you look around the web today you see some similar design themes. What it takes in PowerPoint is the ability to simply copy and rotate an image or Word Art 180 degrees using the green rotate tool.

Figure 1112

Now it's easy to make the shadow image smaller, and select it, right click and use the Format AutoShape command to reduce its transparency to around 50%.

Figure 1113

If you want to animate the appearance of the image and its blurred shadow together, use the With Previous command or select both images, right click again, and Group them to be one object.

Just using this trick on a few slides can give your presentation the look of one created with PowerPoint 2007. Of course in the new version these features will just involve selecting the option from a gallery of similar effects and applying them.

PowerPoint LIVE also has plenty of vendors for the PowerPoint universe. My pals from Office FX were showing off their latest version that also has an Interactive Media Player, which enables users to render movies inside the incredible 3D backgrounds out to full frame rate movies with incredible quality.

While my sessions on DVD and podcasting used Camtasia Studio to create a movie file of PowerPoint to burn to a DVD, the Office FX version would also work very well and incorporate broadcast graphics.

Another scenario that is gaining popularity is turning PowerPoint into Flash (or more accurately Shockwave); there are dozens of programs that claim to do this effectively. I like one created and published by a neighbor of mine in L.A. — Wild Presenter from Wildform has a host of great features, probably the best of which is the ability revise the final version without returning to PowerPoint and going through the process again. I intend to review the product at a later date.

Wildform also claims to create much smaller and faithful files (up to 96%) from PowerPoint, which is also the province of PPTminimizer. With so many PowerPoint presentations posted for download or attached to email, this can be a great feature. The product can run from a CD or even a flash drive, which is cool because if you have a tiny capacity flash drive, compressing a highly photographic file is a great feature as well.

Rick always has great keynoters and this year was no exception. Peggy Duncan is a tiny bundle of energy who speaks to groups about productivity and time management. But instead of just using her insights as a soft skills talk on getting rid of clutter and purging junk (which she does extremely well), she has many concrete tips on exactly how to do that (on her web site and in several books).

What makes Duncan walk the walk is her knowledge and use of technology to streamline busy peoples' lives effectively. She knows her PowerPoint well enough to have given a one hour course on how to use it effectively for business (similar to my new book), but she also excels (pardon the pun) at Outlook and other Office programs.

I will be reviewing her book on how to "Conquer Email Overload" (with Better Habirs, Etiquette and Outlook 2003) next month, but I suggest you give it a look now. Her one hour Outlook sessions was chock full of tips and tricks that can help anyone do a lot more than handle email — she shows you how to integrate your calendar and contact list with some phenomenal shortcuts.

She showed off a product I also intend to try and review — Anagram for Outlook — which promises to be a huge timesaver in terms of inputting contact information from email using artificial intelligence.

It doesn't hurt that Peggy is a scream. I laughed harder (appropriately I might add) during her talk than during many professional comedy acts I have seen.

So as usual at PowerPoint LIVE I had a blast — reconnected with many old friend, met some new ones, and came away knowing more about this program than I thought possible. I'm ready to update my new book...

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