Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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If you've followed this column for a while you know that I am partial to PowerPoint, and that each year I attend and sometimes present at Rick Altman's excellent event — PowerPointLIVE.

As the conference has evolved over the years the focus has expanded beyond just using PowerPoint, and gone into how to present more effectively and the use of third party tools that complement and enhance PowerPoint.

This year, once again, there were three excellent keynote addresses. Jim Endicott talked about the evolution of the presentation professional and the need to treat PowerPoint as a medium beyond print, and how the world of corporate communication has changed and is continuing to change as new devices and new challenges emerge.

One of these challenges was accentuated by Nancy Duarte, the head of Duarte Design, who described a recent trip to India where she went to a girls school comprised of lower caste Indians who would in earlier years have been relegated to menial work, and who now all are proficient in computer skills, including PowerPoint. She addressed the challenges that face professionals who want to excel in a global economy in which India will soon be the 2^nd global leader — behind not the U.S. but China...

Dave Paradi rounded out the keynoters with a set of concrete parameters and research as to how to use a presentation tool like PowerPoint more effectively — from a nuts and bolts treatment of which fonts work best (sans serif — use large ones) to why colors really matter. Paradi's systematic approach to the singular medium that is PowerPoint can help any user explain concretely to a client or associate why slides are different from print — based on concrete research available on Dave's web site.

Microsoft was represented directly and indirectly by program managers and MVPs from the newgroups, who provided in depth information on the new version of PowerPoint 2007. The key to implementing the new packages of effects lies in their relationship to Themes in all of the major programs, but particularly PowerPoint.

MVPs like Echo Swinford offered several sessions on working with Themes, which include packages of Color Schemes, Fonts and Effects. While you can create custom themes in Word, Excel and PowerPoint (and use them across the programs to make your graphics and text look more consistent), Echo introduced the new Office Theme Builder — a new standalone program that enables anyone to create a new Office 2007 theme in Open XML format from scratch, or base it on a new theme. (We will cover this in an update soon devoted entirely to Themes and Theme Builder).

We have covered several of the techniques of Glen Millar in the past — he is truly a wizard of PowerPoint Animation — and we provided a glimpse in a series on advanced animation. This time Glen wowed the PowerPoint faithful with a new set of tricks set to music and patiently explained many of the ways he (and you) can take advantage of the optical illusion of a False Background. This essentially is the use of a background image combined with a set of AutoShapes that can capture the pixels from the background image and hide and reveal them through custom animation. As far as PowerPoint 2007 is concerned, Glen pointed out another key feature which is the ability to the background to instantly take an image from the Clipboard.

As usual, the expo at PowerPoint LIVE provided a great preview of new and exciting products to use with PowerPoint.

TechSmith has a new version of Camtasia Studio, which we have covered in the past for making PowerPoint movies. Camtasia has learned some new trick, including the ability to export in new Flash movie formats. It also makes it possible to synch audio with your slides by providing slide markers in the editing studio to use with the audio track. In addition to Flash, Camtasia now also publishes in iPod video, Silverlight compatible Windows Media and other formats. We will review the new version in more detail soon.

Print is still a major output medium for PowerPoint and many users fret the need to get their slides and handouts printed professionally in time for a presentation. One sponsor, Mimeo Corporation has the answer, with a facility based in Memphis right near Fedex, so that it can make the last shipment of the night. Mimeo published the PowerPoint LIVE guide and has won accolades from Fortune 500 companies as well as individual users for its ability to deliver first rate printouts on time.

A promising new third party app for PowerPoint from Japan is Prezvision, which has the ability to convert PowerPoint graphics and text to 3D. This is shared by its rival Perspector, which can create extruded shapes and 3D graphs. One new feature from Prezvision, however, and one I haven't seen yet anywhere else is the ability to map motion video onto 3D shapes in real time within PowerPoint. Stay tuned — we'll cover these technologies in more depth soon enough.

I also profited from the sessions by video guru Richard Harrington who brought more of a Mac-based approach to the video side of PowerPoint. While we've covered some of the popular PC based programs for turning PowerPoint into DVD, or extracting DVD formatted files for re-encoding and use in PowerPoint, Richard showed some interesting alternatives including Premiere Elements for video editing and went through the scenario of using embedded Flash files in PowerPoint.

Interestingly enough most of the machines available in the Help Center still ran PowerPoint 2003, which was also the most widely used version by this year's attendees. But many of the issues covered in the sessions and the help area concerned interoperability.

Many users of 2007 need to distribute in the 2003 compatible format, and run into trouble when they mix masters and designs from 2007 or convert to 2003 format. One important point that we will amplify in future updates is how using the more powerful Effects in PowerPoint 2007 results in text being converted to bitmapped images for the compatible version in 2003, in order to maintain the visual effects as closely as possible. Unfortunately, however, this makes the nicely formatted text uneditable in PowerPoint 2003.

The best practice — create in 2007 to take advantage of its new graphics features and then distribute, if necessary, in PowerPoint 2003 compatibility mode.

That was the big picture from the Big Easy. There was plenty more material for PowerPoint users and we will get into much of it in more detail in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

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