Indiana University: IT Training Tips Blog

In an earlier blog post, Veronica discusses the lynda.com training that is available for Office for the Macintosh. I was happy to see that she was sharing this information, because participants who attend the IT Training & Education PowerPoint workshops almost always have questions about PowerPoint for Mac versus PowerPoint for Windows. Is the interface exactly the same in the two applications? Do they use the same filename extensions? Can I open up and edit a Mac presentation with the Windows version? Etc., etc...

Since IU students, staff, and faculty can now access lynda.com for free, it is a great time to learn more about PowerPoint for the Mac. In David Rivers' tutorial called PowerPoint 2008 for Mac Essential Training, you can find out everything there is to know about the Mac version of this application, including how to:

• create, edit, and share professional slideshows and presentations
• efficiently navigate presentations
• apply custom themes
• place and edit text, images, and multimedia files
• publish a self-running or manual slideshow

Mac users can watch all of the modules included in this comprehensive tutorial, or they can just watch the sections they are most interested in. If you have already attended our STEPS PowerPoint workshops, you may just want to view the section called Understanding the Interface.

If you haven't yet taken any of the STEPS workshops in this series, consider attending one of the following:

1. PowerPoint: The Basics
2. PowerPoint: Enhancing & Packaging a Presentation
3. PowerPoint: Customizing a Presentation
4. PowerPoint: Project Lab 

This is the last official blog article in the lynda.com series, but you can bet that there will be more information about this fantastic learning resource in upcoming posts.

Users of Microsoft Office can take advantage of STEPS workshops on Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access.  However, these workshops are all taught in Office 2007 for Windows; and Office for the Macintosh (both the 2004 and 2008 versions) have a significantly different interface. Don’t worry though - users of Office 2008 for the Mac can find the training they need in Office 2008 through lynda.com. From now until December 20, 2009, students, faculty and staff in the IU community receive FREE access to lynda.com. (For more information and a link to lynda.com training, visit http://ittraining.iu.edu)

For users already familiar with Office for Mac, one tutorial on Lynda gives a comprehensive look at just the new features in the 2008 suite. Other topics of training include essential training for Word, PowerPoint and Excel as well as Entourage, the personal information manager. For a more detailed listing of titles included in the Word, Excel and PowerPoint tutorials in the lynda.com site read the rest of this article.

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Interested in seeing some of the new features in Microsoft Office 2010? Check out this article on the Lifehacker blog containing some introductory videos from the Microsoft Office team:

Microsoft Office 2010 in Videos

You can also check out this user's videos on YouTube for more:

Office Videos

The release of Office 2010 isn't for a while yet, but Microsoft is being quite social with the changes being made.

Stay tuned to this blog and our website for information about training opportunities when Office 2010 gets released to the general public.

Enjoy!

In the IT Training & Education workshop at IU called PowerPoint: Customizing a Presentation, we show participants how to create a trigger from a clip art image. A trigger allows you to "set off" or start another animation by clicking on an element on a slide.

For example, you might have a question on a slide and then have several potential answers. You might set things up so that when your audience clicks on an answer, they get additional feedback. Perhaps a textbox appears that says, "Great job. This is the correct answer!" or maybe they hear a sound that tells them whether their answer is correct or incorrect. In this case, each of the text boxes that contains an answer is a trigger that starts another animation when clicked.

A trigger allows you to activate an animation whenever you want to see it. This means that you don't have to use the trigger at all, if you find that you don't need it during your presentation. The example used in our workshop is a practice problem. If a presenter is using the same slide show over and over again with different audiences, he may want to be able to access additional practice problems or examples for some groups but not others.

Creating triggers is not difficult and there are many good online tutorials that will walk you through the process. There is one step in the process, however, that workshop participants always have questions about. After you have added the supplemental information and the animation that brings it to the screen, you must set up the trigger. If you decide to use a clip art image for your trigger and you have more than one image on the slide, it is very difficult to pick out the image that you need from the list on the drop-down menu. (more...)

Today a colleague of mine emailed me with a question about using Flip camera footage in a PowerPoint 2007 presentation. He was attempting to use the raw video files from his camera in a presentation but couldn't get them to work.

PowerPoint 2007 allows users to import the following video file formats: .asf, .avi, .mpg or .mpeg, and .wmv. Since the Flip camera produces an uncompressed .avi file, we should be able to import it. Right?

Wrong. The fact is that even if your video file has the correct file extension, it may not play correctly if the correct version of the codec is not installed on your computer, or if the file is not encoded in a format that is recognized by your version of Windows.

The Flip camera captures video in MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile format and saves the video as an .avi file. So, then, perhaps we just need to download a codec and then it will work in PowerPoint?

No, wrong again. The Flip camera video uses the 3iVX codec. It can be downloaded free from a number of different sites on the Internet, and it is also included when you download and install the Flip camera software. But, even after installing the 3iVX codec, it isn't possible to insert Flip camera clips into a PowerPoint 2007 presentation.
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