Indiana University: IT Training Tips Blog

If you are ready to break out of the PowerPoint mold and infuse rich design features with multimedia into your slide shows, create an interactive InDesign document for your next presentation. Adobe InDesign offers Presentation mode with buttons, transitions, and all interactive bells and whistles.

You can watch how to to do it here:

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adobe-and-your-voice/creating-your-personal-brand-episode-creating-a-slide-presentation/

And you can check out all the features with written step-by-step how-to’s here:

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/indesign/cs/using/WS328f5ee33f08f77d1e63e3d120f2667a4c-7ffe.html

You’re in class on the first day and the professor is going over the syllabus. There are readings, papers, quizzes; all of the usual stuff. She says that if you participate in class and turn in your assignments you’ll get a B.  Then she mentions the big end-of-semester project  that counts for 70 percent of your grade. If you do well on this, you’ll get an A. You hear this and say to youself, “I’d better get started on this right away!” Of course you do. You’re a go-getter.

You decide to make a list of things that would make your presentation stand out.

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On this week’s episode we’re talking about what’s new on the IT Training Tips blog.

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I recently came across an IT Training Tips Blog post by Donna K. Jones entitled “Renaming Clip Art Images When Creating Triggers in PowerPoint 2007 (Or… Using the Selection Pane)“.

“What?” I said to myself, “You can do that?”

Well it turns out you can. In my several years of using PowerPoint I have never noticed this Selection Pane, but there it was right under Bring Forward and Send Backward in the Arrange group in the Format tab.

Back in the day when I was using PowerPoint to create animations, and then converting them into video with Camtasia Studio for my IT Help Podcast, I could really have used this great feature.

Now that I do know about the Selection Pane I figured I’d make a little tutorial video to let you guys in on the secret.

I created a slide for a pretend presentation. This presentation is about animals and their habitats, and in the talk I want to mention an animal, show a picture of it, and show a picture of the place where it lives. I found some clip art images of the animals and the locations in which they might be found and arranged them on a slide.

I’ll use the Selection Pane to help me keep track of my images. I can also use it to organize text boxes and shapes.  I can give them useful, recognizable names, instead of their default names (i.e., picture 22, oval 1, etc.).  I can change an object’s place in the stacking order.  If you have lots of objects on a slide, it’s sometimes tricky to do this just by right-clicking and choosing Send to Back or Bring to Front.

Using the Selection Pane should speed up your design process. Watch my video and learn how to locate, and then use this neat tool.

You can create interactive quizzes and games with PowerPoint.  Now of course there is software out there dedicated to creating this type of application, but before you purchase one of those solutions, why not try PowerPoint?

Hyperlinks work in PowerPoint. You can create links to Internet pages, files on your computer, and even slides within your presentation. The latter is what we’ll be doing to make our quiz.

Before you start designing your quiz, you’ll need to have an idea of who your users are and what you want them to get out of their experience with your application. Will they learn something? Will they have fun? Maybe both.

If you’re an instructor, you might consider making this type of quiz creation an assignment for your students.

Once you have some goals in mind, you’ll need some questions and answers. I created a short true or false quiz about geography so I could write this post. These are my quest ions.

True or False

1. Helena is the capital of Montana.
2. The Nile is a river in South America.
3. This flag is the flag of Botswana. (Image of flag appears on slide.)
4. Alaska became a state in 1922.
5. The clock “Big Ben” is located in Toronto.

So there’s a slide for each question, and a  “Correct” and “Incorrect” result slide for each question. That’s 15 slides. There is also a title slide to start the quiz.

There’s a bit of logic you have to work out to make your quiz run successfully. Try making a flow chart of how things should go. Here’s a sample:

This one was simple, but yours can be as complex as you like.

Here’s a run-down of my process. (more…)

Recently I decided to investigate the Camera command in Excel 2010. It provides one possibility for capturing data from various spreadsheets and viewing it all in a single spreadsheet. But before I could play with the camera, I had to find it and display it. In my installation of Excel it was hidden by default.

Customizing the Ribbon is possible from the Options window. Go to the Excel (or other Office 2010 application) Options window by choosing the File tab and clicking Options near the bottom of its menu. At the left side of the Options window, choose the “Customize the Ribbon” category. In this window proceed as follows: (more…)

Excel Charts are prime examples of the old saying “A picture is worth a thousand words,” and PowerPoint presentations provide a great vehicle for passing a chart’s message on to an audience. So the combination of an Excel chart on a PowerPoint slide is a powerful way to get a point across. But what if the chart data change? How do we update the slide?

The first part of the updating answer lies in how the chart was added to the slide. Assuming the chart was created in Excel and then copied in preparation for adding it to the slide, there are basically three different ways to paste the chart – embedding the chart, linking the chart, and pasting the chart as a picture. Each of those impacts your ability to update the chart. These choices are available by clicking the drop-down arrow next to the paste icon at the lower right corner of the pasted chart:

Paste Options

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By default, the rulers in PowerPoint display measurement in inches. The same is true of the other Microsoft Office applications. If you prefer to view and work with metric units, this setting can be changed from within Microsoft Word and Excel (via Options > Advanced > Display) but not from within PowerPoint.

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Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 includes many useful new features that make it easy for users to do everything they need to do from within the program. We can now edit images, audio clips, and even video without ever opening another application. While these editing capabilities are fairly limited, they are still extremely handy when you are trying to get a slide show out the door quickly.

Considering their efforts to include all the basic tools that a designer could ever need, I am really surprised that Microsoft has not integrated some type of color picker tool into their user interface. I can’t count the number of times over the past 5 years when I have needed to identify and replicate a specific color used in a slide show. Yes, I am a power user, and yes, I do create far more presentations than the average Joe, but I feel certain that even novice users may occasionally have this need. 

While it isn’t difficult to open Photoshop, or another image editing application, and to use the tools available to identify a color’s hexadecimal code or RGB values, it takes time.  I want everything to be quick and easy!   (  :

I guess that is why I was so excited when I recently discovered a handy little utility called Pixie. The program is free, easy to download and use, and it provides accurate color information, not only for use with PowerPoint, but for use with any application that doesn’t have its own built-in color picker.

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“Just Browsing” might be considered worthwhile when we are strolling through the mall with no particular must-haves on a shopping list. But when we’re working in Microsoft Office and frequently saving files, taking time to browse for the preferred folder can be about as productive as hunting for a mall parking spot at Christmas!

Your installations of Microsoft Office applications come with default locations defined for saving files. If, for every file you save, you navigate from that location to another, you could be losing lots of time browsing. And if you absently click the save button without specifying the location, you lose more time later searching for the file and/or moving it to the preferred spot. So how do you tell the application that you would like to head to a different location when you start to save a file? (more…)