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

Interesting images
Charts and graphs
Motion
Background music (see this post for more on finding music for your project)

 

 

Then you say, “I’m not a multimedia producer, how can I get all of that cool stuff into my project?”
And then you remember that you can do it all with PowerPoint (PPT).

I’m going to pretend I’m you, the student looking to earn an A.  You could even be an employee aiming to impress your boss and get a promotion. Whoever you are, I’ll be you.

My assignment is to make a presentation about developing healthy eating habits. It’s going to be a presentation that runs by itself, and I’ll convert it from PowerPoint to video format to make it accessible to anyone who has a video player on their computer.

We’ll say I have an outline of points I want to cover. This is going to be simple because it’s just for pretend.

1. Why Americans need to adopt a healthier diet
2.  Components of a healthy diet
3. Other components of a healthy lifestyle

Here’s a breakdown of the tools I’ll need to use:

If I use narration I’ll need to write a script. I’ll then need to find data relevant to my topic. This could include things like the percentage of people who are overweight, or number of people who are diagnosed with Diabetes each year. I’ll put this data into easy to understand charts and graphs. I’ll also use images and text to illustrate my points.

It’s easy to bring all of these things into PowerPoint.  I’ll use buttons from the Insert tab like Picture, Smart Art, Chart, Audio, and Text Box,

 

 

 

 

and I’ll use the Animations and Transitions tabs to make things exciting and dynamic.

 

 

I could create my own design for the look and feel of the presentation, or use the Design tab to apply a theme.

 

 

 

When everything is in place I’ll rehearse my timings and then record the presentation.

 

 

 

 

 

If my instructor uses the Assigments tool in Oncourse, I can upload my work there.

 

Click image to enlarge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you didn’t know you could do all of this with PowerPoint, consider signing up for IT Training’s PowerPoint workshop series:

• PowerPoint 2010: The Basics
• PowerPoint 2010: A Quick Overview of Core Feature
• PowerPoint 2010: Creating Customized Backgrounds, Graphics, & Animations
• PowerPoint 2010: Setting Up a Slide Show with Audio & Video
• PowerPoint 2010: Slide Masters
• PowerPoint 2010: Templates
• PowerPoint 2010: Publishing & Sharing Your Presentation

You can also learn PowerPoint on Lynda.com.

Have fun making great presentations and enjoy that ‘A’!

 

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“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.

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.

1. I made a first slide with the name of the quiz and a Click Here to Start Quiz button.
2. The second slide had the first question and a True and False button.
3. If the user clicks True for this question he gets the Correct! Helena is the capital of Montana slide. This slide also has a  Go to question 2 button.
4. If the user clicks False for this question, he gets the Wrong answer! slide. This slide also has a Go to question 2 button.

All the buttons are simply hyperlinks to another slide in the presentation. To add a hyperlink, right-click the object you’re using as the button (text boxes in this case), and select hyperlink.

Right-click the object and select hyperlink.

Selecting a slide to link to.

Then choose the slide you want to link to.

My last Correct and Wrong answer! slides give the user an option to start the quiz again or to  exit. You can use an Action Button to allow the user to exit the slide show with a click.  Action Buttons are at the bottom of the Shape Tools menu. Select Action Button: Custom, draw a button, select the hyperlink radio button, and choose a link option.

Shapes and Actions

Test your quiz to make sure it does what it’s superposed to do and keep tweaking until it does.

If you want to deliver your quiz online, you’ll need to convert it to a interactive Flash video. I suggest using Adobe Captivate.  Just open Captivate and choose From Microsoft PowerPoint>>.

Publish your Captivate file as a .swf with and export to .html.

Captivate publish dialog box

That’s how I do it. You may prefer a different method. To find more ways, do an Internet search on “PowerPoint interactive quiz”.  Happy quiz making!

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:

Customize Ribbon Options

1. In the Choose commands from field, I clicked the drop down arrow and selected Commands Not in the Ribbon

2. In the list of commands that appeared, I chose Camera.

3. To organize where I wanted it to sit on the Ribbon, I clicked Insert in the window on the right because that is the Ribbon tab where I wanted to locate the command.

4. I then clicked the New Group button at the bottom of that window to create a new group for this command. A group called New Group (Custom) appeared in the list. With that New Group (Custom) item selected, I clicked the Rename button to give it the name of Camera.

With my newly-added Camera group showing in the list under the Insert category, I could then add a command to that group.

Still in the Options window, I followed these steps:

1. I made sure I had the new Camera group selected on the right.

2. I selected the Camera command in the Command list on the left.

3. I clicked the Add button between the two windows to move the command to the prepared location.

Expanded Camera Group in the list of groups on the Insert tab

In the right side of the window,  the new Camera group expanded shows the Camera command as the only command in the group.

4. To complete the customization, I clicked OK at the bottom of the Options window.

Camera available on the Ribbon

Back in the spreadsheet, I wanted to be sure I could use the Camera command so I clicked the Insert tab to see how the new group and command were added:

Oh, and what am I doing with the Camera in Excel? Stay tuned for an upcoming blog and find out!

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

If you paste the chart as a picture, you are establishing no connection between the underlying data and the pasted chart. This is a good choice if the data is historical and you see little need to update in the future.

If you paste the chart with a link, the original data and the original chart are still sitting in the Excel file. As long as you maintain the link by keeping the Excel and PowerPoint files in their original locations, updates to the Excel data will automatically be reflected in the Excel chart within the Excel workbook and in the chart on the PowerPoint slide.

If you embed the chart, you are placing the entire Excel file – not just the chart – in the PowerPoint file. Returning to the original Excel file and editing its data has no impact on the chart in PowerPoint. To edit the data, with the chart on the slide selected, you would choose the Design tab in the Chart Tools section of the PowerPoint Ribbon. In the Data group, clicking the Edit Data icon opens the embedded Excel file for edit. Excel calls the opened file “Chart in Microsoft PowerPoint.” This file is a separate file from the original Excel file.

If you want to use a metric ruler in PowerPoint, you must go into your Windows settings and make the change there. To do this in Windows 7, follow the directions below:

1. In the bottom left corner of your screen, click the Start Orb. The Start menu appears.
2. To continue, on the right side of the Start menu, click on Control Panel.
3. Verify that the Control Panel view (top right corner) is set to Category.
4. To access the language settings, click on Clock, Language, and Region.
5. In the Region and Language section, click on Change the date, time, or number format. A Region and Language dialog box appears.
6. At the bottom of the dialog box, click on the Additional settings button. The Customize Format dialog box opens:
   
7. Click on the drop-down arrow at the end of the Measurement system field.
8. Click on Metric.
9. To apply the new setting, at the bottom of the Customize Format dialog box, click on the Apply button and then click on the OK button.
10. Close all open windows.

Now when you turn on the ruler in PowerPoint, the units will be displayed as centimeters instead of inches. (This will also change the way the ruler displays in Word and Excel, but it does not affect the ruler in WordPad.)

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.

To use this tool, simply download it from http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.php. It is offered as a portable application, in a ZIP archive, or as source code. The first two options are free, but if you want to use the source code, it is necessary to purchase it.

If you download the portable application, you don’t have to install it. You simply double-click on the .exe file when you are ready to use it. An Open File – Security Warning dialog box will appear. Click on the Run button,and a small box will appear on your screen that looks something like this:

To use the utility, all you have to do is point to an item on your screen and this box will provide the color information for it. As you can see, this app will provide the hexadecimal code for the selected pixel, the RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values of that color, and it also tells you exactly where the pixel is located on your screen (x and y coordinates).

When working with PowerPoint 2010, you can use Pixie to get the color information for the item you are trying to match. Then you can select the  line, shape, etc., that you want to recolor, click on the Format tab on the Ribbon, and then click the Fill Color drop-down arrow.

Next, click on “More Fill Colors…” at the bottom of the menu. The Colors dialog box appears.

Make sure the Custom tab is active, and put the color information from Pixie into the fields at the bottom of the dialog box. Click the OK button, and your items should now be exactly the same color.

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?

Default Save Location is one of the options you can set in the application’s options window. In 2007 versions you can  enter the Options window by clicking the Microsoft Office Button in the upper left corner of the window. At the bottom of the window that opens, click the Options button. In Office 2010 applications, click the File tab and click Options in the menu at the left side of the window. 

In the options window there are tons of choices so they are classified according to their purpose. In the list at the left side of the window, you can see that one of the categories of options is Save, and that’s what you want to effect. Click Save in the categories menu at the left. The right side of the window changes to show options that can be set about saving. One field is labeled “Default file location:”  In Word you are given a Browse button to use for navigating to the preferred location. In Excel and PowerPoint you must type or paste the path in the field. To complete the task, click at the bottom of the Options window, click OK.