Making Your Powerpoint a Little More Interactive
I'm no Powerpoint master. I'm just a normal guy, just like you. But I found this method that can earn you double your salary from the comfort of your own home!
Seriously, though, these two things are just things that I'd like to mention to those who aren't as Powerpoint savvy as others and/or people who can't program. They can make your presentation more creative and more interesting. I like to think of it as making Powerpoint closer to Flash without the need for Actionscripts.
First, a useful tool to learn if you want to create more visually dynamic Powerpoints, or if you just want more control over what your Powerpoint looks like, is the Effects Option tool for Custom Animations. With it, you can set animations [or sounds] to repeat or start at a certain time, among other things. For example, if you thought the Color Typewriter tool was a good idea, but the flashing colors were too tacky for you, you could use the Fade animation and set it to animate per letter with a delay between letters. That creates the same effect, but with a more subdued look. Or if you wanted an animation to activate only when you clicked a certain picture or area, you can set the animation to trigger on the click of whatever you want. It's just giving you more options, which allows you more control over your presentation, which allows you to do what you want, and not what Powerpoint seems to want you to do.
Second, I'd like to mention Actions, which I think is one of the more powerful tools for those of us who can't program. Most people know how to use hyperlinks in Powerpoint, and that you can do things like make a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story using them by linking to other slides. Actions [Insert > Action] are like an extension of a hyperlink. You can define actions that will occur when you click on or scroll over an image, a text box, or whatever. This allows a lot of freedom over what you can do for your Powerpoint.
For example, for a school project, I created an interactive presentation with the Action tool. Basically, I had an interactive map, where when you scrolled over a certain region of the map, a pop-up dialogue box would appear with the region's name and some of the text on the slide would change. If you clicked on that, it would head to the slide with the description of the place, and you could head back to the map by clicking on a hyperlinked box at the bottom. This is really easy to do with multiple slides; when you move your mouse over the area [which I created by creating a 100% transparent shape, and then creating an action with it], the slide changes to another slide with the exact same background, but with the dialogue box, etc. That, obviously, is hyperlinked somewhere else.
The point is that the ability to control your animations and control what happens even if you move your mouse a little goes a lot way towards making your Powerpoint more interactive. Obviously, Powerpoint can't be Flash [Maybe if you knew Visual Basic. I don't, so I wouldn't know], but knowing your options helps.
For those who care [no one], here's the Powerpoint I used as an example. For some reason, I don't have the finished version [and this one is buggy, it might not include fonts, etc.], but this should be enough to explain what I mean by
integrating Effect Options and Actions.
http://www.mediafire.com/?ndthydcd99jr80c
Seriously, though, these two things are just things that I'd like to mention to those who aren't as Powerpoint savvy as others and/or people who can't program. They can make your presentation more creative and more interesting. I like to think of it as making Powerpoint closer to Flash without the need for Actionscripts.
First, a useful tool to learn if you want to create more visually dynamic Powerpoints, or if you just want more control over what your Powerpoint looks like, is the Effects Option tool for Custom Animations. With it, you can set animations [or sounds] to repeat or start at a certain time, among other things. For example, if you thought the Color Typewriter tool was a good idea, but the flashing colors were too tacky for you, you could use the Fade animation and set it to animate per letter with a delay between letters. That creates the same effect, but with a more subdued look. Or if you wanted an animation to activate only when you clicked a certain picture or area, you can set the animation to trigger on the click of whatever you want. It's just giving you more options, which allows you more control over your presentation, which allows you to do what you want, and not what Powerpoint seems to want you to do.
Second, I'd like to mention Actions, which I think is one of the more powerful tools for those of us who can't program. Most people know how to use hyperlinks in Powerpoint, and that you can do things like make a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story using them by linking to other slides. Actions [Insert > Action] are like an extension of a hyperlink. You can define actions that will occur when you click on or scroll over an image, a text box, or whatever. This allows a lot of freedom over what you can do for your Powerpoint.
For example, for a school project, I created an interactive presentation with the Action tool. Basically, I had an interactive map, where when you scrolled over a certain region of the map, a pop-up dialogue box would appear with the region's name and some of the text on the slide would change. If you clicked on that, it would head to the slide with the description of the place, and you could head back to the map by clicking on a hyperlinked box at the bottom. This is really easy to do with multiple slides; when you move your mouse over the area [which I created by creating a 100% transparent shape, and then creating an action with it], the slide changes to another slide with the exact same background, but with the dialogue box, etc. That, obviously, is hyperlinked somewhere else.
The point is that the ability to control your animations and control what happens even if you move your mouse a little goes a lot way towards making your Powerpoint more interactive. Obviously, Powerpoint can't be Flash [Maybe if you knew Visual Basic. I don't, so I wouldn't know], but knowing your options helps.
For those who care [no one], here's the Powerpoint I used as an example. For some reason, I don't have the finished version [and this one is buggy, it might not include fonts, etc.], but this should be enough to explain what I mean by
integrating Effect Options and Actions.
http://www.mediafire.com/?ndthydcd99jr80c
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