Become a PowerPoint 2010 Rock Star!

These are the links and resources referenced in my Training Magazine presentation on January 20, 2011.

PowerPoint Resources

• Rapid E-Learning Blog posts: there are many posts and demos to help you get the most out of PowerPoint for rapid elearning.
• PowerPoint 2010 tutorials: a series of quick tutorials (most under a minute) to show how to use very specific features.
• PowerPoint tutorials via the Articulate community: a collection of tutorials created by the Articulate community
• Microsoft Office.com: a boatload of great resources, such as free assets, templates, and tutorials
• PowerPoint MVPs: most of them have web sites with additional tips & tricks

Books to Help You

• Non-Designer’s Design Book: If there is only one book to buy, it’s this one.  You’ll learn all of the basics about typography and visual design.
• Beyond Bullet Points: Great tips to help organize your content whether presentation or rapid elearning.
• Better the Bullet Points. Practical tips on using PowerPoint.
• Slide:ology: Great book on visual design concepts and how to craft better presentations.  They have some good examples of branded templates that do work.
• Presentation Zen: This book is very similar to slide:ology and will help you learn to communicate better with your slides.  I haven’t read it yet, but his new book is supposed to be good.
• Back of the Napkin: Great book on organizing ideas and visual communication.
• Various PowerPoint books: Tufte is a critic of the poor use of PowerPoint.  He offers a lot of good information on how to present complex data.  There are also all sorts of good how-to PowerPoint books.

Previous PowerPoint Presentation

• Part 1: Don’t Let the Experts Tell You PowerPoint Sucks: notes & resources from the earlier presentation where I did an overview of PowerPoint tips

Tutorials Relevant to the Presentation

• Access previous versions of the PowerPoint file
• Pin files to the top for quick access
• Open multiple files in separate windows
• Quick preview using reading view
• Save as picture presentation
• Customize the ribbon
• Create section slides
• Copy & paste feature
• Cropping in PowerPoint 2010
• Enhanced picture effects
• How to remove backgrounds
• Combine shapes to create your own
• Grab quick screen shots
• Apply animations using the animation painter
• Preview the slide transitions
• Audio and video editing: there are a number of audio/video tutorials in the stream.
• Output as video: example of how you can use a video made in PowerPoint for your rapid elearning course.

Click here to view the demo.

The video in the presenter panel was created in PowerPoint 2010 and published to .wmv.  From there it was converted to .flv and inserted in the elearning course.

Here’s a good starter tutorial on how to do this.