How to PowerPoint

Resident elearning guru, David Anderson offers three really easy ways to make your audio sound good.  Instead of recording your audio in PowerPoint, record it using Audacity, which is a free audio editor.

Reduce Background Noise

In this first tutorial, you’ll learn to reduce background and ambient noise to make you narration sound much better.

Click here to view the tutorial.

Boost the Bass

The second tutorial walks through the steps of slightly boosting the bass.  It will make your voice sound warmer and give you a greater sense of presence.

Click here to view the tutorial.

Equalize the Audio Narration

In this tutorial you’ll learn to equalize the audio.  It adds a richness and warmth to your voice only equaled to a cup of hot tea and honey.

Click here to view the tutorial.

Adding Audio Back to PowerPoint

If you’re using a rapid elearning tool like Articulate Presenter, you can just import the audio into the slide using the audio import feature.

However, if you’re using PowerPoint, just select insert sounds>from file to bring the audio file onto the slide.

Hope that helps.  Do you have any audio narration tips and tricks?

The Rapid E-Learning Blog as a great year end wrap.  There’s a list of the top posts for 2009.  With the list is a link to 13 posts on the blog that has free resources.  So if you want some good information and free templates, check it out.

You can even download the template you see below.  And it’s all free.  Here’s a quick tutorial that explains how to edit the template.

Here’s a free site that I use quite a bit.  It lets you easily calculate the missing value for an aspect ratio.  I use this a lot when I try to figure out the size of photos or widgets that I want to embed on slides or web pages.

Let’s say you have a picture that’s 800×662 pixels wide, but you can only put a 400 pixel wide image on your blog.  So you need to scale it down, but keep the same aspect ratio.

You can see the aspect ratio calculator in action in the tutorial below.

Click here to view the aspect ratio tutorial.

So now you’re never at a loss to quickly calculate the aspect ratios for any of your multimedia projects.

Screenr is a great screencasting application.  It lets you make videos of your computer screen that you can share with others.  Here’s what I like about Screenr:

• It’s free
• Doesn’t require a download
• Easy to share via Twitter or Youtube
• Looks great on the iPhone or iPod Touch

PowerPoint and Screenr are a great combination.  I like to frame the screencast border around a blank PowerPoint slide to give me a virtual whiteboard.  Then I can use all of PowerPoint’s features as I explain a topic or present a lecture.

This works really well with a tablet PC (which you can see below) because it looks more like a real whiteboard.  It’s a great way to do math lessons, for example.

Check out the screencasts below.  In the first one, I show a demo of how it looks with a tablet PC (although it that demo I used OneNote).

Example of a Virtual Whiteboard

Click here to view the Screenr demo.

Here’s another example of Screenr and PowerPoint.

How to Frame the Screenr Window

In this next example, I explain how I frame the Screenr window around the blank PowerPoint slide.

Click here to view the Screenr demo.

One other thing I really like about Screenr is that the full screen of HD view mode gives you a really clear and crisp image.  Most of those video sites give you a full screen image which tends to make the video blurry because it stretches the video to fit your screen.

Give it a try, I’m sure that you’ll find that the combination of Screenr and PowerPoint is a winner.

PS.  If you’re not familiar with OneNote, check out Microsoft’s OneNote site.  It’s one of my favorite applications.

Most PowerPoint slides are filled with text and decorative images.  We our text on the screen and notice it looks a little bland.  So we decide to put a nice image on the screen as well.

That’s fine for beginners.  But if you want to do a better job communicating, you have to apply more focus on the slide’s visual design.  And it all starts with understanding some graphic design basics.

If you’ve never had any training in visual design, I highly recommend that you get this book, The Non-Designer’s Design Book.  It does a great job covering the basics of visual design and typography.  I like the book because it gives good before and after examples.

I’ve also written a few blog posts for the Rapid E-Learning Blog that deal with visual design.

• 3 Graphic Design Principles for Instructional Design Success: Basic ideas around visual communication.
• 3 Simple Techniques to Guide Your Learner’s Attention: Explore ways to guide where and when the learner looks at info on the screen.
• 5 Common Visual Design Mistakes: Things to avoid when build out the slides.

Check out the blog posts and get the design book.  You’ll be creating slides like a pro in no time.

I worked for a multibillion company that employed about 30,000 people.  There was one executive who made the decision that anything built in PowerPoint could only use a single PowerPoint template.

That’s ridiculous!

Now, I understand the need to have some quality control over how PowerPoint is used; especially when you interact with the public.  But, that’s why you come up with style guides and teach your staff about basic design concepts.

The executive saw PowerPoint from a single perspective.  He was a director who was presenting to higher level executives and the investment community.  From his perspective, it was best to have tight quality control over how the company was portrayed in public.  That makes sense.

However, the reality is that PowerPoint is a versatile tool used for more than just public presentations.  Because of this, it’s ridiculous to apply broad branding rules and template limitations to all uses of PowerPoint.

Not All PowerPoint Files Are the Same

For example, I wrote a blog post about PowerPoint and rapid elearning.  When you use PowerPoint to build courses, you need as much room as possible.  Any branding should be applied to the color theme or player.  You should try to keep the slide are as open as possible and use that for the learning content.

The problem template restrictions is that the message of the presentation is discounted and altered to comply with the template requirements.

The template should just be a guide for the content and what you hope to communicate.  But it shouldn’t dictate the content.  Sometimes a branded template is fine, but sometimes it’s just crap.  And it’s usually the cause for a lot of the horrible PowerPoint presentations we have to endure.

OK, enough of my rant.

Here are some good resources to help you rethink how you use PowerPoint and whether or not having strict branding requirements is necessary.

These are some key books that I think do a great job discussing visual design principles; and then blends them with sound presentation and communication concepts.  They’ll make you rethink the one-size-fits all template strategy.

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 If you want to do presentations and PowerPoint right, then this book is highly recommended.  It’s practical and has some good job aids.
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.  His new book goes through the new design.

Be sure to check out this free ebook by Seth Godin on Really Bad PowerPoint.   It’s not just a rant, he’s got some very good tips on communication that will help you do a better job.

The Rapid E-Learning Blog is giving away a free PowerPoint template.  In addition to the template, you get a great tutorial on how to create your own PowerPoint templates.

To view the tutorial and download the free template, go to Here’s a Free PowerPoint Template & How I Made It via the Rapid E-Learning Blog.

You don’t need a tablet PC to get the benefits of a tablet PC.  If you have Microsoft Vista or Windows 7 you can enable the the tablet functionality.

However, to get the most out of the tablet functionality, it helps to have a tablet.  In the demo below, I hooked up an older Wacom tablet to see how it would function in Vista with PowerPoint 2007.  As you can see in the demo below , it works well. 

Wacom Tablet Demo

Click here to view the demo.

The tablet functionality gives you a lot of neat features and capability.  One of the things I like is being able to add a personal touch with handwritten text and hand drawn arrows and circles.  It’s a great way to draw attention to the content.

I bought a used Wacom tablet, but you can see that the prices have come down.  It’s worth the investment.

PowerPoint 2010 is going to let you publish your presentation as a video.  You can then convert the WMV to a format that works for your iPod Touch or iPhone.  That’s probably easy enough, if you don’t mind the extra steps.

Or you can use Screenr to create a screencast video presentation.  It’s free and easy to do.

Here’s an excellent example of a presentation that Scott Skibell did.  It’s a great testimony to the Articulate customer service (which I like), but it’s also an excellent presentation that is captured using Screenr.  I think he used Keynote, but it would work in PowerPoint just as well.

Presentation on the iPhone Demo

Click here to view Scott’s demo.

The steps are pretty easy. 

• Just frame the Screenr record window around the PowerPoint slide and start recording.  You can use the page up or page down to advance the slides back and forth.
• If you want to capture the animations, then record from presentation mode rather than using the slides in normal view. 
• Once you have a video recorded, check out the URL in your iPhone or iPod Touch. 

Pretty slick, huh?

Here’s a quick demo I recorded when testing it out with an interactive PowerPoint file.  There’s no audio and probably isn’t the best example because it requires that the user clicks on the screen, but I wanted to see how the animations looked.

Click here to view the PowerPoint demo.

Most of us aren’t audio engineers.  We just want to hit the record button and end up with good sounding narration.  We definitely don’t want to do a bunch of tweaking.  If only it was that easy.  Well, it could be.

First, you probably think that the microphone that you’re using sounds fine.  And it might.  However, if you compare it to other microphones, you might find that’s not the case.

Most people I know use headset microphones because they’re portable and typically inexpensive.  But are they the best to use for even simple narration?  You be the judge.

Here’s a demo tutorial I did comparing my headset to a desktop microphone.

• $30 headset
• $72 desktop (with no pop filter or any other type of adjustment)

As you can hear, the desktop microphone has a better sound.  I’d invest in a desktop microphone if you do a lot of recording or expect people to listen to your presentations. 

I use the Samson microphone and am happy with it.  And it’s relatively inexpensive.  You can get them for about $70, now.  It’s worth the investment.

Improve Audio Using the Levelator Tutorial

Click here to view the Levelator tutorial.

Once you have a decent microphone and record your audio, use “The Levelator” to make it sound better.  It’s super easy to do and will give your narration a richer tone.  Is it perfect? NO.  But it’s better than nothing.  And overall, I’ve been pleased with the results.