How to PowerPoint

I build elearning courses with PowerPoint and publish with Articulate Presenter.  This is typically called rapid elearning.  I write about it on my work blog, The Rapid E-Learning Blog.

Traditionally, elearning courses are built in Flash or other applications.  Because of this, when people hear that courses are built in PowerPoint they’ll immediately think that it’s boring bullet point slides.  And I can understand why because there’s so much of it out there.

To show you that PowerPoint is an effective tool for building elearning courses, I recreated a course that was originally built in Flash.  For my demo, I built all of the graphics and assembled it in PowerPoint alone.  Then I published it with Articulate Presenter.

Here’s a link to my version of the course, if you want to see how it works.

And here’s a tutorial that walks through the original and how the PowerPoint version works.

PowerPoint E-Learning Demonstration

Click here to view the demonstration.

A lot of people moan and groan about PowerPoint because there are so many bad PowerPoint presentations out there.  But the way I see it, PowerPoint’s just a tool.  If something done in PowerPoint is no good, tell the person who created the presentation or elearning course.  Don’t blame PowerPoint.

I heard someone say that it’s still PowerPoint’s fault because it’s so easy to use.  That’s just flat out ridiculous.  Why don’t we start blaming pens or keyboards for all of the crap that’s out there.  They’re a lot easier to use than PowerPoint and empower anyone who can type to write to produce worthless drivel.

To prove my point about the power of PowerPoint, I wrote a post for the Rapid E-Learning Blog that shows how you can use PowerPoint to build effective and viable elearning courses.  You’ll still need to start with good instructional design.  However, if all you have to sue is PowerPoint, there’s no reason why you still can’t build a decent course with it.

Below is an example of an elearning course created entirely in PowerPoint and then published with Articulate Presenter.

Click here to view the elearning course.

To learn more, check out the post on the Rapid E-Learning Blog.

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?

It’s not really a matter of right or wrong as it is a matter of how the fonts you use in your PowerPoint files communicate with your audience and contribute to the overall tone and visual design of the slides.

When using fonts, you kind of have two considerations. 

• Is the font going to be legible?  Can people read and retain the information.
• What does the font’s design communicate?  How well does it support the tone and design of your slide content?

The Rapid E-Learning Blog has a good post on How Fonts Take a Starring Role in Your E-Learning Courses.  While the focus of the post is elearning, the information is just as relevant to any use of PowerPoint.

It’s a good post with an interactive exercise that illustrates how fonts can do more than display text.

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.

PowerPoint’s a great authoring tool.  You get a blank screen and some pretty cool animations.  There’s no reason that you can’t mimic some of the same types of animations you see created with Flash.  On top of that, if you use a rapid elearning application, like Articulate Presenter, you can publish the PowerPoint slides and convert them to Flash. 

What Articulate Presenter does is convert each slide into its own Flash movie (.swf).  The .swf will contain the slide content, with audio narration and any animations.  These become a slide#.swf.  You can take the slide.swf from the published data folder and use it as an independent Flash movie.

I like to insert them into web pages, wikis, or even other rapid elearning applications.  In the demo below, I show you how to insert the slide.swf into an Articulate Engage interaction.

Click here to view the demo.

Here are the basic steps:

• Create a PowerPoint slide with some animation
• Sync the animation with narration using Articulate Presenter
• Publish the slide show in Articulate Presenter
• Go to the published data folder and locate the slide.swf.
• You can use the .swf elsewhere.

Here are some good tips that will help speed up your development time in PowerPoint.  While the post references elearning, you can apply the ideas to all types of PowerPoint use.

In the post, How to Be More Productive When Using PowerPoint to Create E-Learning Courses, you’ll learn three key concepts:

• Move objects off screen so you don’t have to go back and forth.  The viewer can’t see them during the presentation.
• Create a staging area by using a blank slide that sits under the real slide
• Hide slides that aren’t being used.  You have quick access to them, but the viewer can’t see them. 

There’s a lot more detail in the blog post and a quick tutorial that explains it all.

Most software tutorials are built using screenshots of the application or using a screencast video like those from Screenr. 

What’s cool about PowerPoint is that you can combine those techniques to create your software demos.  Or you can just build it in PowerPoint without the screencasting application.

In the post, Here Are Some Time Saving Tips for Your Next Software Demo, I wrote for the Rapid E-Learning Blog, I showed some ways that PowerPoint can be effective as an authoring tool for software demos.  You can even make them interactive, which you can see on that post.

Compared to older versions, PowerPoint 2007 makes this even more viable because you can easily right-click and swap out images.  Thus if the application’s screen changes after building your demo, it’s just a matter of right-clicking and inserting the updated images.  All of the interactivity and animations will still be intact.

Having produced hundreds of screencasts and software courses, I can tell you that PowerPoint is a very effective tool for software training.  Is it the best tool? Not always.  But for a lot of software training, it’s a good tool.  And in many cases a lot faster and easier to work with than a screencast video that requires more production (and usually a lot more editing).

Check out the blog post on the Rapid E-Learning Blog to learn more.  Be sure to watch the demo and try the interaction on the last slide.

I get a lot of questions about grouping and ungrouping clip art.  I discussed this a bit in a previous post on How to Create Custom Clip Art in PowerPoint.  But, if you’re not used to all of the nuances of clip art or graphic formats it can get a bit frustrating.

On the Rapid E-Learning Blog, I wrote a post about What You Need to Know When Working with Grouped Clip Art.

The post covers:

• difference between bitmap and vector images
• clip art anatomy 101
• great tutorial that walks you through the steps

Here’s what you’ll learn in the tutorial:

• Quickly select, duplicate, and scale your images
• Use the grid and guide options to align objects
• Work with duplicate slides and a scrub area to avoid messing up your real slides
• How to work with all of the ungrouped objects
• Save your creations as bitmap or vector images

To view the post and tutorial, visit the Rapid E-Learning Blog.

I did a post for the Rapid E-Learning Blog where I demonstrated a simple elearning scenario.  I got a lot of emails asking how it was built. 

So I did a follow up post where I show how I actually built the elearning scenario using PowerPoint and Articulate Presenter ‘09.

View the Tutorial and Download the Free PowerPoint Files

If you use PowerPoint for elearning and you want to learn to make your courses more interactive, then you’ll get a lot of value out of the link above an this one on How I Built that E-Learning Scenario. 

Not only is there a good tutorial that goes with it, I also included the PowerPoint files so you can deconstruct how the scenario was built on your own.