How to PowerPoint

Adding some interactive decision-making to your rapid elearning course is a good idea.  Leslie from Education Breakthrough has a great screencast on how he created a branched interaction in PowerPoint.  This can be applied for rapid elearning courses if you’re using a tool like Articulate Presenter as well as something you can do in PowerPoint and present as a .pps file.

Some key points from the tutorial:

• He sets up the scenario.  You have a set of criteria with which to evaluate some people.
• You evaluate the people.  As you return to the original slide, you notice the person visited has been marked off.
• He provides a tour of the interaction and a flow chart to show how it works.
• Here’s a link to the PDF that explains how he built the branched interaction in PowerPoint.

Check out the tutorial.

Click here to view the tutorial.

In case you missed it on the Rapid E-Learning Blog, there’s a good post that collects some of Screenr’s best PowerPoint tutorials.  All of them are under 5 minutes, with most being 2-4 minutes long.

Here’s the post, More Than 100 PowerPoint Tutorials & a Free Template.  Check out the tutorials and be sure to grab the free PowerPoint template.

Not sure I mentioned this or not, but I pulled some of the PowerPoint tutorials together that I’ve written for the Rapid E-Learning Blog.  Here’s a link to the resources.

You’ll find some tutorials and free templates.

• PowerPoint for E-Learning: PowerPoint-based posts
• Graphic Design Tips: I also have a bunch of posts on using PowerPoint for graphic design.  You’ll have to dig through them.

Someone asked how I animated the office people in the Security Demo that I posted a while back.  So here’s a quick tutorial to show you three ways to do that type of animation.

 The basic techniques are here:

• Create a single motion path
• Create a series of motion paths
• Use the Flash once animation and duplicate the object

PowerPoint Animation Tutorial

Click here to view the PowerPoint animation tutorial.

I work on a 30 inch monitor.  So when I create a slideshow in PowerPoint and want to play it back, it fills my entire screen.  This can be a little overwhelming.

On top of that, when I do a video tutorial I may already have my screen recorder set to a specific resolution like 960×600.  I need to be able to do my screen recording and playback the slide show in the same window.

Here’s a quick tip to help set your slide show playback to a resolution that works with the screen recorder.

Here are the basic steps and then you can watch the tutorial below.

• Go into Slide Show and then select Set Up Slide Show.
• Select browse by individual window. This creates a scalable window that you can position inside the screen recorder.
• I always choose the lowest resolution.

PowerPoint Screencast Tutorial

Click here to view the tutorial.

Most people use the mouse and cursor to navigate the PowerPoint features.  However, there’s a faster way.  And that’s by using keyboard shortcuts.

Common Keyboard Shortcuts

There are some keyboard shortcuts that I use all the time.  They are:

CTRL+D =  duplicate slides or objects

CTRL+M = create a new slide

CTRL+X = cut the object off the screen and place on the clipboard

CTRL+C = copy object and place on clipboard for pasting

CTRL+V = paste object from clipboard

While those are the ones I use most of the time, there are all sort of shortcuts available via the keyboard.  And once you know what they are and how to use them, it can really speed up your production.

Using the CTRL key and it works is the same across PowerPoint versions.  With the introduction of the ribbon toolbar in PowerPoint 2007, how you use the ALT key is a little different.

Below are two quick video tutorials that explain how to use keyboard shortcuts in the different versions.

Using Keyboard Shortcuts in PowerPoint 2003

Here’s an earlier post that describes the PowerPoint 2003 tutorial in more detail.

Click here to view the PowerPoint 2003 tutorial.

Using Keyboard Shortcuts in PowerPoint 2007

Here’s an earlier post that describes the PowerPoint 2007 tutorial in more detail.

Click here to view the PowerPoint 2007 tutorial.

In Hollywood, when they make movies that require special effects they’ll use the infamous blue screen (although many times it’s a green screen).  What they do is shoot the scene and then later replace the colored screen with a different image or video.

They choose a color screen that can easily be selected and replaced.  Today, you’ll learn to do something similar in PowerPoint. 

Let’s say you have a PowerPoint shape and you want to put a hole in it.  In the example below, we’re going to create a piece of paper that looks like a 3-ring binder page.  What we want to do is have the holes in the page be transparent.

• Create the piece of paper in PowerPoint using the rectangle tool.
• Then add three circles.
• Fill the circles with a lime green (or any other color).
• Get rid of the outline color.
• Select the object and cut it from the screen (or CTRL+X).  This places it on the clipboard.
• Select Paste Special and paste it as a .PNG file.  By pasting as a PNG file, you’ll maintain the image quality and retain any transparency.

• Select the Set Transparent Color feature and click on the green color.  That will make the green color transparent and you should end up with a see through hole.

That’s basically it.  The transparent tool in PowerPoint 2007 and lower can only work on one color, that’s why you want the fill to be solid and to be a color that is no where else in the image.  PowerPoint 2010 has a more sophisticated transparent tool feature.

Once you master this technique you’ll find all sorts of uses for it, like getting rid of backgrounds.  Here’s a tutorial that shows it in action.

PowerPoint Tutorial

Click here to view the PowerPoint tutorial.

Save to PDF

I already covered this in a little bit of detail in a previous post on
What You Need to Know About Image Types in PowerPoint.  But there’s no reason not to share this excellent tutorial by David Anderson. 

In the tutorial he covers how to save the assets you create and use in your PowerPoint slides.  One of the benefits of creating your graphics in PowerPoint is that you can easily share the development files.

He also discusses three image formats and how they work in the slides.

PowerPoint Tutorial

Click here to view the tutorial.