Solving technology problems, one at a time
With some microphones, particularly Plantronics USB headset mic’s, you may get an error when you try to set the Microphone Level in Powerpoint. “Powerpoint is not receiving sound from the microphone. Try one of the
Continue readingAdobe Presenter is an add-on to Powerpoint that produces Articulate-like Flash presentations from your Powerpoint slides. At around $500.00 list price it’s out of reach for a lot of content developers, but with an academic discount the price drops considerably, to about $150, and it starts to be a viable option for SME’s to purchase for Rapid Elearning development.
But even with the lower price, it may not be convenient for everyone involved in producing a course to have Presenter installed, so it is useful to know how to import and sync narration created outside Presenter. This way, a narrator can take their own laptop and a USB microphone off into a completely quiet room, which often makes more difference in the quality of the audio than almost anything else.
Continue readingThe fastest way to grab a YouTube video for Powerpoint? If you can’t count on internet access at the lecture hall, you will need to download the video in a format compatible with Powerpoint. YouTube
Continue readingIn my search for the best way to synch video with slides, I’ve tried a number of different software packages. At this time, I’ve settled on the Rich Media Project’s flash extensions as the most reliable way to create synched presentations, but I’m always looking for a better way.
When I came across Adobe Presenter, it seemed like another promising tool for this purpose, and possibly easier for clients to use than anything else so far.
Unfortunately it does not yet seem to be the case, at least not yet. When I tried to sync a video of a lecture with a powerpoint using Presenter, it proved to be a hopelessly frustrating and tedious task.
Continue readingHow can you make a shape or image move across the screen? Follow these steps to create your first motion-path animation in Powerpoint. PC-version required, unfortunately.
Continue readingOne Powerpoint feature that Keynote does not yet have is animation triggers. In Powerpoint, you can set an animation to be triggered when a particular object elsewhere on the slide is clicked. This can be used to create interactivity for web-based elearning, or perhaps for presentations where there is some interaction from the audience and the exact sequence of clicks is not figured out in advance.
A workaround to create a trigger effect is to make the triggers into hyperlinks that link to slides that look identical to the slide containing the trigger, but which contain the response animation. For each trigger, there will be a corresponding animation slide. The animations are set to begin “after transition” or in other words, right after the slide loads.
Continue readingIf you add screenshot images to a Word or Powerpoint document on a Mac, by either dragging them onto the page or pasting them in, chances are they will not be visible on a PC.
Continue readingThis procedure which will leave you with an original PowerPoint-format (to use in lectures) document, and a web-enabled version:
Links to PDF’s can be made to target specific places in the document by appending a number/pound (#) sign to the end of the URL, followed by “page=[number]: Example: target page 10 http://server.com/title.pdf#page=10 Example: Target
Continue readingA client sent me a powerpoint with revisions from last year’s version. Over the year, they must have found the “Animation Schemes” button because the presentation was filled with animated text. When I exported the
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