Anyone who has ever given – or sat through – any kind of presentation is familiar with PowerPoint. It’s the Microsoft Office (Windows and Mac) application used to build all those presentation slides full of bullet points, charts and diagrams. It’s also a very nice platform for building multimedia scrapbooks. It’s not the only presentation application out there. There’s iWork’s Keynote for the Mac, OpenOffice.org’s Impress (Windows, Mac and Linux) and WordPerfect’s Presentations X4 (Windows). Like automobiles, each has the same basic functionality and each has additional features exclusive to them.
These applications let you include photos, captions, video clips, audio and music and even larger blocks of text – all the things you need in a scrapbook. Yes, many of the packaged themes are business oriented, but I’ve noticed personal styles showing up more frequently. A quick Internet search will find even more.
To take full advantage of any of these presentation applications, you will need to distribute your presentation in that application’s native format – .ppt for PowerPoint or .key for Keynote. Your viewers will need a copy of the application to view your presentation properly. Considering that each of these applications is updated regularly, using the native format is not a good option for long-term viability. Within just a few years, technology will have left your beautiful presentation by the wayside. We surely don’t want to see that.
I’m not sure about the latest version of PowerPoint, but I do know each of the other applications include an option to convert the slideshow to PDF format. This is not a multimedia option, but it never hurts to produce a PDF version of everything you create. Why? Printability. Uncle Fred – who wants nothing to do with any of that “new-fangled junk” – would still enjoy a printed copy of the photos. This is a way to make that happen.
Each application has some video export facility – Windows Media for PowerPoint, Quicktime for Keynote and Flash for Presentations X4 and Impress. Once you’ve exported to a video format, upload it to a video-sharing system of your choice. Why? If, some day in the future, a new video format comes along and replaces all the current formats, do you think YouTube or Vimeo will allow the hundreds of thousands of videos currently on their platforms to become virtual bricks? Neither do I. And, I’ll be more than happy to let them spend the money and effort it will take to convert my videos so they are still functional. What if one of them gets into financial trouble? Again, all those videos are assets and someone will come along to buy them out and continue serving up videos. Is this a perfect solution? No, but it’s a lot better than what my small skills and smaller budget can do alone.
Okay, so let’s get to the fun stuff. Where to begin? If you’re new to presentation software, start simply. Insert some photos, resize and arrange them, add captions. Build your story slide by slide. Save the file often so your don’t lose anything if something goes wrong. Even if you do nothing more than this, you’ve created a delightful photo album your family will enjoy.
Next steps: experiment with shapes to use as frames for your photos, transitions between slides, adding narration and background music. Here’s the same presentation with background music and slide transitions added.Even if you don’t have video clips to add to your presentation, you can still create motion using actions on each individual slide. Actions can be used to display the objects (images, text, graphics, etc.) on the slide at different times, move them around and zoom in/out. This clip shows a couple of actions at work.
If you already have an office suite or you are a presentation guru from your job, you will find this a good option for building your own multimedia projects. If you don’t own or have never used presentation software, this may not be the best application for you. No problem. There are many other options and we’ll be discussing them in upcoming articles.
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