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October 2004
- When To Use Arial And When To Use Verdana
Many of my students ask me if there are any rules concerning the use of Arial and Verdana, by far the two most popular fonts available on personal computers (using the Roman alphabet) around the world today. Both Arial and Verdana are SANS SERIF font, and as clearly explained in my recent article both fonts lend themselves well to be used in "information" uses rather than in telling stories. Sans...
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| cat.: Fonts & Typography
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Luigi Canali De Rossi -- October 31
- Portable Audio Speakers For Powerpoint Presenters
Finally a portable audio set that can save presenters in remote locations, in outdoors situations and just about anywhere where there is too little time to get the IT department to support you. Interlink Electronics has announced the release of GoSpeak!,an ultra-portable amplification system consisting of a set flat-panel speakers capable of reaching an audience of up to 200 with high quality omni-directional stereo sound. More info on the GoSpeak!...
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| cat.: Presentation Technologies
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Robin Good -- October 30
- Type An Address And Fly To It!
I am really impressed. I have just downloaded, installed and tested out for a few minutes Google's new acquisition which is getting headlines everywhere. KeyHole, this is the name of this Windows-only software, is a powerful image navigation device leveraging a world-over scenery of satellite imagery covering the whole planet. Not only, KeyHole integrates an extraordinary amount of data relative to roads, borders, cities, and down to gas stations, pharmacies...
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| cat.: Presentation Software
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Robin Good -- October 29
- Three-Dimensional Design for PowerPoint: Perspector
Two dimensional imagery and design is part of PowerPoint - all sorts of tools and options enable you to create stunning presentations. Look beyond to the third dimension and the lack of similar options becomes obvious. That's where Perspector, a PowerPoint add-in that facilitates three-dimensional design within PowerPoint comes into the picture. Read the full review......
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| cat.: PowerPoint Add-ons
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Robin Good -- October 28
- Creating Organizational Charts in SmartDraw 7
SmartDraw creates some of the best organizational charts I have seen. The new version 7 provides even more possibilities. In fact, SmartDraw now has a special Org Chart edition that you can download and use free for 30 days. Organizational charts are also known as organization charts or org charts. They are essentially tree or hierarchical layouts that help understand the relationships between higher and lower levels. Such charts are...
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| cat.: Presentation Software
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Robin Good -- October 28
- The Information Designer: Who is He?
Information Design is the ability to arrange, organize, chunk and format information according to a specifically defined audience, timing, medium and message to be conveyed while maintaining the highest degree of access efficiency (legibility, consistency, preservation, compatibility). Information Design is not based on the achievement of aesthetic beauty, but considers it a natural consequence of the effective application of information design methodology. The Information Designer is the person who is...
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| cat.: Information Design
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Robin Good -- October 27
- Twelve Best Tips To Design Effective PowerPoint Presentations
PowerPoint is the most popular tool for giving presentations. It's ideal for everything from sales talks to academic lectures. The program makes compiling and running a presentation easy, but there are still pitfalls that can trip up even the best presenter. Presenting is about a lot more than displaying slides on a screen. You have a message to deliver and the presentation is a means of getting that message across....
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| cat.: Presentation Design
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Robin Good -- October 25
- PowerPoint Presentations On A Pocket PC
Conduits Technologies has released Pocket Slides 2.0, software that allows users to make presentations on their handhelds. It is the only application on the market that permits the creation and editing of presentations on a Pocket PC. More on the Brighthand site......
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| cat.: Presentation Software
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Robin Good -- October 24
- How To Visualize Ideas With Images
Presentations are becoming increasingly visual and less textual. Converting every concept into an image is the challenge and, at the same time, the solution. Presentations with visual support, typically running under PowerPoint, have become ubiquitous. All of us have been at some time in need of making one of them and they are, increasingly, a part of our daily work. Did I said with visual support? Surprisingly a good deal...
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| cat.: Information Design
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Juan Dürsteler -- October 23
- How To Reduce PowerPoint File Size
PowerPoint presentations can become very large when you are inserting images into the slides. One option you have to get around this problem is to manually convert all the graphics to a more compressed file type such as a JPG. An even easier method is to have PowerPoint take care of this for you. Once you have your presentation open, click View, point to Toolbars, and place a check beside...
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| cat.: Troubleshooting
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Diana Huggins - Lockergnome -- October 22
- PowerPoint Tools And Ideas From The PPTLive Conference
Mother Nature is not the only one capable of madcap experiments with new life forms. The progression of Microsoft PowerPoint from a lowly, black & white-only electronic presentation tool to a ubiquitous, media-rich facilitator of tens of millions of presentations per day is one of the strangest tales in the history of computer software. From annual meetings of Fortune 500 companies to digital scrapbooks of the family vacation, PowerPoint has...
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| cat.: Presentation Software
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Robert L. Lindstrom -- October 21
- Uses Of Colour To Convey Information
Colour is an integral part of most visual representations. In this issue we review the fundamental uses of colour to convey information. Colour is an attribute that is not strictly necessary in order to distinguish shapes or to perceive the real world in a sufficiently operative way, as anybody that has seen black and white TV or photography can state. Nevertheless, colour is excellent to convey emotions, to label and...
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| cat.: Information Design
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Juan Dürsteler -- October 19
- How To Create An Effective Presentation - Part 4 Of 4
by Geetesh Bajaj Step 8 Beta At this stage, your end user should have a chance to view the presentation. Be present, by all means for the viewing, if this means there are no more than two other people representing the client. If the number is any greater, make yourself scarce and ask them to get back to you with their feedback. Analyse and study this feedback - keep an...
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| cat.: Presentation Design
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Geetesh Bajaj -- October 18
- Elegance Through Simplicity
"By keeping goals in mind and design simple, you can achieve elegant, easily understandable data presentations." Experts in any domain tend to lose awareness of the individual steps that they go through to produce their work. As their expertise grows and deepens over time, it becomes second nature, intuitive, and automatic. Ask them to break the process down for you and they might just stare blankly, genuinely befuddled. They know...
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| cat.: Information Design
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Robin Good -- October 17
- Design With Emotion: Volvo Shows The Way
Here is some truly innovative and beautifully designed "user experience" site for a luxurious and expensive car. The Volvo V50. The entry scene is set by the natural framing on a city street created by the window of a coffee bar. The photography, initial visual opening of what is beyond the window, and the stylish mini-loops of city life that interplay randomly thereafter create a unique surreal audiovisual atmosphere which...
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| cat.: Presentation Design
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Robin Good Recommends -- October 15
- How To Create An Effective Presentation - Part 3 Of 4
by Geetesh Bajaj Step 5 Attempt An 'attempt' is to place all your content in the presentation in a linear way - we'll talk about interactivity later. Once all your stuff is laid out, you'll be able to obtain a 'rough-cut' of your presentation. You can try out builds and transitions and ascertain which looks or works the best. Set out manual or automatic timings - edit the contents if...
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| cat.: Presentation Design
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Geetesh Bajaj -- October 15
- Data Presentation: Tapping the Power of Visual Perception
"Why do people respond to some forms of presentation better than others? This instalment of our series sheds light on how physical aspects of vision influence the way we process information -- and ultimately, decision-making itself." (Stephen Few - Intelligent Enterprise Magazine)...
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| cat.: Information Design
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Robin Good -- October 14
- How To Create An Effective Presentation - Part 2 Of 4
Step 4 - Content. Content includes text, font, charts, pictures, music, video, graphs, etc. Let's consider text first - although text is the most important part of any presentation, try to keep it in small doses - use direct speech, bullets, concise information, etc. Create the text outlines in a word processor - make sure that the progression of slides has a flow to it. Now, about slide backgrounds -...
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| cat.: Presentation Design
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Geteesh Bajaj -- October 13
- Visualization - News Channels Are Heating Up
News By Name is a free, non commercial news site with "up to the minute news headlines collected from multiple news channels. Incoming news is automatically scanned for 'names' allowing for charting, archiving and email alerts by name, showing you who's hot and who's last weeks news". If your work involves monitoring the news for mentions of particular people (the CEO of your organisation's closest competitor, key clients, suppliers), then...
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| cat.: Information Design
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Francis Good -- October 11
- Camtasia and PowerPoint
One of the coolest things you can do on your system is to perform a video capture of on-screen activity. This is a great way to create videos of presentations, browsing or any other desktop activity. One of the best tools to do any type of video capture is Camtasia from TechSmith. Read more......
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| cat.: Presentation Software
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Robin Good -- October 10
- Right Seat Software Releases Vox Proxy 3
Right Seat Software, Inc. announced the release of Vox Proxy(R) Version 3, bringing new versatility to the process of adding and viewing 3D-animated talking characters in Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. The Vox Proxy collection of fun, effective characters, custom-designed for the PowerPoint platform, can now be viewed using the free PowerPoint 2003 Viewer, while media files can be played using Microsoft Windows Media Player 9. A new online help system has...
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| cat.: PowerPoint Add-ons
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Robin Good -- October 9
- Video Capture Paradise For PowerPoint Presenters
One of the coolest things you can do on your system is to perform a video capture of on-screen activity. This is a great way to create videos of presentations, browsing or any other desktop activity. One of the best tools to do any type of video capture is Camtasia from TechSmith. Read more......
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| cat.: Presentation Software
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Robin Good -- October 7
- Repurpose Presentations for a Kiosk or the Web
If you have a great presentation, you might want to re-use it at a convention or on your Web site. But the situation is very different when a viewer looks at a presentation without anyone to explain it. Here are some tips for making the conversion work....
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| cat.: Presentation Distribution
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Ellen Finkelstein -- October 5
- Animate a Chart or Table
You may want to animate a table row by row, or a chart series by series. Because a chart or a table is one object, you can't animate the individual elements in its regular format. Here's how to get the results you want....
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| cat.: PowerPoint Techniques
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Ellen Finkelstein -- October 4
- Information Design Journal + Document Design 12:1
"(...) a forum for both practitioners and researchers. It aims to enhance design knowledge and practice so that informed design can support people's interactions with printed and electronic materials, whether using verbal text, numbers, pictures, diagrams or other forms of representation. IDJ+DD brings together the variety of ways of investigating and thinking about the effective design of information in various genres." (John Benjamins Publishing Company)...
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| cat.: Information Design
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Robin Good -- October 3
- Graphics For PowerPoint
My friend TAJ Simmons has launched a great new site for all sorts of PowerPoint graphics - the site offers instant downloads of a wide range pictures for PowerPoint in a range of themed (from business to medical) images to download. Each image has been especially optimized for PowerPoint presentations. Visit PowerPoint Graphics......
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| cat.: Presentation Resources
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Robin Good -- October 2
- Turn AutoShapes into Pictures
Sometimes you want to edit a diagram or AutoShape in a way that PowerPoint doesn't allow. For example, you may want to crop it, scale it along with the text, change the contrast, change the brightness, or create a watermark. The secret is to turn your AutoShapes into a picture. Here's how....
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| cat.: PowerPoint Techniques
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Ellen Finkelstein -- October 1
- Simple Quizzes in PowerPoint
Creating a quiz in PowerPoint can be fun. You can use your quiz after a business presentation as an excuse to give away gifts to those who provide the right answers. Or you can use it to create a basic quiz for a child in elementary school. Whatever your aim, creating a quiz in any recent version of PowerPoint (PowerPoint 97 or newer) is fairly easy and intuitive. More on...
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| cat.: PowerPoint Techniques
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Robin Good -- October 1
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