Hello, Iím Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial.
Today weíre looking at making more interesting presentations
with PPTPlex and PowerPoint 2007 or 2010.
PPTPlex is an application that uses different technology for making your
PowerPoint presentation.
And using PPTPlex you can create PowerPoint presentations that operate
in different ways
to the traditional linear step-by-step presentation.
Iím working here in PowerPoint 2007 and I already have this
application configured.
And we're going to step through seeing exactly what
PPTPlex is going to get us and then we'll go to 2010
and do it in there.
This is the PPTPlex canvas here
and we add it using the canvas background tool.
There are lots of different canvases that you can use and you can see that Iíve
used this wave one but Iíve colored everything to suit my application.
There are different elements appearing here on the canvas,
chairs, tables, lounges, outdoor and bedding because this is a furniture catalog.
The word chairs is coming from this section divider that Iíve added to this
presentation.
In PowerPoint 2010 you can add sections natively. In
PowerPoint 2007 you canít do that so PPTPlex has an insert
new section tool.
Sections inside 2007 are a little bit different.
Theyíre added as slides and in PowerPoint 2010 theyíre just added as section
markers.
So this is a section slide that Iíve added inside my slide deck here.
It's a special divider that PPTPlex needs
and itís going to ignore this text when we get to the presentation.
Iíve added section slides throughout my presentations so in addition to chairs thereís
one here for tables
and there are a couple of others for bedding and lounges and outdoor furniture.
So youíll add sections throughout your presentation breaking it off into
smaller quantities of slides. Five or six is a really good idea.
So once you've got your canvas in place and your section slides
that's pretty much all you need to do to configure PPTPlex.
There are however some advanced options here that you can use.
Iím just using a spatial slide transition here and I have my slide
arrangement as spiral because I find that a little less grating when Iím using
it.
And I also have a template chosen here that Iím using for my
chairs and table sections. You can choose different settings by section if you
want to or give all sections the same settings.
So this PowerPoint 2007 presentation is ready to go.
But before we go and fire this off and have a look at it let's see how weíd put it
altogether. And let's do that in PowerPoint 2010.
Here is the exact same presentation but this time I have it open in
PowerPoint 2010.
And weíre going to set it up step-by-step.
When you install PPTPlex it installs as a tab on the ribbon
and
Iím going to start by going back into my normal view of my presentation
and Iím going to add the sections.
Now sections are native to PowerPoint 2010 so youíll do that from the
Home tab.
Iíll just select to add a section.
And here's my untitled section so Iím going to right click it and choose Rename. And
because this section is chairs Iíll type chairs.
And I don't want furniture catalog to appear because Iím actually going to add
that to the canvas title.
So Iím just going to hide this slide for now. I donít need to delete it. I just need to hide it.
So having added our section for chairs let's go and now add a section for
tables. Now in PowerPoint 2010 weíll click on the first
table slide
and then click Section Add Section. And it will be added before there.
Iíll rename it and letís call it tables.
And then weíll scroll down until the next change in our slides and that's going to
be lounges here.
I think weíll call that lounges.
It's important when you're using PPTPlex that you break your
slideshow into smaller quantities. You don't want a lot of
slides in each particular section so Iím going to call this one bedding.
And then we've got one final one which is outdoors.
So now we have all our sections in place. What we need to do now is to
add our canvas. And for this weíll use the PPTPlex tab
and weíll click Canvas Background and we can select a canvas background.
Iím going to choose the same one as I used before just to show you how that's put
together
so Iíll just click on it to select it.
You can see that it doesn't match the colors of my presentation so all I did
was select each element in turn, use the Drawing Tools Format tab, Shape Fill
options
to recolor it so it would look more like the colors that I was using for
my presentation.
Now Iím not going to do that right now for a lot of these because that's just
wasted time.
But you can see that you could work through this particular canvas slide and
just adjust it to look exactly the way you want it to look.
And it doesn't have to have wavy lines on it. You can make it look however you want it to
because you can draw shapes on it and all sorts of things.
Iím going to click in the presentation title here
and Iím going to type my text
and then my subtitle text.
Now PowerPoint has already given me my sections here. You can see here there
are the chairs, tables, lounges,
bedding and the outdoors furniture.
This one is an untitled section. In fact what it's done is it's given me way more
sections than I actually need to use
so Iím just going to remove them.
You only want section markers, these boxes,
for those sections that you actually plan to use.
And now we can move these around. So we could for example take this outdoors
one down here and make it quite considerably larger.
There are no hard and fast rules about this at all. It's really whatever you
want to do with it.
Iím just going to
position these in different areas on the screen so we can see this
happening later on when we get
into
running our
PPTPlex presentation.
So again youíve got lots of flexibility on how this is laid out and how it looks.
Here too we've got our advanced options exactly the same options as we had
in PowerPoint 2007.
We can choose a color to use and we can choose more colors and go and grab a color
from the color picker.
Now I chose an orange simply because it was easier to try and pick an orange
that
I liked to go with the blue rather than try to match the blue itself. So Iíll just click
Ok.
And now I can choose a template. And I was using this particular style so weíll choose
that and click Ok.
Now that weíve set everything up and that really as a simple as it is Iím
going to save the presentation.
And weíll come back next and look and see what our PPTPlex presentation
really looks like.
Now Iím looking here at PowerPoint at full screen size.
And Iím ready to run my PPTPlex presentation so Iím going to select from
overview.
And Iíll wait as the PowerPoint presentation is published.
The first time you run PPTPlex this will take a couple of minutes.
And here's our PowerPoint Plex presentation. As you can see it doesn't
look really very much at all
like a typical PowerPoint presentation.
It's running full screen. So now Iím going to press the right arrow key.
And when I do I come to my first section. And this is why you need sections to
be fairly small
because what you're going to see on the screen now is the entire section.
If I press the right arrow key Iím going to continue to move through this
presentation
from one slide to the next.
And now because I finished with the first section, when I press the right arrow
key
I come back out to see the whole of the section, and when I press the right
arrow key again I can go into the second section. Now this is not all I can do.
I can press the up arrow key or the left arrow key to move from one section to
the next.
I can also double click on a slide to go straight to that slide.
And if I roll my mouse I can go further into the slide. I can move it
around on the screen.
And if I had a touch screen I could be doing this on the screen itself.
I can zoom out,
move the presentation around and go and have a look at outdoors furniture. So Iím
not operating the slideshow anymore in a linear manner. Iím deciding where I
want to go and exactly what I want to do with this slideshow.
I can still move from slide to slide in any direction
but I also have the flexibility of being able to zoom out and do exactly what I
want to do
with this particular presentation.
You'll find that the PPTPlex tool is really interesting. It has all
sorts of applications
for large presentations. And particularly when youíre working with touch screens it can
be quite attractive.
This PPTPlex presentation is going to work exactly the same way in
PowerPoint 2007
as it does in PowerPoint 2010. Itís just that setup
for the two applications is a little different because PowerPoint
2007 doesnít natively support sections.