Presentations and other stuff to trip over

Do you use Opazity just to tease your audiences with things to be revealed? That was my starting point for creating the blurred image effect. But, of course, for movie directors, soft-focus (dissolve) transitions from one scene to another, such as you can create with Opazity, have had other significances.

In the cinema, different types of transitions have long been associated with manipulating audiences’ attention and emotions. Here’s what author Matt Woolman says in his 2004 book ‘Motion design : moving graphics for television, music video, cinema, and digital interfaces’

“Transitions…are critical in establishing narrative sequences and emphasizing content. In early films, radial wipes implied that time had passed from one scene to the next; fades to black signaled the end of a particular moment; and dissolves from one scene to the next functioned as a comfortable formal device…applying a slow fade transition to a word suggests that it is to be contemplated.”

For a scene, a slow dissolve fade had a particular significance, depending on the context. For example, in the classic 1953 film ‘From Here to Eternity’ it wasn’t necessary to actually show Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr making love in the waves at the edge of the beach - the fade communicated it all. The slower the fade, the stronger the passion, it seems!

So, the effect of the speed of your transitions are another dimension to think about - and possibly use to your advantage - when constructing a PowerPoint presentation. If you are constructing transitions with Opazity, like the example on the website home page, you may feel constrained even by the standard 5 second ‘very slow’ animation setting. But actually, you can change those settings to any length you wish:

1. Select the PowerPoint shape
2. In Custom Animation mode apply an exit fade animation
3. Select the animation listing in the panel
4. Right-click and choose ‘Timing’. (This opens the animation’s dialog box.)
5. Put your cursor in the Speed box and type in the number of seconds you want the effect to last (see screenshot below)
6. Click ‘OK’

Rick Altman, presentation designer and organiser of the annual PowerPoint Live conference has inspected a PowerPoint ‘deck’ produced by Hillary Clinton’s team and not just found it wanting but has gone as far as redesigning it.

Whatever your view of the lady herself, the result, set out in Rick’s blog, is an interesting lesson in design principles and approach. View ‘Hillary Clinton Commits Death by PowerPoint‘ here.

When I talk to people and mention Opazity, a common reaction is to assume that any day now Microsoft is going to come knocking on my door begging to drop me a couple of millions of their loose change to incorporate it into PowerPoint. Well, it’s not like that! Let me explain…

In 2004 I went to PowerPoint Live! Which has become a key annual user-conference, supported by many Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs). Of all the interesting experiences I had there, one which stands out was to listen to Ric Bretschneider, Senior Program Manager for PowerPoint, and other members of his team, talking about how they work. He didn’t say it directly, but I understood how difficult it is for them to introduce even the most minor change in PowerPoint’s functions. The scale of the business case they have to make – how many millions of users the change may affect, and how likely they are to be disrupted by the change – and their negotiations for resources are, by my reckoning, horrendous.

Clearly, they took the opportunity of the large-scale Office 2007 changes to slip in a few improvements, but how do they respond to people and companies that, like I have, produce something that makes a leap in terms of change to the program? After all, it is not for nothing that MVP Geetesh Bajaj said in his review of Opazity:

“The new versions of PowerPoint seem to have everything apart from the kitchen sink – but yet, it’s amazing to see vendors create small add-ins that provide an impressive capability that PowerPoint lacks.”

Microsoft’s limitations

Interestingly, Microsoft is not neutral on the subject of other people’s developments. I guess that people in the organisation recognise its limitations and are happy for other companies to produce extras that will appeal to, and enhance the experience of, a small proportion of their user-base. In fact Microsoft positively encourages them by providing a venue for the promotion of add-ins, etc. relating to their programs.

That venue is called the Office Marketplace, and it is worth visiting from time to time. There are separate Office Marketplace sites for many countries, which you can find by using the ‘change’ link at the top right of the page once you are on one of them. It then takes a bit of navigating to the right place from the portal page you are taken to, but look out for something like ‘Third Party Downloads’ at the bottom and then head for ‘Presentation Tools’.

When you arrive at the Marketplace (links below) you will find all sorts of interesting things with links to the vendors and an opportunity to rate their listing – the product, in effect – including Opazity. So do go and have a look now; rate Opazity if you wish, but don’t expect to see me stuffing Microsoft’s millions under my bed any day soon!

US Office Marketplace site, and the other sites in English: UK, Australia, Canada. (Canada has a French site too.)

Many thanks to Geetesh Bajaj, PowerPoint MVP, for his review of Opazity in his Indezine blog. He starts it with the sentence:

The new versions of PowerPoint seem to have everything apart from the kitchen sink – but yet, it’s amazing to see vendors create small add-ins that provide an impressive capability that PowerPoint lacks.

I must confess I really like that! Read the rest of the Opazity review, and explore the rest of Geetesh’s Indezine site.

Small is definitely beautiful when it comes to file sizes and, although Office 2007’s new file format produces much smaller files than previous versions, lots of people do not yet use it.

The Problems

Word, Excel and PowerPoint in particular can quickly grow large files, especially when they contain graphics. The problems are:

• Excessive storage space needed on hard disks, especially when multiple copies and drafts are stored
• Greater risk of file corruption
• Longer disk backup times
• Slow opening of files (especially if being scanned by anti-virus software)
• Slow file transfer and lots of bandwidth used unnecessarily

As very large files are not accepted by many email providers, file size is a real issue for many people and, in large organizations, the storage and bandwidth difficulties quickly become major problems.

What you can do to reduce file sizes

I’m going to focus on PowerPoint because, now that many people are (rightly) moving from text-based presentations to ones using more pictures and other graphic elements, the problem of file size is particularly acute for them.

If you are using a version of PowerPoint older than 2003 with the Office Service Pack 3 (the last pack before Office 2007), than the first thing you need to do is to make sure that ‘Allow Fast Saves’ is unchecked in the Tools Menu Options…Save setting. With it checked, when you save a file, Office keeps a history of the changes you have made, rather than creating a ‘fresh’ file. These history-rich files become large very quickly and can cause file corruption. Because of these problems, Microsoft dropped the ‘Allow Fast Saves’ option with SP3 and Office 2007.

The next thing to do is to import resolution-optimised photos into your presentation slides. PowerPoint only displays quite low resolution images, similar to web browsers. There is no point, therefore, in importing a high-res image that will be much bigger than PowerPoint needs. It will just increase the file size.

The one bit of good news is that if you use the same picture several times in a presentation, PowerPoint only counts it as one image.

What is the optimal resolution? Let’s not get into the debate about how resolution should be expressed, but let’s stick with the resolution that PowerPoint outputs in the way Microsoft expresses it: 97 dots per inch (dpi). Whichever way you calculate it, this is quite low, and higher resolution pictures in your slides do not display any more sharply than that. They simply take up file space.

Now, almost no one is going to take the time in a photo-editing program to resize and reduce resolution of photos before putting them into PowerPoint, it would take too long! However, it is possible to get PowerPoint to reduce the size. When you have placed, sized and cropped all the pictures in your presentation, open the ‘Picture’ toolbar and click on the ‘Compress Pictures’ icon. Choose the ‘All Pictures in Document’ and ‘Web/Screen’ options.

The two measures above will help, but this will still leave the underlying files themselves unoptimized.

The best solution

By far the best solution is to optimize your Office files using software dedicated to that purpose. There are several ‘out there’ but the one I have experience of, and can wholeheartedly recommend, is called NXPowerLite. I first met the guys who developed this program at the PowerPoint Live conference in San Diego in 2004. I was impressed with it then, and have continued to be impressed by the improvements they have made since.*

As it says ‘on the tin’, NXPowerLite works quickly, efficiently and unobtrusively to reduce the file sizes by intelligently compressing the graphics and embedded documents stored within them.

Using it you really can’t tell the difference between the original and the optimized file and I have seen some incredible file size reductions: 75Mb to 15Mb, and 3Mb to 450Kb, for example!

You can optimize files from within Word, Excel or PowerPoint, or by right-clicking them in Windows Explorer. NXPowerLite also integrates with Microsoft Outlook and you can set it to ask if you want to optimize your email attachments before sending them.

There are also batch processing options which mean that you can optimize a number of files in one go, immediately freeing up large amounts of hard drive or network server storage.

Best of all, a single user license is roughly the cost of Opazity, so it is extremely affordable and it can soon pay for itself in saved storage space costs.

I could go on about this for a long time, but the best thing is for you to take up the NXPowerLite free trial offer for yourself.

Below I’m giving you a choice of links to the NXPowerLite website. Following the first of these will help support me via a small commission should you decide to buy the program. (You pay no more for the program, the commission is from the company.) The second is a plain link via which I receive nothing. I include this because otherwise you would rightly suspect that I only made the recommendation because of the commission, which is not the case. It is software that I use regularly and recommend everywhere I go.

Link 1: Go to NXPowerLite website for a free trial.

Link 2: Go to NXPowerLite website for a free trial.

---

* A week after first publishing this, a reader took up the suggestion to try NXPowerLite. She had problems with her card company in making the payment go through and got in touch with NeuxPower, the company that produces NXPowerLite. I’m pleased to report that they went well beyond the call of duty to help her until the payment was successfully made.

---