Here's How I Built That PowerPoint E-Learning Template

Adobe’s Kuler is a great color scheme tool:

http://kuler.adobe.com/

And a note on fonts: you can embed your fonts in your PowerPoint presentation (one of the Save options) so that others will be able to edit the content even if they don’t have those fonts installed on their systems. This option makes the size of your PowerPoint file larger, but can save you a lot of grief. Note: only TrueType fonts can be embedded, and even some TrueType fonts will prevent embedding. So YMMV. But it’s usually worth a shot.

Larry Pryor

Tom,

In trying to view the demo once I got to slide #3 and clicked the next arrow to advance the slide it looped back to slide #1. I even tried clicking on the individual links to the demos and it would say the slide was paused. When I clicked the play arrow it looped me back to slide #1 again.

Eric Matas

Kuler is cool. I second that. Also: I know I’m a PowerPoint nerd, but I think I enjoyed watching you play in PPT just a little too much. Never would’ve thought it’d be so fun.

Certainly watching you demonstrate awesome and innovative PowerPoint tips is better than seeing 95% of the presentations that people make. (Ahhhhh!)

Finally, we use Captivate, but since Office ’07 came out, I’ve been pushing for Articulate too. Your demo will help my case. *fist pump*

Thanks, Eric

Tess

Tom, I watched the entire 20 minutes! Thanks for the tutorial – priceless!

I am still fumbling my way around when to use Presenter 09 branching vs PPT hyperlinks. But I guess all will become clearer as I build more courses.

Hoping to get to Articulate 09 if the wind’s in the right direction and the pound doesn’t fall more against the dollar…

Margaret Riel

Tom, I too watched from beginning to end with my mind racing with all of the possibilities. What fun! Thanks so much for the free lesson. What a great service!

Noureen Shaikh

Thanks so much for a wonderful tutorial! I can’t wait to apply these wonderful tips to my presentations.

I have been doing instructional design for a little over a year. My work is a drastic change to what has normally been created in my business and it is much appreciated by those who take the training as well the training department for the rave reviews. I pretty much get all my ideas from your blog, so thanks a lot!

I just watched the Dump the Drone tutorials and they were great.

Gary Donaldson

As useful as this tutorial was, what really grabbed me was the navigation system you used for the presentations that described how you did the “drone” template. How do I “nest” several Articulate presentations together?

Nancy

Once again your blog has gotten my creative juices going. This came just in time as I am working on a presention that I will now go in and make some changes to based on what you discussed.

Is there a place to buy bitmaps that can be used like you do so often. I use a lot of graphics, but most of them cannot be ungrouped.

Thanks again.

John Loty

Great tute – I am still on the tarmac but starting to rev up to get to the steep learning curve.Your blog/s and this sort of material is very helpful. Thanks

Emily Coltman

Thanks Tom – great demo as always. I immediately went and had a play with the trial of PowerPoint 2007 which I hadn’t yet touched – and can’t see myself going back to 2003.

A couple of things, firstly could I ask if you’ve ever tried doing multiple interactive callouts on the same screen in Camtasia? I tried that and it didn’t like it.

Secondly, are you on Twitter please? I tweeted about this post but would like to follow you if you’re there!

Cheers

Sandy

This was great. We don’t have the new version of powerpoint yet, but this presentation made me a little less fearful about it. Just a question: When I clicked on the attachments, I saw that they were read-only but in your presentation you talked about downloading and using the templates. Did you mean for these to be read-only or for us to use them?

Ryan

Tom-

Once again you are saving me time. I haven’t really taken the time to look at all the PowerPoint functions in 2007 and I am amazed at how the themes work. Great tip which should save me a lot of time.

Joe

Hi Tom,
Great set of demos as always. One question — how did you create the backgrounds (two blackish, one bluish, I believe), on slides 4/5/6 in the “drone demo?” The backgrounds aren’t in slide masters, so when I tried to copy/paste those slides to experiment, the background turned white.

Joe

Hi Tom,
Just figured it out. Thanks again for demos. Ideas for layouts are especially welcome.

Blythe

I am a self-professed PPT virgin compared to what you have been able to demonstrate through your tutorial! Thank you for taking the time to build my capacity so quickly.

Diane

Hi Tom,

Love the tutorial on Dump the Drone. I did have a comment about the list of steps in the tutorial. I’m not sure what you mean by “Create two menu slides. One for animations and audio. The other for clicking.” Did I miss this in the tutorial or am I just addle-brained this morning?

Keep up the great work – you have helped our firm tremendously in the practical application of Articulate.

tom

Thanks for the feedback and comments.

@Larry: the demo is designed to go to the main menu. So the forward bars are disabled. To access the various demos, click on the buttons. Next time, I’ll make the navigation more clear.

@Eric: My kids are counting on that Articulate purchase. Don’t let them down. 🙂

@Gary: those are all individual slides in one presentation. I just didn’t create a sidebar menu and relied on the slide hyperlinks.

@Nancy: there are a lot of clip art sites to purchase graphics. Just do a search online. Not all can be ungrouped though. Look for vector images and those typically can be ungrouped.

@Sandy: the files shouldn’t be read-only but I think something happened in the upload. In either case, you can save them to a new name and that should get past the read-only.

tom

@Emily: When I use Camtasia, I just do straight screencasting. I don’t normally use the callouts. I like to limit my editing. Someone on the Techsmith site might be able to give you some technical tips. I do have a personal twitter account, but am not an active user. However, that is going to change. I’ll let you know when I set up a twitter that is more relevant to the blog and ideas on elearning.

@Diane: The menu slide has audio and animations. If you click away and come back to click on another link, you don’t need to hear the audio and animations again. So I create a duplicate menu. Once you visit the first time, you always end up back at the one with no audio and animations. Hope that makes sense. Click around on the menu to see how it works.

tom

FYI on read-only downloads. When I tested it in Firefox, the PPT was read-only for me. When I tested in Chrome, it wasn’t. There must be a local setting in the browser that causes that.

HueiHsien