May 2011 – Page 2 – The Logical Blog

May 8, 2011

PowerPoint 2010: Audio Won’t Trim? Compress It!

by AJ George

Have you ever been frustrated by an inability to trim audio in PowerPoint? Let's say you followed my instructions on how to play two songs sequentially in your PowerPoint presentation. The first track was 2 minutes long, but you trimmed it down to 15 seconds and set it to play across slides.

Perhaps your plan was to play the first track when the presentation started, move to the second slide, let the track end and then have the second track start.

You probably set the second track on the second slide to start right after the first track ended, which is the correct process. However, even though you trimmed the first audio file down to 15 seconds, it kept playing, running into the second track.

Or maybe you've experienced this: You trim an audio track so that it starts 15 seconds into the track and then set it to play across the slides. When you view your presentation, however, you notice that rather than cutting the first 15 seconds from the track, only the first 15 seconds play.

What gives?!

Well, get excited because I'm about to save you a lot of frustration. All you have to do is this:

In PowerPoint 2010, select File > Info.
From the Media Size and Performance area, click the Compress Media button.
Choose one of the three settings to compress the media (I chose Presentation Quality and it worked fine…if yours still doesn't work, choose a lesser quality).
Unfortunately, I have not found a suitable explanation as to why the trim function in PowerPoint doesn't always work, or why compressing the media helps, but it is nice to know that it is easily remedied.

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About the author: AJ George is IconLogic's lead Technical Writer and author of both "PowerPoint 2007: The Essentials" and "PowerPoint 2008 for the Macintosh: The Essentials."

May 6, 2011

Writing & Grammar: Acronyms–Are they Both Efficient and Clear?

by Jennie Ruby

I have been told, and have taught, that you define an acronym on first use if it is used at least once more in the document. But during a recent class one of my students opened my eyes to thinking further about acronym use. Writers and editors at her agency, she said, have a policy that if an acronym is not used at least five times in the text, they do not use the acronym at all.

That policy struck me at once as being so sensible that I immediately adopted it for my own use. Why make your reader have to search back for where an acronym was defined if you have used it only twice in the entire document? Just spell it out the second time. Unless the acronym is more frequently used in the world than the spelled out words are–like CSS instead of Cascading Style Sheets–the meaning is going to be clearer if you spell out the words.

Another student sent me some text that used an acronym to refer to a group of people. The acronym referred to a medical condition, but it was along the lines of defining Microsoft Word Users as MWUs. The people were then called MWUs throughout the text. This immediately struck me as dehumanizing and disrespectful, especially since guidelines about talking about people with disabilities recommend always using the word people or person, as in people with asthma instead of asthmatics, to avoid characterizing people as totally defined by their disease. It seems even worse to define people as acronyms.

Good writing is both efficient and clear. Use of acronyms may seem very efficient, but that may be at the cost of clarity. Spelling out more words and phrases instead of using acronyms may make the document longer, but it may actually increase efficiency if it means the reader does not have to stop and go back to reread what an acronym stood for.

At their worst acronyms can make a document seem overly technical, or even exclusionary, as readers who are not very familiar with the acronyms struggle to derive meaning from terse groups of letters.

So for now, I am going with the "used at least five times" rule in my work. Let me know what you think. Does your office have a policy like this? Do you use a lot of acronyms? Do you avoid them? I would love to hear from you.

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My next live, online grammar class is a one-day review, May 10. Bring your actual problem sentences, hyphenation questions, and other grammar conundrums and have them answered once and for all. Sign up now to allow time for your copy of Abrams' Guide to Grammar to arrive before the class.

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About the Author: Jennie Ruby is a veteran IconLogic trainer and author with titles such as "Editing with Word 2003 and Acrobat 7" and "Editing with MS Word 2007" to her credit. She is a publishing professional with more than 20 years of experience in writing, editing and desktop publishing.

May 4, 2011

Adobe FrameMaker 10: New Support for Drag and Drop

by Barb Binder

I was walking to my airline gate recently and overheard an elderly woman complaining to a younger woman as they passed me. All I heard was, "Why do they give us so many ways of doing the same thing?"

Who knows what she was talking about, but it made me smile because I hear the same thing all the time in my various Adobe training classes.

One of the (many) benefits to having spent so many years delivering software training is that I've had the opportunity to observe all of the various learning styles and workflow techniques. I try to let each of my students know early on that even though some of us might be dedicated right mouse button clickers, others (like me) prefer keyboard commands, and still others like to rely exclusively on the menus. It's all good… we can still be friends. My statement usually diffuses the otherwise inevitable frustration that can accompany learning more than one way to do the same thing.

With that thought in mind, let's discuss FrameMaker's drag and drop feature. It's just another way to move (or copy) text and elements. To move something, just select it, press down on your left mouse button, and drag the text or element to its new location.

If you'd prefer to copy, just hold down the Control key and do the same thing. (If you see a question mark, FrameMaker is telling you that you are trying to move/copy your object to an invalid location.)

Dragging and dropping also works within column rows and tables, as long as you add the Alt key to move and Control + Alt to copy.

And as long as you purchase FrameMaker 10 within the next fifteen minutes (I'm just kidding!), you can also drag and drop across other applications that support the drag and drop feature.

As I said earlier, I'm a happy keyboard shortcut gal… the drag and drop feature isn't likely to change the way I use FrameMaker. I'm betting that some of you are going to love the drag and drop feature and begin using it right away. That's okay. We can still be friends.

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About the author: Barbara Binder is the president and founder of Rocky Mountain Training. Barbara has been a trainer for nearly two decades and has been recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers world-wide.

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Looking to learn Adobe FrameMaker We offer Beginner and Advanced classes.

May 2, 2011

Adobe Captivate 5: Nervous About Editing Your RDL? Dupe It… But Watch the Name

by Kevin Siegel

Back in March I wrote an article about editing Captivate's RDL files to control much of the text and punctuation that will appear in a project's text captions before recording any of your lessons. That little trick will surely save any Captivate developer hours of work.

During one of my recent Advanced Captivate classes, a student asked if it was possible to make a copy of an RDL file, make changes (for instance, maybe have one RDL that featured end-of-sentence punctuation and one that didn't) and then have them both available within Captivate.

The answer was a resounding YES and I went about demonstrating how to do it for the entire class. First, I opened the default Captivate RDL file (CaptureTextTemplates_English.rdl) using Notepad. I gave the file a new name (kevin_test_english.rdl) and then added end-of-sentence punctuation to several lines of text.

Then it came time for the big finale. I saved and closed the kevin_test_english.rdl file and started Captivate. I went to the Preferences dialog box (Edit menu for Windows users; Adobe Captivate menu for Mac users), selected the Recording category, selected the Generate Captions in menu and… and… the pesky RDL file was not in the menu.

So there I was, scratching my head and trying to figure out why my RDL file wasn't available in the menu. Thankfully, my classes are online and without video cameras so my students couldn't see me sitting there all slack-jawed. I honestly had no idea what I had missed and wondered if I was seeing some kind of bug. Mind you, I had performed this steps dozens of times over the years and the new RDL file always showed up in the menu.

And then of my students came to the rescue. Dave Previdi, a Business Systems Consultant with Wells Fargo, reminded me of a key step in the process that I had forgotten. The name you give to the RDL is critical. I had named mine kevin_test_english.rdl, which is all wrong. The name must be CaptureTextTemplates_name.rdl. I changed the RDL file name to CaptureTextTemplates_Kevin.rdl and all was well with the world (in the image below, you can see my Kevin file is available in the Generate Captions In drop-down menu). Rock on Dave!

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Looking to learn Adobe Captivate 5? We offer Beginner and Advanced classes. Both Windows and Macintosh developers can attend these classes.