Month: September 2011

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PowerPoint 2010: Where Did the Custom Motion Path Options Go?

by AJ George Follow us on Twitter

If you used custom motion paths in PowerPoint 2007, you may think a setting you previously used has disappeared in PowerPoint 2010. In PowerPoint 2007, to get to Curved Motion Paths, you would select from the Animation Pane Add Effect > Motion Paths > Draw Custom Path > Curve.

PowerPoint 2007 Curved Motion Path.

In PowerPoint 2010, the path is a bit different. To insert a custom motion path, click the Animations tab and then choose Add Animation > Motion Path > Custom Paths. You will notice, however, that the custom motion path options you once saw in PowerPoint 2007 are not there.

PowerPoint 2010 Custom Motion Path

Never fear, the option isn't gone, it has just moved. After selecting Custom Path, return to the ribbon. Select Effect Options from the Animations tab to find the Custom Path options for Curve, Line and Scribble paths.

PowerPoint 2010 Effects Options

For more on motion paths, check out this article on Perfecting the Motion Path.

 

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

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Adobe Captivate 5.5: The Fastest Angle Remover in the West

by Kevin Siegel Follow us on Twitter View our profile on LinkedIn

You may have noticed that Captivate 5.5 allows you to quickly change the angle of a slide object by dragging the free-rotate icon you will find just above any selected object.

Free rotate

While rotating an object is great, getting rid of the rotation can get a bit sticky if you try to use the free-rotate icon. Most people will nearly remove the rotation, but are surprised to find that a slight angle remains.

There are two painless ways to remove the rotation (the Angle). First, with the rotated object selected, expand the Transform group on the Properties panel and change the Angle to 0.

Remove a rotation using the Transform group on the Properties panel.

Sure, using the Angle field on the Transform group is easy. But I am always looking for easier. Select a rotated object and, instead of dragging the free-rotate icon at the top of the object… double-click it. And bam! That Angle is instantly reset to 0. No dragging. No typing. Just a simple double-click and done.

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Looking to learn Adobe Captivate 5 or 5.5? We offer Beginner and Advanced classes. Both Windows and Macintosh developers can attend these classes.
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PowerPoint 2010: Perfecting the Motion Path

by AJ George Follow us on Twitter

Using motion paths in PowerPoint is fun, but also kind of complicated. Probably the most complicated aspect of using motion paths is continuing the motion from slide-to-slide. Does this scenario sound familiar? You want an image on your slide to move using a custom motion path. On the next slide you want the image to move from where it ended on the previous slide to a new location. The problem is PowerPoint only shows you where the image begins in the motion path. To line up on the next slide exactly where the image ended is very difficult. As a result, your image can "jump" as you go through your presentation.

The way to avoid this unfortunate "jump" situation is to essentially work backwards.

  1. Create your slide and position the image you are going to animate in its final location (where it will end after the motion path plays).

    In the example below, I want the hand to come up from off of the slide and look as though it is pushing the text "Meet Jackson" up on the screen. On the next slide, I want the hand to continue moving from this position and then exit to the right.

    Meet Jackson

  2. Duplicate this slide ([Ctrl-D]).

    If this slide was your first slide, the duplicate will be your second. After duplicating, return to the first slide.

    Note: Motion paths work from the center of images. Before you continue, you will need to find the center point of the image you will be animating. In this case I will be working with the hand.

  3. Notice the handles around the image. (If you don't see them, click once on the image.)

    PowerPoint handles

  4. From the View tab, select Guides in the Show area to make the slide's guides visible.
  5. Drag the guides so they line up with the center and middle handles of the image. The intersection of the guide lines is the center of your image.

    Guides centered

  6. Insert your desired motion path (Animations > Add Animation > Motion Paths).

    For this example I am using a simple Line motion path. Starting at the end point (where your image currently is) and drawing to where you would like the image to begin its motion path.

    Motion path, end-to-start.

  7. Right-click the motion path (not the image) and choose Reverse Path Direction.
  8. If the Animation Pane is not already visible, choose Animations > Animation Pane to view it now.
  9. On the Animation Pane, click the down arrow next to the motion path animation and select Effect Options.

    Notice that my image has a descriptive name of "Hand" on my Animation Pane. If you would like to learn how to do this in PowerPoint, click here.

    Effects options

  10. From the resulting dialog box, click the down arrow next to Path, select Locked and then click OK.

    Path locked

    Locking the motion path will allow you to move to the image without the motion path automatically moving with it.

  11. Select the object you are animating (in this case, the hand) and place your cursor directly over the intersection of the guides (the center of image).
  12. Carefully drag the image so that your cursor (which is in the center of the image) overlaps where the green arrow of the motion path is.
  13. Move to your second slide (where your image appears exactly where it ended on the 1st slide) and add the rest of your animation.

Check out this video to see the completed animation. I used the same method to animate the "Meet Jackson" text.

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

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Adobe Captivate: Quick Clicks and You’re Texting to Speech

by Kevin Siegel Follow us on Twitter View our profile on LinkedIn

The ability to convert text to speech using Captivate's built-in text to speech agents is awesome. All you need to do is select the slide note(s) you want to convert and then click the Text-to-Speech button.

Assuming you have installed NeoSpeech (a program that come with Captivate but needs to be installed manually), you will be able to choose from any one of five voices from the Speech Agent drop-down menu.

In addition to the five voices you get with Captivate, any voices that have already been installed on your computer will also appear in the Speech Agent drop-down menu. In the image below, Microsoft Anna, which comes with Windows, is also listed among the Speech Agents. 

After selecting an agent, all you need to do is click the Generate Audio button to convert the selected text to an audio file. Simple! Of course, if you follow these simple steps, you won't get the agent you were hoping for in the generated audio.

In the image below, notice that I have selected Kate from the Speech Agent drop-down menu. However, Microsoft Anna is shown at the right of the dialog box. Most new Captivate developers (and even some vets) miss this little detail. If I were to click the Generate Audio button now, I'd end up with an audio file containing Microsoft Anna, not Kate.

Kate selected as the Speech Agent

There is one subtle thing you have to do before selecting an agent and then clicking the Generate Audio button: click just above the text you'd like to convert and ensure the space above the text turns gray (see the image below).

Kate re-selected as the Speech Agent.

If you miss this one simple click, you won't be using the agent you want… instead, you'll be using the default agent (which, as shown earlier, would have been Anna for me).

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Adobe Captivate 5 & 5.5: Avoid the Heart Attack… Put It Back!

by Kevin Siegel Follow us on Twitter View our profile on LinkedIn

I was teaching a session on Adobe Captivate at a conference when I performed an action I have performed at least a thousand times… I opened the Advanced Interactions dialog box (via the Project menu).

While this was  a routine action, the result was anything but routine. The Advanced Interactions dialog box did not appear on my screen and Captivate appeared to crash. I could move my mouse around the screen, but if I tried to click anywhere, I heard an alert beep. Nothing was working in Captivate and I was stuck. This was perfect timing. There were only a few hundred people staring at me. And I'm pretty sure that more than a few attendees were enjoying the show as I squirmed and tried to troubleshoot the issue.

I noticed that if I pressed the [Escape] key on my keyboard, I could continue to work within Captivate, but trying to open that pesky Advanced Interactions dialog box caused my system to freeze each time.

The first thing I tried to do was reset Captivate's Classic workspace (Window > Workspace > Reset Classic). While that seemed like a reasonable course of action, it didn't resolve the issue.

And that's when it hit me. I use two huge monitors in my office (yes, I'm spoiled). When I was at the conference, I was plugged into the conference-supplied overhead–essentially a single huge monitor.

I remembered that when I was last in my office, I had opened the Advanced Interactions dialog box and dragged the dialog box from my main monitor to my second monitor. I had done what I needed to do in the Advanced Interactions dialog box and I had clicked OK.

I did not drag the dialog box back to my main monitor–and I had never needed to worry about doing so in the past. But for whatever reason, Captivate was acting as if I was still working with that second monitor, even though the monitor was not at the conference with me and wasn't listed in my system Display Preferences.

Thankfully there was a second monitor in the room, sitting just to my left on the table. I quickly plugged the second monitor into my laptop and BAM!… the Advanced Interactions dialog box showed up on the second monitor.

Given the fact that I've heard about this issue from several Captivate 5 developers, I would urge you to be diligent when working with dual monitors. If you move something to that second monitor, drag it back to the main monitor… especially if you are going on the road and you're not planning on taking the second (or third) monitor with you.

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Looking to learn Adobe Captivate 5 or 5.5? We offer Beginner and Advanced classes. Both Windows and Macintosh developers can attend these classes.

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Adobe RoboHelp: Preserve Modifications to Linked Content

by Kevin Siegel Follow us on Twitter View our profile on LinkedIn

Instead of importing content into RoboHelp from either Adobe FrameMaker or Microsoft Word, you can create a link between RoboHelp and the source document. One tactical advantage to linking to content instead of importing is if the Subject Matter Expert (SME) updates the source document, a few simple clicks in RoboHelp will update the RoboHelp project with the updated content.

It is possible that you will need to make local changes to some of the linked content from within RoboHelp and you don't want to rely on the SME to make the changes to the source document. Editing the content within RoboHelp is simple: open the topic from within RoboHelp and make edits just like you would in any word processor. However, if the source document is later updated by the SME, and you update the RoboHelp project with the intent of grabbing those changes, all of the changes you made to the content from within RoboHelp will be lost. Ouch!

If you find yourself needing to make changes to some of the topics from within RoboHelp, and you don't want to risk losing your edits, you can update the linked document so that your changes are preserved should you update the linked documented with its source.

On the Project Manager pod, right-click the linked document and choose Properties to open the Word Document Settings dialog box.

On the File Update Settings tab, select the topic(s) you plan to edit within RoboHelp (put a check in the check box) and then click the OK button.

Preserve modifications to linked content.

You are now free to update the topic from within RoboHelp as you see fit. Should you notice that the linked document has been updated by the subject matter expert (a yellow alert icon will appear on the document if the document is our of synch), go ahead and right-click the document and choose Update > Update. Topics that were not selected from the list of Generated files will be updated with the SMEs content changes. Topics that you edited will not be affected.

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Looking to learn Adobe RoboHelp? We offer a live, highly interactive online RoboHelp class once each month.

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eLearning: Could Zap Reader Philosophies be Applied to eLearning?

by AJ George Follow us on Twitter

Have you ever had to deliver eLearning where, despite your best efforts to eliminate it from a design perspective, there were still big blocks of text that learners HAD to read? Maybe it was a lengthy mission statement or some company policies or perhaps some pretty dry, but essential, text on insurance policies offered by the company.

I've been trying out this tool that popped up in my Twitter feed called Zap Reader. Essentially you copy and paste any text you would like to read faster into the Zap Reader tool and it will "play" the text for you one word at a time (or more-based on your preferences), speeding up your reading, and, allegedly, not compromising any of your comprehension.

The whole idea seemed a bit silly to me, but then I tried it. I read a lot of blogs to stay current on what's popping in the eLearning and technology fields. A LOT! Sometimes, if a post is super word heavy without breaks for pictures or videos, my eyes give up on it before I've even started.

I started pasting some of those text-heavy articles into Zap Reader and I realized that I was flying through them. I set the reader to read 600 words per minute, 2 words at a time and for the most part this worked out well for me.

There are shortcomings, however. Sometimes an article will have unusual names or acronyms I'm not immediately familiar with. In these cases my mind will get hung up on what I'm reading and I miss the next words as they flash up on the screen, pretty much shooting my retention right in the foot. But, for the most part, I find the Zap Reader method to be very effective.

The experience got me thinking. Would it make sense when delivering text-intensive sections of eLearning to flash up one or two words at a time? Could this work? Have any of you tried this? Can you share some samples? I'd love to hear from you.

You should give Zap Reader a try. Copy this whole article in and see how fast you can zip [zap?] through it. Also, check out this infographic by Mindflash for some useful speed reading tips.

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

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PowerPoint 2010: Drawing No-Fill Shapes By Default

by AJ George Follow us on Twitter

Related to last week's article on changing PowerPoint's default color palette, I was asked by a reader if it was possible to set up PowerPoint so that, by default, shapes were drawn without a fill color. After tinkering around with the color palettes, I can find no way to set PowerPoint so that every time you start a new presentation the shapes are already pre-set to draw without a fill color. PowerPoint will always default to drawing with a fill color. You can, however, set up each individual presentation to do this. It is not a perfect solution, but will still save you time versus having to format every shape individually in your presentation.

  1. Choose Insert > Shapes to draw the shape as you normally would.
  2. Right-click the shape and select Format Shape.

    3. The Format Shape dialog box will appear.

  3. Make formatting changes as you see fit (to remove the fill color choose Fill > No Fill).
  4. When you are finished, click the Close button.
  5. Right-click the shape again (being sure to click on the outside lines, clicking on the center of the shape will give you a different drop-down menu) and choose Set as Default Shape.

    Set as Default Shape in PowerPoint 2010.

Thereafter, any shape you draw in that presentation will follow this formatting by default (excluding lines and open shapes). Go ahead, give it a go with some other shapes. You will have to reset the shape defaults for each new presentation, but you will only have to do it once per presentation.

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