Enhance your PowerPoint presentations with free pptPlex

PowerPoint remains the tool of the most popular presentation in the company for the general public. However, his concept of the "slides" which succeed each other is very linear, too! pptPlex revolutionizes presentations making them far less linear with an astonishing principle of clusters and zoom effects spectacular ... Simply brilliant and indispensable!


Step 1: Installation

Clearly, the "Office Labs" of Microsoft are full of new ideas and good surprises! The latest is a revolution in the world of PowerPoint presentations! It's called pptPlex and is an extension for Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, which does not incorporate the concept of slides to present information rather than linearly, but flat, arranged on a wall on which zooms in and zoom out are possible. In practice, the principle works so well that very quickly you adopt for your next presentation ...

The first thing to do is, of course, download and install this extension for PowerPoint:

- Quit PowerPoint if it is open

- Log into the site for pptPlex of Office Labs

- Click on the icon Try it!

- Download the pptPlex.msi software on your desktop for example.

- Once the program is downloaded, run it by double-clicking

- The installation wizard will install the extension in the core of PowerPoint

- Once installation is complete, run PowerPoint 2007 and see the presence of a pptPlex new tab in the Office Ribbon.

Step 2: Definition of sections

Traditionally, a PowerPoint presentation is divided into chapters of one or more slides. In other words, in a presentation, you can generally combine slides around a theme or sub theme.

pptPlex works indicating where to start PowerPoint clusters. Suppose we had a presentation divided into 3 chapters: Chapter 1 includes 3 slides, Chapter 2 includes a slide, and Chapter 3 contains 2. We will then, using pptPlex, insert a Section pptPlex at the beginning of each chapter.

Nothing more simple:

- In the panel that displays the slides, select the last slide of a chapter

- Open the tab pptPlex

- Click the Insert New Section

- This inserts a new slide "pptPlex Section Divider"

- Switch to "edition" of this slide and replace "Enter Section Title Here" in the title of the chapter.

- Repeat the operation to insert a slide "section pptPlex" before each chapter.

Step 3: View the pptPlex presentation

At this stage, most of the work has already been achieved, pptPlex being a highly automated. We will already be able to discover the effects.

- Always in pptPlex ribbon tab, click the icon From Overview

- PowerPoint displays an overview of the presentation where the slides are grouped in sections, as thumbnails of varying size, as you can see on the screenshot.

- Double click on a section or on a slide. And see how PowerPoint zoom in on the selected region.

- Continue to double click and find that PowerPoint can come and zoom in on tiny portions of a slide.

- Now click the right mouse button. The view is then "zoom out" one level PowerPoint.

- Have fun and zoom out and zoom in on your presentation and see how the experiment turns pptPlex very linear PowerPoint presentations in a more dynamic with moments where you can "dive" to a given topic and then return to a menu or a global view.

Step 4: Playing with advanced options

You can set various options that act both on the effect of zoom in/zoom out, on the organization of thumbnails in the sections, and the layout of the sections:

- In the Ribbon pptPlex tab, click Advanced Options

- The Slide Transition settings affect the zoom effects

- Color and Template affect formatting sections

- Slide Agreement modifies the arrangement of slides in the section

Try different combination's to discover the influence of these parameters on the presentation.


Step 5: Apply a background

By default, pptPlex uses a white background. But for presentations more visually appealing, it is better to come and apply a color screen.

- Open the tab pptPlex from ribbon

- Deploy the library of results by clicking on Canvas Background

- Choose the one that seems best suited to your presentation

- This adds a new slide at the beginning of the special presentation

- You may then edit this slide to change the titles, add things, move and resize components of pptPlex.