PowerPoint

heeheehee - the PowerPoint tutorial talked about floppy disks. *grin*
Looking at the date for the website, I see it's probably 1998, so they were probably using Windows 95. Still, I'm glad to see they have updated their tutorial for Office 2007.

Even though it is quite obviously an oooold tutorial using a fairly old version of MS Office, it is still a good tutorial. It well and truly covered the basics and advanced features, as well as a few rules for good presentation.

I've created a number of .ppt presentations in my time. I have toyed with clever transitions, dissolves, SFX and other features that are offered with the program, but usually upon viewing my efforts, I've gone back and removed them. I'm very much of the "less is more" school, especially for home made videos and PowerPoint pressentations.

I have previously been guilty of trying to fit too much text onto a slide, but am nowadays making big efforts to cut that down so I talk about the slide, not talk from it.

I have also been guilty of making too many slides for some presentations, but often that comes down to using the presentation as a 'slow reveal' for the elements of a reference, displaying the next element with each slide. That can be pretty big when you're showing 4 or more references. :-/

The closest I've come to utilising the more advanced features of PowerPoint is to embed some video files to lighten a presentation and provide a quick laugh for students. However, that can be quite painful, ensuring the linked file follows the ppt file around, since of course the presentation won't work without the linked file.

Whilst I realise the brief is to be clever with PowerPoint and tell you what I did, the truth is that I wouldn't use any file I was clever with in a class room situation, as I don't want the message to be lost in the production. Typewriter noises, crazy dissolves, text flying around, video and SFX are all awesome looking, but too much can go wrong if they have to be moved from one computer to another (as a prior work colleague discovered in a sales presentation), they are distracting, and can be overused.

Just because you can use them all, doesn't necessarily mean you should.