Tips, tricks, tools, and techniques for Microsoft Office

In the past, one of the common ways to add variety to a PowerPoint presentation was to use a third-party template -- anything other than using its same old, standard blue background. Many presenters choose a different approach, loading their presentations with animation, thinking it’s a good way to spice up things and hold viewer interest. That could be true, but a little animation can go a long way, and eventually it, too, fails to grab an audience’s attention.

Ovation, from Serious Magic ($99, http://www.seriousmagic.com) may not elicit the response its name implies, but it will add striking (and subtle), impressive stylish elegance to your PowerPoint slides.

Figure 1: Setting up a Presentation Click to enlarge

You prepare your presentation in the traditional way, using PowerPoint. You place titles, create bullet points, position graphics, and the rest of the typical PPT chores. When you’re done, you click on a button in a new toolbar within PowerPoint (which Ovation installs during installation) and switch to Ovation, which then does its magic, applying the template of your choice. That template is a collection of impressive backgrounds and animations (some faint, some dramatic). You don’t waste your time animating bullets in PowerPoint -- Ovation will apply its own motions (which are classy).

What makes the slides so impressive? There are several templates, each of which comes in a variety of colors. One template uses a foreground color scheme, then displays clouds floating past in the background. Another using spinning globes in the background (and displays a larger spinning globe between slides).

If you don’t like the way Ovation changes your layout, you can revert to the original layout from the PowerPoint slide. On a title slide, for example, the title was moved to the upper-left corner, with the subtitle just below it; we preferred the title in the center of the screen, the way PowerPoint lays it out. (You can also tell Ovation to use the typeface and text colors from PowerPoint rather than those assigned by the Ovation template, but not the font size -- that’s controlled by PowerPoint.)

When you’re ready to make your presentation, you control the slides from Ovation, not PowerPoint. That also means that some features -- such as Pack and Go -- can’t incorporate Ovation’s styles. You save your original PowerPoint presentation in the usual way (from within PowerPoint), then save the Ovation-ized version (from within Ovation, naturally) as a separate file, and present it.

If you are using a laptop, you can switch to “dual” mode and display the presentation via a projector hooked up to your computer’s serial port and use the presenter’s mode that offers PointPromper (a panel with rolling speaker-note text -- like a TelePromptR), a timer (which shows you if you’re ahead or behind schedule), and a “Next Bullet” field that previews for you the next bullet point (helpful to remind you of the next point when you’ve set bullets to display one at a time).

Figure 2: Making Your Presentation Click to enlarge

If you preview your presentation and find a tweak or two to make, you can flip between PowerPoint and Ovation to perform editing chores -- fixing typos, adding bullet points, adjusting font size, and the like. From PowerPoint you click a “Save and return to Ovation” and Ovation takes a few moments to re-process your slides.

Ovation is best suited to presenters who are willing to accept the defaults the program uses. It’s also best to call upon Ovation when your PowerPoint presentation is almost in final form. Flipping between PPT and Ovation is simple and relatively quick, but it can get tiring having to use two different programs.

You can insert a welcome slide (to be shown as the first slide), a closing slide (a “thank you” slide to show at the end), and any number of Intermission slides (which tick down the seconds during a break, for example; you can set the duration for up to 99 hours).

Some aspects of an Ovation presentation are surprisingly inflexible. You can’t drag and drop an Intermission slide, for example, to a different position within your slide set; you have to delete it and re-insert it at the desired spot. Furthermore, you can’t change the text colors, so “Please fill in your evaluation card” appeared in black text on a purple background in one sample I created -- it was definitely not readable, but there was no way to change the text to white.

We planned our PowerPoint test presentation carefully, then let Ovation take over, and we were generally pleased with the results. We could edit with PowerPoint to make last-minute tweaks, preview was quick, and there’s no question that the subtle animations of some slide templates (between slides and on a slide itself) are mesmerizing. All Ovation template designs have set aside room for your company logo, and others have spinning graphic areas into which you can place other files (such as product pictures, logos of your partners or subsidiaries -- whatever you like).

The program comes with a good “getting started” user guide that explains Ovation’s purpose and design, and gives you enough information to get started. The learning curve itself is quite short -- including a quick perusal of the user guide, we got the hang of things in about 30 minutes, a short investment for such a rich payback.

Serious Magic offers a 15-day free trial of Ovation. It’s definitely something you should try. Their product page

   http://seriousmagic.com/products/presentations/ovation-for-powerpoint-templates.cfm

also has a video presentation that gives you a good idea how the program works, and you can see the beauty built into the templates. -- James E. Powell

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