Ridge View Media’s Blog

Kudos, First, to Tom Kuhlmann!

The Articulate user community of instructional designers, developers, and technical communicators has a wonderful advocate in the person of Tom Kuhlmann, author of Articulate’s “The Rapid e-Learning” blog, and Vice President of Community. This week, he wrote a post on how hiding slides in PowerPoint (PPT) helps you save your edited clip art images and other edited items inside your PPT project file. If you use “layers” frequently when creating animations in PPT, you will appreciate this Hot Tip of Tom’s!

Click the image above to go to his post, “How to Be More Productive when Using PowerPoint for e-Learning Courses”, 30 September 2008, or just click here! )

User Comments

The Comments section of Tom’s post clearly demonstrates the value of Articulate’s user community. Make sure you read through each comment. I did, and saw that some users discovered issues with the hidden PPT slides and their LMS. Gabe Anderson replied that the upcoming Articulate Presenter ‘09 resolves those issues.

But, what if a user will not be upgrading to AP ‘09 soon? No problem; I have a solution. So, I decided to write this post to suggest a workaround for those users who would LOVE to upgrade to Articulate Presenter ‘09, but may not be able to right away due to corporate budget constraints, or any gazillion number of reasons. (Especially in these economic times; what a wild ride we’ve been on in the U.S. for the past 2-1/2 weeks.) And, my idea may also work for you who will upgrade to AP ‘09, but you have a different work-flow process for your PPT files that are revised by multiple designers.

Create a PPT Library “a la” Adobe Flash!

Adobe Flash best-practices practitioners encourage developers to create a stand-alone Library file of images and animations. The Library file makes it easy to reuse elements, and quickly makes those elements available to a team of developers working on various projects. This Library file helps make rapid development even more rapid.

We can do that with PPT. This workaround will help you avoid any issues with hidden PPT slides and your LMS.

1. Open a new PPT file for your Library items.
2. Save the file as… Library.ppt
   (or, the name that fits your team or your project, for example:
   SharePointPPTLibrary.ppt )
3. Change the View of the Library file to Slide Sorter View.
4. Open your PPT project file that has edited elements as Tom describes in his post.
5. Change the View of the project file to Slide Sorter View.
6. Arrange the two slide decks so they are side by side. (See image below.)
7. Drag and drop the hidden slides from your project PPT file to the Library file.
8. Save both PPT files and you’re done!

Left: Project slides with edited images.
Right: Library.ppt file awaiting slides!

Best Practices:

• Open the Library PPT file in Slide Sorter View and hide it in the background while you work.
• When you finish working on your images, drag and drop their slides into the Library PPT file.
  
• Use the Title Slide to create a heading for each project’s slides; create one title for each project.
  

Final Thoughts

When you get a chance, upgrade to AP ‘09. I plan to upgrade this year. Gabe and Tom say it will knock our socks off, and I believe them. Why? Because of Articulate’s active user community and the product gurus who listen to those users every day. (And, that includes Justin and his team in the Support Forum.)

With Articulate’s dynamic development team, I’m “Always Learning” new things about Articulate’s Presenter, Engage, and Quizmaker!

Tags: Articulate, PowerPoint, Project Management, resources, tutorials

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 11:01 pm and is filed under e-Learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.