Aspire relational presentation workshops and tutorials teach interactive presentation skills for PowerPoint 2007 and PowerPoint 2003

Workshop Levels

Level 2—Advanced PowerPoint Skills and Navigation

Level 2's four sessions mark the start of Relational Presentation training. These sessions cover six critical subjects that often receive little, if any, coverage in regular PowerPoint courses. You will explore shapes, pictures, hyperlinks, custom shows, navigation strategies, and important design considerations. Skills learned here prepare you for the more robust navigation forms of Level 3.

Session 2.1

Shapes: Shapes are a wonderfully useful part of PowerPoint's normal functionality, yet are virtually unknown to most presenters. To relational presenters, shapes are like bread and water. They are essential to almost all Relational Presentation techniques and represent the basic alphabet you must understand before building navigation devices. Shapes make possible the formation of navigation elements, slide decoration, and optical illusions. They help organize content and links, provide highlighting and shadow, run animations on demand, and perform a host of other useful functions. When shapes are pushed to their full capacity, they completely change slide shows—meaning that after finishing this session you will be in a new world.

Session 2.2

Pictures/Graphics: Pictures and graphical elements, likewise, are underutilized by most speakers. Flexible inclusion of imagery offers great potential for customized expression of ideas and targeted display of products. Pictures also can be downsized to serve as thumbnails for navigation. When this happens, the thumbnails provide visual clues that help presenters quickly find information or preview topics. This session offers a comprehensive look at the many roles images might play in your future performances.

Session 2.3

Hyperlinks: Hyperlinks in PowerPoint, as in a Web environment, allow users to jump around between different pieces of content. The importance of doing so in a presentation context is enormous. Navigation-based delivery opens up a rich world of customized media use. People new to relational methods often are amazed at how much flexibility hyperlinks add to performances. These simple devices transform canned, rigid messages into adjustable mini-messages that can be added, dropped, or modified instantly and continually along the way during a performance.

Navigation Elements and Styles: The true potential of visually interactive presentation becomes clearer as you experiment with navigation strategies. This session introduces basic navigation concepts by focusing on what is known as Internal navigation—moving around within a single slide show. Such movement, from a technical perspective, is very simple. However, don't underestimate its importance. Internal navigation models are extremely useful and important. Session 2.3 explores Showcase and In-line navigation in detail, and also previews Zone, Invisible, Nested, and Animated styles.

Section 2.4

Custom Shows: Custom Shows are like slide shows within a slide show. They are a part of PowerPoint's normal functionality as well, and once again are practically unknown. We don't use them a lot in a Relational Presentation context, but they do occasionally come in handy. Session 2.4 discusses pros and cons of their use. In some situations, Custom Shows are quite helpful and you definitely need to be intimately familiar with their use.

Introduction to Design for Visually Interactive Presentation: Design considerations are (or should be) a major part of your thinking when producing relational content and building presentation network structure. In this session we touch on several critical design issues, and then go on to cover more techniques during Level 3. The design strategies here focus mostly on aesthetics—use of colors, lighting effects, and content/navigation placement.

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