Skip to main content

Zoomable, Non-Linear PowerPoint Presentations with pptPlex

OK, so many people have asked me how I do my presentations and could they have a link that I've decided to put the links and a short explanation on my blog. My presentations are all done in PowerPoint 2007, but I use a Microsoft Office Labs plug-in called pptPlex. From their website come the following quotes:

"pptPlex uses Plex technology to give you the power to zoom in and out of slide sections and move directly between slides that are not sequential in your presentation."
"...pptPlex can help you organize and present information in a non-linear fashion."
If you don't know what any of this means, then you should ask me to do a presentation :-) or have a look at their videos. It's very simple to install and use. However, remember that you need it to be installed on your presentation machine in order to give the Plex version of the presentation, otherwise it will just show as a normal PowerPoint presentation.
If the pptPlex Ribbon Tab doesn't display in PowerPoint...
There are several reports of the plug-in becoming disabled on some systems and the ribbon tab not displaying. There are solutions on the forums for this, but most of them have an error in the selection of which plug-ins to manage, so I'll quickly give an explanation here. If you have any other problems, don't ask me, use their forums.
  1. Click the (round) Office button and then click on PowerPoint Options
  2. Select Add-Ins from the left
  3. If pptPlex from Microsoft Office Labs appears in the disabled list then carry on, otherwise you have a different problem
  4. Right at the bottom, select Disabled Items from the Manage drop down list box and click Go...
  5. Select the add-in from the list and click Enable, then click OK in the PowerPoint Options dialog (you may need to shut PowerPoint down and start again).
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Coventry Building Society Grid Card

Coventry Building Society have recently introduced the Grid Card as a simple form of 2-factor authentication. It replaces memorable words in the login process. Now the idea is that you require something you know (i.e. your password) and something you have (i.e. the Grid Card) to log in - 2 things = 2 factors. For more about authentication see this post . How does it work? Very simply is the answer. During the log in process, you will be asked to enter the digits at 3 co-ordinates. For example: c3, d2 and j5 would mean that you enter 5, 6 and 3 (this is the example Coventry give). Is this better than a secret word? Yes, is the short answer. How many people will choose a memorable word that someone close to them could guess? Remember, that this isn't a password as such, it is expected to be a word and a word that means something to the user. The problem is that users cannot remember lots of passwords, so remembering two would be difficult. Also, having two passwords isn't real...
Post a Comment
Read more

Improving Usability AND Security - it is possible?

I believe so, but only if security teams start to listen to what's important to the usability experts and adapt the security provision accordingly. As many have said before, there is no such thing as 100% security and we don't even necessarily want governmental levels of security for everything. Security provision should be appropriate to the systems and the information it protects. I have worked on several projects with user experience designers and it has really changed my approach to securing systems. One particular project I was brought in to work on was having problems because the UX team were refusing to put in additional security measures and the security team were refusing to let them go live. To cut a long story short, it turns out that there are known drop-out rates for registrations or user journeys based on the number of fields people have to fill in and how many clicks they have to do. So, the requirements from the security team meant that the drop-out rates wou...
Post a Comment
Read more

Trusteer or no trust 'ere...

...that is the question. Well, I've had more of a look into Trusteer's Rapport, and it seems that my fears were justified. There are many security professionals out there who are claiming that this is 'snake oil' - marketing hype for something that isn't possible. Trusteer's Rapport gives security 'guaranteed' even if your machine is infected with malware according to their marketing department. Now any security professional worth his salt will tell you that this is rubbish and you should run a mile from claims like this. Anyway, I will try to address a few questions I raised in my last post about this. Firstly, I was correct in my assumption that Rapport requires a list of the servers that you wish to communicate with; it contacts a secure DNS server, which has a list already in it. This is how it switches from a phishing site to the legitimate site silently in the background. I have yet to fully investigate the security of this DNS, however, as most...
13 comments
Read more