Digital Web Guide

I heard a story of a radio and Television. In the beginning era of modernity, a radio in a house, which was the sole resource of entertainment, was deserted when a more sophisticated TV entered the house. The story was about a personified radio’s sorrow over the cruel neglectfulness by the family members.  Why now a story like this? Because, Artculate Storyline is the in thing currently, and no one actually remembers that they had depended much on Articulate Presenter formerly. However, I don’t want to be like the unkind people of that family. Here, I have created something in PowerPoint to show my attachment to it. Though the title suggests something I did in PowerPoint, I have achieved this effect with the help of Articulate Presenter. I know this will be an easy task in Storyline with the help of triggers. But, I wanted just to make sure that with a little effort, presenter also could do something close to Storyline. What I tried was to create the Fundamental Musical No...

I am sure you all are very much familiar with the touch screen feature that comes along with latest cell phones those are having in built touch technology. I often am fancied by it when it comes to the image galleries. Mimicking the touch screen animation of image galleries, I have created something similar in PowerPoint. The powerpoint animation needs some basic animations, and I have elaborated the method with the help of a Screenr video. You can also download the powerpoint file by clicking here .

Hey! And I am back, and this time with a simple PowerPoint effect created based on the basic animations. I think this effect can be used as an alternative method to end your e-learning tutorials with a cinematic effect while scrolling up the credit lines. The below screenr will show you the Shrinking Cinematic Effect and the steps which I used to create the effect. If you find my awkward pronunciation difficult to follow, scroll down this page further, and you will see the steps in written format with additional images.  In these following steps, I am showing you a different example. If it was Pierce Brosnan who appeared in my Screenr video, now it is the turn of Tom and Jerry. Step 1: You have the image of Tom & Jerry placed in a PowerPoint slide covering entirely the slide area. In this example, I have changed the slide background colour into black. Step 2: Copy the image, place it exactly on top of the first imag...

In this short article, I am going to show you how I did the ‘Loading Effect’ animation in PowerPoint. You can check the ‘ AuthorStream ’ video given with this article to see what is the Loading Effect here I mention.  Loading Effect More PowerPoint presentations from Tom We have seen this option in many places, when an online flash game is getting loaded, when a new software is being installed, or something like that. I tried to create the same effect in PowerPoint, and succeeded to a certain extend, but here is a disclaimer: this effect won’t work properly in Articulate, unless you are modifying the animations with more patience and efforts. I will try to explain the Loading Effect in the following steps using some screenshots. Step 1: First you want a rectangular frame like this: Animation: No Animation required Step 2: Draw another rectangular box within the first frame, and give a different colour to it. Animation: Give...

Or Crop Unwanted Part of an Image without Harming the Main Element Well, I think both of these titles can together explain the gist of this post. Sometimes when dealing with PowerPoint, we may find ourselves stuck at some images, which have certain queer edges, making it almost impossible to crop without mutilating the main object. The image of the teddy given in the beginning of the post explains this problem well. If we try to simply crop this image to avoid the logo ( Howtodo.com is what it reads), we will find that we can do it only either incompletely or cutting away one of the legs of the teddy. So, how can we chop off the logo without hurting the teddy? In such cases, we can do it more effectively with some small tricks. Just click on the image, and rotate the image by clicking and turning on the rotating handle in such a way that the logo is placed at the bottom of the image. Now, copy the image, and using the paste special option, paste it as a PNG. ...

Another PowerPoint trick which I learned during my interaction with colleagues. We know how to give hyperlinks from an object in our PowerPoint slide to web pages. Yes; right click on the object, click on ‘Hyperlink’, and type your desired web page URL. Using the same feature, you can give hyperlinks to other documents saved in your computer also. But in this post, I am trying to talk you about a hidden trick which will help you to give hyperlink to a specific slide of another PowerPoint file kept in our system. Please note that, this method will help you to give links to the slides of PowerPoint files only. I may disappoint you saying that this method is completely PowerPoint slideshow specific and will not work in Articulate. How to give hyperlinks from an object in a PowerPoint file to a specific slide of another PowerPoint file So the method is here: • Open the PowerPoint file and spot the object from which you want to give a link. • Right click on it, from the...

Here is something which I learned quite recent in connection with the designing of e-learning modules. Before reading down, you should be well aware that the e-learning tool which I am talking here about is Articulate Presenter, not Captivate, Camtasia, or anything sophisticated.   You know about the side bar view of a module published in Articulate. There you have the option to sort the topics into titles and subtitles. The main titles appear along with either numbers or triangular shaped bullets, which point to the right side when we are yet to reach at it (►), and point to down when we are at it (▼). The below picture will clarify my today’s topic of discussion. As you all know, for defining main titles, and sub titles of 2nd level, 3rd level, etc.,  we need to go to the slide properties, and prescribe in the Level tab, the preferred level number in the corresponding column of the titles. For example, if you want ‘Topic A’ as the main title, and ‘Topic B’ a...

I am starting with the assumption that all of you are well familiar with the E-learning software 'Articulate'. It is a very useful tool as far as E-learning is concerned, and we can say, it is almost impossible to create effective e-learning tutorials without the help of a software, like Articulate. For making tutorials, Articulate mostly depends on the Microsoft's PowerPoint. Well, why should I tell all these well known facts to educated and well-learned people like you? Ok, let me just share some creepy observation, which I happened to notice, while publishing a tutorial. When you publish something in Articulate, it is almost like your system has some hysteria or fever. It won't allow you to do other things normally, or even if we are able to do it, Articulate's publishing components will be influencing it like an epidemic. Last day, when I was publishing a module in Articulate, I tried to do just a normal copy paste activity. I opened a web page, copied a text,...

Do you know what did I use to do if I was asked at a stretch to perform a multitude of hard tasks within a short period of time at the work place? To tackle the initial turmoil, I would have sat still for some time, and when the emotional pressure slightly smoothens, I would just login to my instant messenger and would chat freely with someone, who was simply killing free time at his/her office sitting at somewhere in the world. Another method, which I practiced and found as a successful stress-buster was playing computer games. If you have card games or chess or even some comic fun games available in your PC, dealing with them also are proved as capable to kill the workplace pressure. Ok, so that was the introduction. And, this time, what I try to introduce as part of my PowerPoint Learning Series is another tricky method to ease the difficulty that you might have faced while creating PowerPoint based e-learning modules. How many times have you faced the necessity of changing an imag...

So, I am here again with another trick, which may be applicable while you polish your images with a creative touch for your elearning modules. In PowerPoint 2007, you can really mould an image in the format of many default shapes. You might have noticed an array of shapes you are able to draw in PowerPoint 2007 and in advanced versions. These shapes are shown in the Home Tab. Now, will you believe, if I say you can draw your images in any of these default shapes? And believe me, you will not need any advanced options like ‘picture or texture fill’ to do that. You can do it with a single click. It is as simple as giving specific default picture effects. The steps to do this are given below. 1. Insert your image to your PowerPoint slide. 2. Double Click on the image 3. From the Format Tab select 'Picture Shape' drop down menu. 4. You can see all the default PowerPoint shapes there. Click on the one in which you want your image get cut. 5. Now, you can see ...

Ok, so my experiments with MS Paint go on. This time I learned how to write for our e-learning modules with handwritten letters using a PENCIL. It is very simple, and I don’t think it needs a blog post to demonstrate how we are going to write with hand-written fonts in lead color. Anyway, let us first dig the internet to find a clean notebook paper. The following one will be suitable, I think. Open this image in your PowerPoint. Now open the MS Paint (Windows 7 version). In the brushes menu, among many artistic and creative brushes, you will find a ‘natural pencil’. Pick that one and start to ‘write’ on the white area. (Remember to choose black color and a 4px size.) Point to remember: Here, writing does not mean typing. You have to actually ‘draw’ the letters, sentence, paragraph or whatever you want to get written, using the pencil tool. - Select the written things with the select tool and copy it. - Go to your PowerPoint, where you have the image of the notebook sheet ...

The traditional methods of removing backgrounds of images in PowerPoint 2007 version have become obsolete now with the advent of the innovative background removal tool in the 2010 version. But since what the proverb reminds us is being late is better than being never’, I decided to post a small tip, using which we can make the background removal in 2007 version a little bit finer with the application of MS Paint. We know two methods of background removing in PowerPoint 2007. In the first method , we draw an outline of the main object in our image using freeform shape and fill the shape using the picture or texture fill option. In the second method , we draw outlines of the background areas of the image using free form tool, give same colour to all shapes, and after making the entire group into a PNG image remove the background portions using set transparaent colour option. But while using this second method, many of you might have found the light outline of the shapes as a disturbnace...