I've been asked to share some general tips and tricks for Articulate and PowerPoint to a group of fellow trainers this Friday afternoon. I have some ideas, but thought I'd open up the discussion to see some of what your thoughts and suggestions might be? What are your top 2 or 3 tips/tricks you'd share and what are some of your favorite go to resources for working with Articulate and PowerPoint? Let me know your thoughts. Thanks!
BTW- E-Learning Heroes will be a the top of my list.
I personally use the remove background feature a lot. I did learn something new, accidently the other day when using the mark areas to keep part of the tool. In the past I would spend a lot of time clicking on the areas that I want to keep, but sometimes, other areas would pop up as deleted. In the end, I would have a lot of the little plus icons to get the image just right. One day, I accidently clicked and dragged and noticed that the area I dragged was marked. So now, I use click and drag for my areas to keep and areas to remove, and my editing of images goes way quicker, and seems to be more accurate.
Not sure if anyone else has figured this out, but I thought I would share it just in case you have not.
That was a great thread, David! Thanks for linking us to it and all of those resources. My team recently got 2010 upgrade so these are coming at the perfect time.
As for my favorites, these may not be the flashiest features, but some things I use constantly are
Paste Special/PNG (I found the shortcut for my Quick Access Toolbar in 2010!)
Transparency controls
Animation/Format Painters
I can't even work without the Selection Pane. I'd go nuts.
I may be too late for your talk, but here are a couple of my tips.
Like most people have mentioned, the Selection Pane is invaluable, especially when I start adding multiple images, hyperlinks, etc. But until recently, I had forgotten that I could give my own custom names to the elements in the Selection Pane. Naming the elements is saving me a lot of time and frustration on complex slides.
Two very basic things in Quizmaker are to display the question in Slide View for formatting and layout; and to use the shortcut from the Articulate button to move to Next Slide and Previous slide within a quiz. (I often see people overlooking that.)
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Hi Sue!
That sounds like a fun session. I don't know if you saw this post from last year, but it has a lot of PowerPoint tips for Articulate users: http://community.articulate.com/blogs/david/archive/2011/02/07/essential-powerpoint-features.aspx What might help you organize your session is the categories. They could drive the high-level discussion before diving into the specific tutorials.
If you need anything like source files or templates, you can pull from the downloads section.
I personally use the remove background feature a lot. I did learn something new, accidently the other day when using the mark areas to keep part of the tool. In the past I would spend a lot of time clicking on the areas that I want to keep, but sometimes, other areas would pop up as deleted. In the end, I would have a lot of the little plus icons to get the image just right. One day, I accidently clicked and dragged and noticed that the area I dragged was marked. So now, I use click and drag for my areas to keep and areas to remove, and my editing of images goes way quicker, and seems to be more accurate.
Not sure if anyone else has figured this out, but I thought I would share it just in case you have not.
Good luck with your presentation!!
Hi Sue,
This is a great discussion to bring up!
My favorite free tools are pixie (a color picker, so that you can easily find color values) and JRuler.
My favorite tricks are to use the selection pane in and presenter and to, in quizmaker go to arrange
Hope this helps,
Heidi
I just remembered this thread from a while back. It's packed with favorite features and links to blogs and resources.
That was a great thread, David! Thanks for linking us to it and all of those resources. My team recently got 2010 upgrade so these are coming at the perfect time.
As for my favorites, these may not be the flashiest features, but some things I use constantly are
Paste Special/PNG (I found the shortcut for my Quick Access Toolbar in 2010!)
Transparency controls
Animation/Format Painters
I can't even work without the Selection Pane. I'd go nuts.
Great ideas everyone. Thanks for sharing.
I may be too late for your talk, but here are a couple of my tips.
Like most people have mentioned, the Selection Pane is invaluable, especially when I start adding multiple images, hyperlinks, etc. But until recently, I had forgotten that I could give my own custom names to the elements in the Selection Pane. Naming the elements is saving me a lot of time and frustration on complex slides.
Two very basic things in Quizmaker are to display the question in Slide View for formatting and layout; and to use the shortcut from the Articulate button to move to Next Slide and Previous slide within a quiz. (I often see people overlooking that.)
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