Microsoft Powerpoint: The Bumblebee's 3 most useful PPT add-ins

August 27, 2012 | article by Ken Thompson in Visualization/Analytics (10)

In an earlier article, The Bumblebee's 7 most useful Excel add-ins, I shared my 7 most useful excel add-ins. Here I share my 3 most useful Powerpoint add-ins - Acoolsoft PPT to Video, iSpring and PPT2HTML. Like excel add-ins once you install them they become available within the powerpoint menus. Unfortunately none of these are free but sometimes you get what you pay for.

Acoolsoft PPT to Video (paid)

Website: http://www.acoolsoft.com/powerpoint-to-video-overview.html

PPT to Video converts powerpoint files into videos in all the main formats including AVI, WMV, MPEG, MP4, MOV and is a great way of creating a video quickly and cheaply before you upload it to Youtube or Vimeo. What's neat is that PPT to Video also manages to preserve your animations and transition effects from your original PowerPoint presentation.

iSpring (free and paid)

Website: http://www.ispringsolutions.com

iSpring converts your powerpoint presentations into flash videos which you can share on the web. Here is a link to some sample demos. There is a good review by m62 of iSpring versus two other Powerpoint to Flash conversions programs which concludes "iSpring Presenter is far and away more pleasant and intuitive, and a few hundred dollars cheaper. The viewer experience is slightly less customisable than with Articulate's package, but iSpring delivers flexibility where it's needed most, and without any hunting around. Powerful as they are, both iSpring programs feel completely unintimidating at the publishing stage and make it very easy to set up the exact format, size and quality that you need".

PPT2HTML (paid)

Website: http://www.pptools.com/products.htm

PPT2HTML is probably my favourite Powerpoint add-in. It allows you to create a web-page in Powerpoint with lots of embedded hyperlinks and then it converts the page to html which you can upload to your server. The only small problem I have is that PPT2HTML does not seem to convert "mailto" email links correctly so you need to go into the converted html and put them in by hand but this is no big deal.

About Ken Thompson

Ken Thompson delivers keynote conference speeches, workshop facilitation and in-house consultancy in four key business areas:

Creating High Performing Teams in enterprises including Virtual and Mobile Teams (based on the Bioteams Book)
Establishing effective Collaborative Business Networks enabling companies to co-operate effectively in areas such as sales and product development (based on the book - The Networked Enterprise)
How to use the latest social media technologies including blogging and online communities to promote enterprises, brand, organisation or event
Development of graphical on-line interactive Business Dashboards and What-if Simulators for organisations to support Performance Improvement, Strategy Development and Executive Team Development.

Tags: Powerpoint

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Bioteams Books Reviews

The coming shape of organizations and teams

August 23, 2005 | article by Ken Thompson in Book Reviews (37)

Belbin sees Bioteams as the next step. Dr R Meredith Belbin, regarded as the father of "team-role" theory and one of the worlds foremost experts on teams predicts that we will evolve into bioteam forms. In his book "The Coming Shape of Organisation" Belbin picks out five observations human teams need to learn from "a diminutive masterclass" of social insects such as bees, ants and termites.

Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK

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Click here to check all Bioteams book reviews

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