In this article, we’ll see how you can add free animation for your PowerPoint 2007 presentations.

PowerPoint Animation Basics

It is useful to understand the four basic types of free animations for PowerPoint:

• Entry: used to introduce animated objects on a slide
• Emphasis: used for emphasizing elements already present on a slide
• Exit: how objects move off the slide
• Motion Path: move objects in a specified path on the slide

Now let us see some simple ways you can add animation to your presentation.

Use Preset Animation for Text or Objects

To animate any object (text, shape, etc.), do the following:

1. Select the object you wish to animate

2. On the ribbon, select the Animations tab.

3. Choose an animation effect from the Animation drop-down.

Use Custom Animation for Text or Objects

For fine-grained control, click the Custom Animation button to bring up a task pane on the right.

Clicking the Add Effect button brings up a menu with four types of animations from which you can select the one you like. You can also add multiple animation effects, and see them added to a numbered list in the task pane. To remove any of them, select the animation from the list and click Remove. As you add animation effects, you will see numbered tags added beside the object you have selected.

You can further customize each animation effect using the three drop-downs. Start specifies whether the effect starts upon a mouse-click, starts simultaneously with the previous one, or starts after the previous one. The second drop-down depends on the effect and is used for customizing direction or other properties specific to that effect. The Speed drop-down selects the speed with which the effect is applied.

For advanced customization, right-click an effect in the list to bring up the context menu. Select Effect Options from the context menu to bring up a dialog box with more options to customize the effect.

You can reorder effects within the list using the Re-Order arrows at the bottom, and click Play to preview your animation.

Add Transitions Between Slides

Animations between two slides are called Transitions. To add Transitions, do the following:

1. In the left pane where all slides are shown in a vertical row, select the Slides tab.
2. Select one or more slides in the pane for which you want the desired transition.
3. On the Animations tab in the ribbon, choose a transition effect from the Transition to This Slide group.

You can optionally add Sound and change the speed of the transition using the drop-downs in the ribbon to the right as shown above. If you want to remove the transitions you have added, just select the slides and choose No Transition (first one) from the list.

Add Motion Path Animation

To make a graphic object move in a certain path on the slide, use Motion Path animation. This works best for graphic images with transparent backgrounds, as the graphic moves across other elements on the slide. To add Motion Path animation to an object, do the following:

1. Drag the object you wish to animate to its starting position.
2. Click to select the object.
3. Open the Animation task pane, as described earlier.
4. Select Add Effect > Motion Paths > Draw Custom Path > Scribble. The mouse pointer becomes like a pen.
5. Draw the desired animation path, starting at the object, and click where it should stop moving.

You can also check out a gallery of preset motion paths by selecting the More Motion Paths… menu item.

Add Animated Clip Art

You can also check out free animated clip art graphics on the web. The Clip Art section on Office Online has a huge library of clip art, including animations. You can filter your search at the bottom to find only animations related to your search term. In this way, you can get some cool free animations that are ready to be added to your presentations. Another website to check out animation clip art is Animation Library.

Do your presentations come alive after adding animation? Tell us in the comments!

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• 2 Safe Ways To Share Your Presentation Slides Online (3)

Now, sharing presentation slides is a very controversial topic for many different reasons. After all, you will provide all the work you’ve put into developing your presentation for free. But what exactly is it that you’re giving away? Your ideas? Your skill? Your time?

Presentations are a work of art. When you share them in an edible format, you are losing control over what you have created. If you don’t want to see your hard work watered down by edits, you should not share your original files. However, you can offer two alternatives. Either share only the figures and images you used in your slides. Or make your presentation slides available in a format that does not allow simple editing.

In other words, if someone wants to edit your ideas in a way you don’t approve of, they have to start from scratch and can only draw inspiration from your template.

Here are 2 ways and several tools to safely share your presentations online.

1. Share Presentation Slides as PDF

You can export your PowerPoint or Word presentations to PDF. The disadvantage of this method is that you will lose all animations. If that is not an issue, try the following tools.

KoolWIRE

The easiest and most universal way is to use an online tool such as KoolWIRE.

Using it is dead simple. Browse for the file on your computer, choose the output format, i.e. PDF, enter your eMail address, hit start and wait for the download link to be delivered to your inbox. When I tried it, it took less than a minute and in less than 5 minutes I had my PDF.

File Savr

Now you will want to share the file. Let’s say you don’t have a website or server of your own. Also, you probably don’t want to eMail a huge file every time someone asks for it. Fortunately, the web has a simple solution in store. There are many free online tools that let you share your files through the web and you don’t even have to sign up for the service.

File Savr is just one of many. You can upload files of up to 10GB, more than enough for a PDF file. Simply select the file you wish to upload. Once uploading has completed, File Savr will display the download page for the file. Save the URL and share it with people interested in your presentation. A CAPTCHA test must be passed before the file can actually be download.

I have previously reviewed 5 Easy Websites to Share Files Online Without Signing Up.

PDF Hammer

If someone would like to use parts of your work, they could prepare a PDF presentation and, using a PDF editor, merge individual presentation slides from different sources.

One free online tool to edit PDFs is PDF Hammer.

Along with KoolWIRE it was reviewed in Aibek’s post about Simplest PDF Apps Ever: Merge PDFs, PDF to DOC, Convert to PDF.

2. Share as Web Presentation

You can upload and share your presentation through an online service. While this preserves the original design of your slides, including animations, single slides can not be extracted and re-used in another medium. If this is what you desire, go ahead and give SlideBoom a try.

SlideBoom

You can use SlideBoom as a guest. However, presentations will only remain online for 7 days. To use SlideBoom to its full potential, you should register. There is a free version, which allows you to upload up to 100 presentations. It supports animations, add-ins, audio, video, groups, graphical annotations and blog or website embedding.

SlideBoom creates a summary page for your presentation, which includes the actual presentation, your notes, a transcript, and optional sharing options. Members can vote on you presentations and download them if the owner has unlocked this option. Below is a demonstration of an embedded presentation.

If you would like to improve your presentation skills, check out my post on 10 Powerpoint Tips for Preparing a Professional Presentation.

Do you feel comfortable with sharing your presentation slides?

Image credits: duchessa

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These clip art graphics are always composed of illustrations, sometimes with a little text, but never photography.

If you look at office suites like Microsoft Office (Word, Powerpoint, Excel), you’ll see that it comes with a fair bulk of graphics. Most often, you won’t have to look further than that. Nevertheless, sometimes you do.

Whether your collection does not suffice, or you never had any clip art in your office suite to begin with, referring to the world wide web for free clipart downloads is a logical step. Regretfully, a lot of people try to make money out of – often mediocre – clip art. Today we’ll show you a bunch of sites that don’t, places where you can find great clip art for no cost at all.

Clker

Let’s start off with my favourite – Clker.com. Whenever I need something, this is the first (and often the last) place I’ll look. They have a rich collection of vector clip art, all royalty free and in the public domain. Clip art can be downloaded in PNG (low, med, hi), SVG, or even ODG formats. And if you’re feeling especially creative, you can upload some works of your own.

A little less creative but still want to help out? Notice the green tag in the downright corner of the screenshot. You can help out tremendously by just tagging the images that are already there.

Open Clip Art Library

Open Clip Art Library is something special. They’re continuously collecting user-submitted clip art and publishing it under a Creative Commons license. Their goal is to build an easy to use directory, with free clipart downloads as far as the eye can see, to share and be shared alike.

A really useful feature is the Requests directory, where they try to encourage artists to create new content, but where you can also score a fresh piece of work yourself. Got an idea, but can’t find it anywhere? This is the place to go.

Unfortunately, the site doesn’t lend itself for easy browsing. You can perform a search using good ol’ custom Google, but you won’t walk into a thumbnail overview wherever you go. Click on an item to view an illustration preview.

The site takes a decent second place nonetheless, because the work is often of great quality and well worth the hassle.

WPClipart

WPClipart is your standard clip art directory, currently hosting tens of thousands of free clip art images; a number which keeps on growing. Find the image you’re looking for by browsing through the different directories or perform a search – I advise the latter. While looking through the images, you’ll also encounter a few photographs – unfortunate, because they do not belong on the site.

All clip art (and the occasional photograph) can be downloaded as a PNG image. With the click of a mouse, you can also easily convert them to JPG – whatever you like best.

You can also check out WPClipart’s feature overview @ the MakeUseOf directory.

Artvex

This site has pretty good looks – so why is it so far down the list? Well, the search option is completely messed up. I’m not sure if it’s due to bad scripting, or simply bad indexing, but the majority of search queries will refuse to return any results.

That aside, there is some great clip art imagery on the site, so if you don’t mind browsing categorically, I guess you’re fine. It’s still got over 10,000 free clipart downloads for you to choose from.

Again, the images can only be retrieved from the overview (as seen in the screenshot above). All pictures are in GIF format, and because of the download restrictions, the file dimensions aren’t worth any admiration either.

You can also check out Artvex’s feature overview @ the MakeUseOf directory.

Clipart ETC

Clipart ETC is ‘an online service of Florida’s Educational Technology Clearinghouse’. They supply over 58,000 free clip art images, to be used by students and teachers! Mind, if you are neither student or teacher, the license won’t cover you. Otherwise, you’ll be allowed to embed up to 50 items in a single, non-commercial project.

As the screenshot suggests, all clip art is in black and white – but that shouldn’t be too much a problem in research papers. All images include a more than decent description, and list their source. Because most of these illustrations are scans from (old) books, it can be interesting to track them to the source. Downloads are available in 240 dpi TIFF files, which allows you quite some flexibility.

Hopefully you’ve had some use of this post. If you know any other great sources for free clip art illustrations, be sure to mention them in the comments section below.

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Most people in the corporate world use the industry standard (and expensive) Microsoft Visio. So what do you do if you are in need of Visio but you can’t afford it or don’t want to use another Micro$oft product? Are there any free Visio alternatives?

Well I think we have a solution! I was almost shocked to find such an awesome application for the low low price of FREE! Open source is a wonderful thing and I would like to thank all the users that helped created this package – you rock!

Now let us check out DIA-  it is a 16.5 MB download from Sourceforge over here. It is also available for Linux and can probably be run on a Mac as well. If you have experience with DIA on either operating system we would love to hear from you in the comments! We will be working with the Windows version in this article.

After installing the application I launched it and was shown this screen:

At first glance it looks just like Visio with a different logo! Let’s see how it works…

You will see flowcharting as the default purpose of the application but with the click of a drop down menu and choosing Network we can do what I do in Visio… Chart networks.

That changes our tools to be computer network related like servers and firewalls. You can see the items shown below:

Just like Visio all you need to do is drag and drop icons onto your graph paper like so…

Icons are easy to resize and re-orientate by simply clicking on and manipulating the icon. You can make it point in a different direction or whatever you need. Icons snap together if you wish intuitively.

You can add text labels by simply hitting tools – text like so:

Then click where you want to add text either inside an icon or outside like so:

Really anything you can do in Visio you can do in DIA. Why would I want to use Visio over this, seeing as it also opens all file formats that Visio does? The community goes on to say this about the product:

Dia is roughly inspired by the commercial Windows program ‘Visio’, though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.

It can load and save diagrams to a custom XML format (gzipped by default, to save space), can export diagrams to a number of formats, including EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG, and can print diagrams (including ones that span multiple pages).

For me this free Visio alternative is wonderful! What do you use? Questions comments, death threats ? Leave them in the comments!

DIA – http://dia-installer.de/index_en.html.

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With that video file you can post it to YouTube, send it along  to another user via email or post it on your blog as a tutorial.

What ever you are going to do with the finished product this free 6.6mb application will make your life MUCH MUCH easier!

To start you need to download and install this application from here.

Once you complete the usual ritual of next, next and finish you will see a screen that looks like this:

From this screen it is super easy to convert your file. Simply click the New Task Button to get started. Let’s give it a shot.

After clicking the New Task button you choose between a single file or a whole folder. Next you will need to choose what you want to convert your PowerPoint File into. The only options you will have are: WMV, AVI, MPG, BMPs and MP3 audio.This should fit 90% of you and if you want to convert to another format either convert to a supported format and then convert that. But again for posting to YouTube or your blog this will do just fine.

I selected AVI and continued on. Next up you will see this screen:

From the above screen you can adjust transition time, compression, output folder and more. When you are ready to convert simply hit the convert button. you will get a warning screen telling you to make sure your PPT file is saved and not opened. Hit ok and continue.

It took about 25-40 seconds per slide but when I was done I had a smooth AVI video of my PowerPoint file. Awesome! Do you have another way to convert a powerpoint file to video? We would love to hear about it in the comments!

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Slideshare is a good place to see some really cool works of PowerPoint ‘art’. Check under your favorite category and you will feel genuinely inspired to do things with the graphics, fonts, bullets, sounds and audio/video clips on the canvas of a PowerPoint slide.

Whether you are on your first presentation or on your umpteenth, it’s always better to be prepared with the right resources to back up your ideas for the PowerPoint slides. So here’s looking at 10 websites for free supplies of media clips for PowerPoint.

Sound Clips

Wave Central

I wanted to end one of my presentations with a ‘Beam me Up, Scotty’ sound clip from Star Trek. I got the 11KB file from here. The site is not much to look at but it is a rich dump of sound clips from movies, TV, commercials and some special effects types too. The site has a search page, so it is easy to get to your sound clip if you know exactly what you are searching for. If you are searching for a ‘something like this’ kind of a sound, then it’s a chore as all files are listed by name only.

CCMixter

This is a community music site featuring remixes and samples licensed under Creative Commons licenses. It includes many tracks with non-commercial sharing licenses and some under sampling licenses. Users can of course submit their own music and remixes. The site has very good organization with a bunch of categories and filters. Also, the “Download this page” feature allows you to download your preferred collection all at once. Overall, this website has a very selective bunch of MP3s. It’s not for the run-of-the-mill presenter but more for the guy who knows what he is doing with his music.

Sound Bible

From prankish sounds (give the farts a miss in your PPTs) to cool sound effects, this site has a good collection. With the tiny sound clips you can add sound effects to your buttons or transitions. Sound clips fall under royalty-free and free sounds. A ‘pleasing to the eye’ look makes browsing complain-free. If you are looking for a specific sound and can’t find it here, there’s a simple request form for help.

The Open Directory Project

The DMOZ page on music and audio loops is worth a look. Though some of the websites mentioned there might not be free.

Movie Clips

YouTube

The ultimate reservoir of videos will hopefully not be short of the perfect clip you are looking for. With a large user base YouTube is the perfect place to find a video corresponding to the idea you want to project. For instance, a visual demo can help make your “How To” presentations to be more effective.

Also read – 18 Free Ways To Download Any Video off the Internet

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive’s Moving Images library contains thousands of digital movies uploaded by Archive users which ranges from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Many of these videos are available for free download. The videos are grouped under sub-collections like computers, sports, youth media, independent news, spirituality etc. If the video falls under Creative Commons, the logo will appear on the left hand side of the movie’s detail page.

Channel Federator

Nothing breaks monotony like humor; and cartoons are the best agents for it. Channel Federator is like the Cartoon Network for the web. It is a community-driven website of independent animators. From hand drawn sketches to slick Flash based ones; the uniqueness is that none of the cartoon podcasts are longer than 5 minutes. The short clips are perfect for presentations.

Atom

This is the human equivalent of the above animated one. From spoofs to extreme humor, the independent bunch of video creators takes a saucy look at everything. Right now, I am looking at a video on teamwork… Could be useful for the next HR meeting. The clips are brief and embeddable.

One Web Resource for Comics Strips

- Fresher Image

This is not a top to bottom PowerPoint website, simply because clip arts and other graphics such as banners, bullets and buttons find other uses. But undoubtedly, this is a treasure trove. I find this website an invaluable source of free single panel comic strips.

One Web Resource for Animations

- Animation Library

The site features about 13,748 free animations grouped in 18 categories for use in presentations or other web media. The site also has a little one-page section on animation tutorials. The one negative was the non-functioning search bar.

The internet is chock a bloc with freebies. The human problem is laying our hands on the right one at the right time. And with the boss breathing down your neck for the Monday morning presentation, speed becomes a vital though an inhibiting factor towards creating a great presentation. Let’s hope these ready at hand resources give that bit of breathing space to let your inspired mind flow… and kickass.

Which free websites do you use to extend your PowerPoint presentation’s capabilities? Present us with your options.

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There is. Well, sort of. There’s going to be. It’s called Presentations, and is the latest offering from the folks at Adobe’s Acrobat.com, the makers of (among other things) Buzzword, a fantastic online word processor.

To get to Presentations, go to the Acrobat.com site, and look at the bottom. There’s a link for Presentations near the bottom – this is Adobe’s way of making sure you know it’s not a full-featured release yet. But it’s still darn good.

I was able to have a brief discussion with the folks at Acrobat.com before Presentations was launched, and they mentioned something that’s critical to Web-based apps being successful. There are three basic principles and points on which Presentations was founded: ubiquity, collaboration, and user experience. In all three realms, Presentations scores high.

The basic product is the same as any other presentation software – it lets you create slides, and then show them to other people. Adobe’s offering, though, offers a bunch of stuff that’s different and better. The best thing, in my opinion, is how much better the collaboration features are – better than PowerPoint, and better than any other online presentations tool.

A huge number of people can be working on the same presentation, or the same slide, or even the same word or image. You’ll see avatars for each person working on the presentation, listed next to the slide they’re currently editing. Conflicting changes are presented to the users, just in case your work overlaps with another collaborator.

There are a bunch of other great features to Presentations – the little things are what really shine. There are a number of themes available, which are easily customized to your liking (great for corporate use, where they tend to mandate a template). Diagrams can be created separately, and then moved around and edited together.

The navigation system is also a major upgrade from other applications. Even when you’re in presentation mode, you can bring up a small dock-like list of all your slides, letting you easily choose the one you want – avoiding that terrible “scrolling-through-everything-to-find-the-right-slide” moment. You drag the window to change the view of the slides, depending on how you want to edit them.

But it’s not all candy and rainbows, unfortunately. Acrobat.com notes frequently that Presentations is very much an early, unstable release, and it has some major notable features missing. There’s no spell-check, no support for importing movies other than .FLV files, and no import and export with PowerPoint – you can only save a Presentation to PDF.

There’s also no sharing of themes, no way to invite someone to view the presentation as anything other than a co-editor, and no way to make comments or notes on slides and presentations.

For now, Presentations is a slick, usable application. But as bugs get fixed and features get quickly rolled out, Presentations is going to bring ubiquity, collaboration, and user experience to a new level within the world of presentations. They’re easier to create, easier to navigate, and Presentations is a gorgeous app.

Worried about your next presentation? Tina shows you have to blow your audiences minds away with 10 Powerpoint tips.

What tool do you use for giving presentations? Present them to us in the comments.

Photo: garethjmsaunders

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However, a bad presentation can achieve the opposite. Badly designed slides with too much text or bad graphics can distract or worse, irritate the audience.

Here’s is a short guide that will help you create presentations with a professional look and concise content, avoiding the most common mistakes.

Design

The first thing that gives a professional touch to any presentation is the design.

Presentation Helper has a large selection of free Powerpoint templates for a variety of topics. However, whether you download a free template or create your own, keep the following in mind:

1. Compose Slides

• Don’t copy & paste slides from different sources.
• Keep the design very basic and simple. It shall not distract.
• Pick an easy to read font face.
• Carefully select font sizes for headers and text.
• Leave room for highlights, such as images or take home messages.
• Decorate scarcely but well.
• Restrict the room your design takes up and don’t ever let the design restrict your message.

2. Use Consistency

• Consistently use the same font face and sizes on all slides.
• Match colors.

You may use your company logo, highlight headers, create a special frame for figures/images or the whole slide but don’t overload your slides with these elements.

Colors

A poor choice of colors can shatter a presentation.

If you’re unsure which colors match best, use ColorBlender to get a set of up to six matching colors, simply by moving a set of RGB sliders back and forth.

3. Use Contrast

• Black text on a white background will always be the best but also the most boring choice.
• If you want to play with colors, keep it easy on the eyes and always keep good contrast in mind so that your readers do not have to strain to guess what you’ve typed on your slide.

4. Apply Brilliance

• Carefully use color to highlight your message!
• Don’t weaken the color effect by using too many colors at an instance.
• Make a brilliant choice: match colors for design and good contrast to highlight your message.

Text

5. KISS

• Keep It Straight and Simple.
• Keywords only.
• No sentences!
• Never read your slides, talk freely.

Remember that your slides are only there to support, not to replace your talk! You’ll want to tell a story, describe your data or explain circumstances, and only provide keywords through your slides. If you read your slides and if you do it slow and badly, the audience will get bored and stop listening.

6. Take Home Message

• Always express a Take Home Message.
• It’s your message, a summary of your data or story.
• Make it a highlight that stands out.

Images

Images are key elements of every presentation. Your audience has ears and eyes – they’ll want to see what you’re talking about, and a good visual cue will help them to understand your message much better.

7. Add Images

• Have more images in your slides than text.
• But do not use images to decorate!
• Images can reinforce or complement your message.
• Use images to visualize and explain.
• A picture can say more than a thousand words.

If you don’t have your own images, you can browse Flickr or Google’s image search for material. If this is a very public and official presentation however, you need to keep copyrights in mind.

Animations & Media

In animations, there is a fine line between a comic or professional impression. However, animations can be rather powerful tools to visualize and explain complicated matters. A good animation can not only improve understanding, but can also make the message stick with your audience.

8. Don’t Be Silly

• Use animations and media sparingly.
• Use animations to draw attention, for example to your Take Home Message.
• Use animations to clarify a model or emphasize an effect.

Target & Content

Your target i.e. your audience, defines the content of your presentation. For example, you won’t be able to teach school kids about the complicated matters of economy. However, you may be able to explain what economy is in the first place and why it is important.

9. Keep Your Audience In Mind

• What do they know?
• What do you need to tell them?
• What do they expect?
• What will be interesting to them?
• What can you teach them?
• What will keep them focused?
• Answer these questions and boil your slides down to the very essentials.
• In your talk, describe the essentials colorfully and choose your weapons i.e. text, images and animations wisely (see above).

If you lose the attention of your audience, everything will be lost — it won’t matter how ingenious your design шас or how brilliantly you picked colors and keywords.

10. Practice

A well-prepared and enthusiastic talk will help you convince your audience and maintain their attention. There are some key points that define a good talk.

• Know your slides inside out.
• Speak freely.
• Speak with confidence – loud and clear.
• Don’t speak too fast.
• Maintain eye contact with the audience.

If you’re unsure whether or not you’re doing it right, read this article on How NOT to Give a Presentation.

Finally, in order to prepare a stunning presentation, you may also be interested in the following articles:

Build & Show Presentations Online With 280 Slides by Stefan

Create Awesome Excel & PowerPoint Charts with ChartChooser by Matt

Liven Up Your PowerPoint Presentations With LiveWeb by Jerry

Make Beautiful Online Presentations With Sliderocket by Varun

Give Your Presentations A Boost With ZoomIt by Saikat

What are your tips for a killer presentation? Present them to us in the comments.

Image credits: JadeGordon, eqphotolog, ba1969, danzo08, svilen001, hisks

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• Show and Make Presentations Online with 280 Slides (11)
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Available as a Firefox addon and thus available for Windows, Linux and Mac Outwit is a web collection engine that lets you search for documents, images and other kinds of information online and displays the results in a very Windows Explorer like interface.

Head over to the Outwit webpage and install the Firefox addon. There are separate addons for Outwit Hub, Outwit Docs and Images. You can then access the Outwit interface via the toolbar button or the tools menu.

Consider Outwit Docs for example. Once you open it up its pretty intuitive, type what you want to search in the search box and you will see results from Internet and your local files. You can check/uncheck the type of files you want to search for. Found the file you were looking for? Great, just right click and choose to open it up or save it or whatever you would want to do with it.

You can have multiple searches going on simultaneously (reminiscent of something like Limewire) and the results would continue to increase when more such files are discovered that meet your search criteria.

Then there is a basket (strangely called the “catch”) which is like a temporary holding place for the documents (your catch) that you find interesting and would like to download later in bulk.

So much for documents, there is a lot more you can do. Outwit Images that lets you search for images in a similar fashion. Even more powerful tool however is the Outwit Hub. Where as Outwit docs and Outwit images search for documents and images respectively, Outwit Hub can be used to search for a variety of information types.

Outwit Hub is used for information extraction from webpages. Fire it up and then enter the search query or URL of a webpage. Outwit Hub will then show you different kinds of data that can be extracted from the webpage. Click on the view type on the left hand side pane and you can view the page, all the images on the page, links, email addresses, text, rss feeds found and so on. Then there are the data extraction tools which allow you to extract data from tables, lists and other data structures on the webpage.

These tools have a great potential if you are looking for data or documents of any kind. Granted, you can always copy and paste and search for them on Google but you can do so much more with tools like these. A lot more flexibility, more control and ease of use. You can for example extract the data from a table and export it as excel spreadsheet or as SQL statements in just a few clicks from within Outwit Hub.

Do you know of any such tools or extensions you use for similar purposes? Mention them in comments, we would love to hear and check them out!

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For a while now, my solution has been Google Docs. It’s a great service, and one that has served me well over the months and years I’ve been using it. Google Docs, though, is not without its issues and downsides, some of which have left me in constant search for the best and brightest of the online document managing application.

Well, I haven’t found it yet, but I’ve found five pretty great alternatives to Google Docs that you might want to check out. All of these, and Google Docs, offer the same basic editing features; instead of rehashing them over and over, I’ll point out the one or few great features that put the application on this list.

Buzzword

My current online editor of choice, Buzzword, is Adobe’s offering in the online word-processing department. It’s attractive, flash-based, and incredibly simple to use. In addition to all the standard features, Buzzword offers a few key uses for users of all levels. Buzzword lets you share documents with people, giving individuals varying levels of access, from comments to editing to just reading the document.

Also useful is the Version History tracker, which tracks your changes and lets you revert to an earlier version of the document in only one click.

Buzzword is the prettiest of the bunch, and while it’s not terribly feature-rich when it comes to document editing, its collaboration and tracking tools more than make up for it.

Zoho

The number of applications Zoho offers, from an email service to a personal wiki and a “centralized public repository” (whatever that is) is ridiculous. I’ve become a big Zoho fan recently, and it has a huge number of useful tools at your disposal.

The writer itself is excellent, with a ton of editing options organized in a way that looks much like Office 2007’s Ribbon interface. Almost anything you can do in Word can be done in Zoho, from adding a header and footer to directly posting a document to your blog.

Zoho is the most feature-complete of the Web-based applications, including Google Docs, and is incredibly easy to use. Zoho doesn’t get nearly the press Google Docs does, but I can’t see a reason not to switch to Zoho.

Etherpad

If collaboration is what you’re into, give Etherpad a good look. There’s no need to sign up for Etherpad – just click “Start New Pad” and get going. Then, either share a link to the pad or send invitations to your contacts by email.

As users come in, you can edit the text on the pad in real-time, and changes automatically appear. You can chat in the sidebar, highlight which user made a given change, and save revisions in order to revert if a mistake is made.

Etherpad is perfect for coding and programming, but is also great for writing and editing documents. There aren’t as many features to Etherpad, and all your editing is in plain text, but it’s so collaborative and useful that it deserves a mention anyway.

Peepel

Peepel is basically a whole suite of desktop applications, stored within your browser. You can run multiple Peepel windows in the same browser window, letting you manage more pieces of your workflow all at once.

Peepel offers services like the WebWriter word processor, WebSheet for spreadsheets, a contact manager, great file-sharing and collaboration tools, and the Workspace Manager that lets you save your layout and return to it later.

Peepel isn’t the flashiest of the applications, but I love the ability to run more than one document or application in the same window.

OpenGoo

OpenGoo is similar in appearance to both Google Docs and the Zoho suite, with a well-integrated interface available to you. You can access calendars, tasks, documents, sticky notes, email, contacts, and time-tracking tools all from within the OpenGoo interface.

For document editing, OpenGoo is much like Google Docs. You can create documents or slideshows, and the interface is much like Google’s. You can edit documents, and then tag them or add them to folders for easier organization.

One thing I liked was that a new document is opened in the same window, with the document browser in the sidebar, whereas Google Docs always opens a new window.

If all you want is documents, there’s not a lot unique about OpenGoo; if you’re looking for a more complete interface and application, it’s a great choice.

What do you use for document editing, either online or off? Which one of the above mentioned online office apps in your opinon is the best alternative to Google Docs?

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Looking at 280 Slides a very interesting thought popped into my mind; Microsoft, and every other desktop software maker is in very deep trouble. Why would I want to buy the Office suite when I’ve got a perfectly capable web application available on any of my computers for free?

Even Windows is in trouble; One of the big downsides to switching from Windows at the moment is the lack of portability for applications: you have to learn how to use apps which are compatible with Debian for example. But when the apps run in your browser, and the browser is the same, Firefox, there’s nothing to stop users from switching platforms. As these web applications evolve this will become a very pressing problem. I’ll leave this discussion for another time, so let’s get to know 280 Slides.

• All the basic features are there: text boxes, pictures, video, shapes, notes. If you’re using PowerPoint or Keynote to create presentations but never heard of manually assigning animation paths, you’re never going to know the difference.
• Import and Export PowerPoint 97-2007, ODF or PDF. Create slides online and then save them on your computer or import an existing slideshow for editing. Simply click Import and select your document. To download – just select the format you prefer.
• You can store documents directly on the 280 Slides server if you create an account. The only information you have to provide is an email address and a password.
• The full screen presentation mode works very well and supports the standard key combinations for going forward and exiting.
• Recognizes and uses existing fonts from your presentation.
• 12 integrated themes, simple and elegant, inspired from similar themes in Keynote.
• Uses Amazon S3 storage facilities – which have a consistent uptime and are reliable.
• The application is written in Objective-J and Cappuccino. Objective J is JavaScript with the addition of classes.

280 Slides is in beta but so far works very well; There are a few kinks and bugs, but no ‘showstoppers’:

• It had trouble recognizing non-ASCII characters, which limits its use to the English-speaking market. For example it replaced Romanian specific characters with a question mark:

• It doesn’t recognize cropped areas created with PowerPoint 2007. For example, I had a cropped signature from a screenshot. Instead of the signature – the whole screenshot appeared.

• It is still a bit slower than the offline versions; be prepared to wait 2-3 seconds to switch from one slide to another. Sometimes, when opening a new dialog box, the application was unresponsive for a short period. That proved to be a little frustrating.

An alternative to 280 Slides is SlideRocket – in my opinion a better choice when it comes to creating presentations online. It has more advanced features such as transitions, charts, diagrams, tables and assets managing. Unfortunately, SlideRocket isn’t free.

I invite you to take a look at 280 Slides and tell us in the comments what you think about the app; How would you compare it to SlideRocket?

Other MakeUseOf writers have reviewed similar web applications. Check out articles by Tina and Jeffry. You can read Varun’s review of SlideRocket here.

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Chart Chooser from Juice Analytics is an innovative tool that lets you create Excel and Powerpoint charts and choose what characteristics you wish to highlight in your data; Comparison, Distribution, Composition, Trend, Relationship and/or Table, and it will filter the selections highlighting the possible charts for your needs.

Once you have decided on your selection, Chart Chooser will display options to download templates for Excel and Powerpoint. The downloaded files will have random data filled for you to get an idea of how the data is presented and where you will be able to enter your own figures.

The good news about this service is that Juice Analytics doesn’t seem to be stopping with the current selection of graphs available on the site. Users are encouraged to suggest different charts to be added to their website and even design bespoke versions for organisations. Juice Analytics have also endeavoured to make all their charts Tufte-compliant (clean and minimal) whilst remaining visually aesthetic.

Juice Analytics also operates an analytics blog that focuses on free tools and open source code. Here, you are able to find a wealth of information on how the Juice Analytics team tackle different projects, including this project inspired by the New York Times.

One tool that the team recently released was Concentrate, a search analytics tool for SEO and paid search professionals who wanted to make sense of search keyword data. Concentrate works by connecting to your Google Analytics account and helps to visualize keyword relationships to see connections and performance of common word combinations. All data collated by Concentrate is automatically formatted and information such as categorized search phrases and pattern groups can be downloaded to CSV format for off site analysis.

Juice Analytics is a great source of Excel and Powerpoint information as well as providing open source code, most of which are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. If you need to impress the board, your boss or your peers at your next meeting, a visit to these guys, even just for the Chart Chooser, should be your first stop.

Do you know of any other sites that offer templates like these? If so, let us know of your recommendations in the comments!

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• 9 Must-Have OpenOffice Extensions (65)
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Before you carry on reading, here are some things that you need to do/know:

Obviously, the extensions require OpenOffice to work. If you have not installed OpenOffice, grab the latest version here.

To install the extension, you have to go to Tools -> Extension Manager in any of the OpenOffice applications. Click ‘Add’ to install the extension that you have downloaded.

Let’s proceed onto the 9 must-have extensions for your OpenOffice.

1) Sun PDF Import Extension

Normally, OpenOffice only allows you to export your file to PDF format, but not to import and make changes to it. With this PDF Import extension, you can now import your PDF files and make changes to the date, numbers or even a small portion of text.

By default, this extension imports the PDF file into the Draw application rather than Writer, even though it may contain a full page of text. You may be wondering why, but if you remember that when the PDF format was first created, it was designed not to allow any editing at all. As such, importing as a text document into Writer may prove too difficult a thing to do.

With that, capturing the content as a Draw object now seems the easiest and most logical thing to do. When you import your PDF file into your Draw application, every single line of text will be treated as a draw object and you can edit the text and rearrange it as you like.

Sun PDF Import Extension is still in beta and only works in OpenOffice 3.0.

2) Professional Template Pack II – English

With more than 120 professionally designed document templates at your fingertips, it is hard not to create a high quality document or presentation.

This extension adds various kinds of templates, ranging from business correspondence, budgets and project plans, event posters, invoices, notes, minutes, press releases to personal letter templates.

You’ll never have to spend your time writing up the whole document again.

After installation, the templates can be found under File -> New –> Templates and Documents.

3) OpenOffice.org2GoogleDoc

This extension allows you to export and import documents from Google Docs, Zoho and any WebDav server. Files supported include OpenDocument Text (.odt), StarOffice (.sxw), Microsoft Word (.doc), Rich Text (.rtf), OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods), Microsoft Excel (.xls), Comma Separated Value (.csv) and Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps).

Java 6 is required to use this extension.

4) Writer’s Tools

If you are just like me, who spends a great deal of time sitting behind OpenOffice writing articles, then Writer’s Tools is the extension that you must have. Writer’s Tools is a set of utilities designed to help OpenOffice users perform a wide range of tasks. You can back up documents, look up and translate words and phrases, manage text snippets, and keep tabs on document statistics. Some of the useful functions of this extension include:

• Lookup word from several sources, including Cambridge Dictionaries, WordNet, and Google Define.
• Backup a copy of your current document by sending an email to a specified address.
• Wikify Word tool links a selected word or text fragment in the current document to a Writer document, which is created on the fly
• Quick Converter that lets you convert between the metric and imperial systems easily.
• Bookmarks tool allows you to bookmark often-used documents, so you can access them with a few mouse clicks.
• Word of the Day tool picks and displays a random word and its definition from the accompanying WriterDB database.

and many more…

5) LanguageTool

What use is there if you can’t check your grammar and other language errors in an Office suite? The LanguageTool extension is an Open Source language checker for English, German, Polish, Dutch, and other languages. It is rule-based, which means it will find errors for which a rule is defined in its XML configuration files. Rules for more complicated errors can be written in Java. You can think of LanguageTool as a tool to detect errors that a simple spell checker cannot detect, e.g. mixing up there/their, no/now etc. It can also detect some grammar mistakes.

The Language Tool extension does not include spell checking.

6) Creative Commons Licensing

If you are always creating open source projects with the Creative Commons License, this extension will come in handy to you. The Creative Commons Licensing extension provides the ability to select and embed a Creative Commons License in Writer, Calc and Impress documents.

7) Data Form

In the Excel application in Microsoft Office, there is this feature – Data -> Form – that allows you to key in data easily. What this extension does is to replicate that feature in OpenOffice. The Data Form extension generates a data input form for tables in the Calc application that you can use to enter values.

In Calc, create a table with at least one row and the headline, for example:

Then, click on a range or any cell of the newly created table (not on empty cells), and go to Data – Form. That’s it. A form should appear letting you insert other records, or edit-delete the old ones.

Modern Impress Template

The Modern Impress template extension installs more than 30 beautiful templates that you can use for your presentation. All the graphics in the template are based on open-source art.

After installation, you can access the template at File -> New -> Templates and Documents -> Templates -> My Templates

9) Sun Presenter Console

For those who need to give presentations regularly, wouldn’t it be great if during the presentation, you can view what the next slide is and read the note that you have written all from the screen? It will take the guesswork out of you and also keeps you away from the troublesome paper notes scribbled with tiny text. What this extension does is to project different views to different monitors and allows you to see your upcoming slide and note while the audience only sees the current slide and the slide effect.

There are three views that you can configure in the Presenter Console. The first view displays the current slide for your audience to read while the second view shows the speaker’s notes in large, clear and scalable type plus the current and upcoming slide. The third view is a slider sorter view with the slide thumbnails. In your Impress application, go to Slide Show -> Slide Show settings and you can decide which view is to be projected to each monitor.

Do you use extensions for your OpenOffice? If so, which one is your favorite?

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What would a bundled app of 145KB have to offer? Some nifty help if you look at it closely. Imagine you are giving a PowerPoint presentation to a roomful of people. Perhaps you need to get your point across with a chart but the guy on the fourth row can’t make it out. With a click of a mouse you can now zoom in and focus on that part of the screen with the important information and then zoom back out. You save your audience the pain of squinting.

Plainly speaking, ZoomIt gives you three tools to play around with.

• Zoom (zoom in on any area of your screen)
• Draw (draw on your screen, whether zoomed or not)
• Break Timer (to countdown till a break is up)

Zoom : Screen Magnifier for Windows

As a screen magnifier, I think this tool is the best free one out there. It does show quite a high level of magnification which can be seen clearly from a long distance. The screen can be panned around to the desired area of focus. The entire operation can be controlled by a toggle keystroke and/or the mouse.

Draw : Freehand Drawing Tool

The freehand draw function serves as a great presentation aid. Of the three features, this one is the richest. Use the mouse to circle or highlight any part of the display. Then, with a simple push of the E (’E’ for Eraser, maybe?!) key, the drawings are erased again. You can erase all the drawings or just the last one.

Or just use the screen like a white or black sketch pad to give an impromptu drawing or a typed remark. Or just have fun by drawing some simple shapes like circles, rectangles or ellipses. Change the width or color of the draw pen. To further enhance its appeal, you can combine the zoom function with the draw to give your presentations the savvy edge.

Break Timer

After the first two tools, this one is more of an anti-climax. It just acts like a countdown timer rolled into an alarm clock. You can get bit of a reminder help from it if you configure it to play sounds when the break time is up.

Inside the 145 Kilobyte Package

The first time you click the ‘exe’ file, it presents a simple configuration screen. The three functions (the ‘type’ function makes it four actually) are well explained with default hotkeys. Of course, it also allows you to specify your own. The program sits unobtrusively on the tray and all features are easily accessible with a right click.

ZoomIt is a free download, does not require Microsoft validation and is installable on all versions of Windows.

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If you look underneath the links from the show on this page, you will see a little media player where you can listen to the podcast right here on the site. Or if you prefer, you can right-click on the “audio MP3″ logo and save the MP3 file to your computer for listening on your MP3 player or iPod.

The podcast is available through iTunes so don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast if you have an iPod, or in another podcatcher if you have a different MP3 player.

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SlideRocket is packed with features. Depending on personal preferences, it may or may not replace Powerpoint or Keynote on your desktop. However it’s surely going to amaze you with what it has to offer.

Creating Presentations Online using SlideRocket

For starters, you can either import a Powerpoint presentation (it supports Powerpoint 2007 also) or start from scratch. If you indeed decide to start from scratch, SlideRocket has some excellent tools to offer:

Choose from a variety of stunning themes, add charts, images, videos, put in some transitions (some pretty cool ones) and effects and you are already on your way to a fabulous jaw-dropping presentation. What’s best is that the themes, transitions and effects do not resemble the usual ones you would find in Powerpoint.

On top of that SlideRocket has an excellent plug in architecture so you can be sure that there will be no shortage of creativity, to tickle the creative guy/gal in you.

Managing Presentations and Assets

SlideRocket offers excellent management of your assets. The assets are stored in a library with the ability to tag and search your uploads so that you can get to that brand logo you uploaded few months back quickly and easily. You can also share assets with others if you want to.

Apart from these, SlideRocket also offers you version control on your presentations so that you have a revision of the changes you made to the presentation and you can revert back to a previous version in case you mess things up.

You also get to decide who can view, edit or share your slides. Cool eh?

Put your ideas across – delivering the presentation

You can invite people who you want to be able to view the presentation and prevent them from redistributing your work.

Send the URL to the presentation or embed it on your site. You can also download the Adobe AIR-based offline viewer in case you want to present your ideas offline. Or you can view the presentation from a mobile device or perhaps go with the no fuss print option!

Metrics and Analysis

If you thought that was all, just wait till you hear about this: “SlideRocket allows you to track your presentations and gives you access to some extensive metrics. These metrics allow you to see who is viewing your presentation, where they viewed it, who they’ve shared it with, which slides they looked at and for how long”.

Here is a sample presentation to let you know about some of the capabilities of Sliderocket:

So how do you think SlideRocket compares with similar offerings from Google and Zoho? Or do you know of some other better ones? Let’s hear about them in the comments :

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The problem with that is when you are through with the page you have to close or minimze the browser and go back to your presentation. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to open a browser right in the slide and you didn’t have to leave your presentation?

As it turns out there is! LiveWeb will do just that and it comes in varieties that will work with every version of PowerPoint from PowerPoint 97 up to and including PowerPoint 2007. Oh and by the way, it’s also free! (It does require however that PowerPoint be on the presenting machine. The free PowerPoint viewer will not work).

You need to download and unzip a small file which contains a ‘ppa’ file (PowerPoint addin). Follow the easy to do directions and the addin is installed. One gotcha, though. Make sure that you disable macro security first or it won’t install. To do that, open PowerPoint, go to “Tools”, then “Options” and click on “Macro Security”. Then select “medium” or “Low”. Then finish the installation and you are good to go.

The way you use it is simple. Just start building your PowerPoint as you normally would do. When you get to where you want a web page, go to “Insert” and select “Web Page” from the drop down menu. An easy to follow wizard will take you through the process or you can do it manually. You can also decide whether you want the slide to be dynamic or static. In other words, each time you run the presentataion the addin can go and get the current web site or it can use the same static page.

When you are finished a new slide appears that you can modify or not. You may want to add a slide title, navigation buttons or other things that you might normally do. When you run the presentation and get to the slide you set up, a browser opens up right in the slide that displays the web site.

Here is how our favorite blog appears in a PowerPoint slide:

This has really helped my PowerPoint presentations move along quicker and I sure couldn’t complain about the price!

I am always on the lookout for cool PowerPoint freebies, so let me know what you have discovered…

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Omnisio is an excellent online tool which allows you to assemble clips from different video sites like YouTube, Blip.tv etc and mix them and edit them, without downloading any of them. Yes, its simple, fast and very easy. It has a cool interface and allows you to easily search and add videos and then use a slider to clip them and add them together. Using the screenshot below as an example, I was making a video out of different clips from Bryan Adams’ concerts.

Some other cool features of Ominisio are :

1: It doesn’t require a sign up unless you would want to have an account where you can store those edited clips and videos and come back later to see it again.

2: You can also synchronize video with slides and show them side by side. This is an awesome feature and especially useful for conferences and meetings.

3: It also allows you to embed the mash-up which you created, in your blog or website.

4: You can share the videos with your friends and add comments, directly in the videos !

5: Last but not least, its FREE !

If you love playing with videos and presentations, then this is a must try tool for you. I’m loving it already !

(By) Abhijeet Mukherjee is addicted to the internet and loves blogging and freelance writing. He blogs about tech tweaks, blogging tips, productivity hacks at Jeet Blog

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(1) Docstoc – Extremely useful community-powered service for sharing all kinds of business document templates. If you need a professional document, Docstoc is the first place to check out. Whether it’s a legal document, a business form or whatever is out there. Docstoc was launched just recently but already counts over 65.000 user-submitted documents, covering legal, business, financial, technology, and education areas.

For all Docstoc features and video demo check out Docstoc profile here.

(2) Gazhoo – Unlike Docstoc, Gazhoo is a marketplace for legal, financial and business documents, case studies and research papers. Mainly it’s a place to buy and sell professional documents. However, with the exception of few scarce document types (i.e. market research papers) most of the listed documents are free. So, it’s a pretty good resource as well.

(3) Scribd – Scribd has the biggest document collection, but it’s not focused on professional documents alone. It’s more like a virtual document library, where anyone can freely upload and share any kind of text documents (jokes, facts, stories, legal, presentations, etc.). Although, there is a good deal of useless stuff, it still has lots of legal forms and document templates. Read more: Scribd – Online Document Sharing.

Are you aware of any other similar websites? Share them in comments

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