A different view on PowerPoint

As I have said before in other posts, I love the work the guys/gals in Office Labs are doing. They envision future Information Worker scenarios and prototype experiences that enhance the way we interact with information.

One of my previous posts related to the Search Command add in for Office 2007 and how it made the FluentUI more approachable for those who found it challenging to move from the Office 2003 toolbar/menu approach.

This time, I want to talk a bit about a fantastic add in for Office PowerPoint known as PPTPlex (PowerPoint Plex). Traditional presentations are delivered in a very linear approach where you advance from one slide to the next and each builds towards the message you are trying to leave your audience with.

This is great when you are delivering one to many sessions but what if the meeting is more interactive? What if the content is really just supporting material for the interactive discussion you are having? What if you are presenting in a one to many situation but want to have the flexibility of being able to change up the order of your delivery based on your read of the audience and what you think will be the most impactful way to deliver your message? In PowerPoint, you can do some stuff like hiding slides, using the Slide Navigation menu while in the presentation but it still comes off as a very linear approach.

Enter PPTPlex which provides you with a rich presentation canvas that you can navigate any way you want. You can create sections of content that appear on the screen as galleries of slides. You can then bounce into any section or individual slide and bounce right back out so you can focus on the next important point or supporting material.

Plex adds a tab to the Ribbon in PowerPoint that gives you the ability to insert sections into your presentation that will group your slides on a single overview slide when you are in presenter mode. You can even customize the overview slide to brand your presentation and provide visual impact to your message.

To the right you see the overview slide I did for a customer presentation on OCS and how it is broken down into galleries of slides that I can bounce back and forth to while presenting.

You can move in and out with your left and right mouse buttons by gallery or individual slide and can even zoom right in on any section of a slide for a better look. Great way to handle eye chart slides… though the best way to handle those is to delete them from your deck altogether.

The only downside that comes up is that you cannot have slide animations on the slides themselves, though you do have some control over the transitions between slides. The reason for this is due to what happens behind the scenes when you start a presentation with Plex. It actually outputs and XML Paper Specification (XPS) doc that you are panning through when you deliver your presentation. That means you need to download the XPS/PDF add in for Office to use Plex but the install points you in the right direction, so no worries.

All in all PPTPlex provides a unique way to deliver a PowerPoint presentation that, it used properly, can enhance and add plexibility (nice huh???) to your next meeting.

Download PPTPlex here.