PowerPoint^® Advanced Presentation Techniques

Rating:
Summary: No Advanced Techniques here!
Review: I bought this book because I wanted to find something that would take my work beyond the standard fair of PowerPoint presentations. I stumbled upon this book title just before its release and thought by the title that this was exactly what I was looking for. Advanced techniques would give me a book detailing the cutting-edge of PowerPoint. Boy was I wrong. A whole chapter on text placement? Other chapters detail creating an org chart, creating templates, and using the text tool. Does that sound like advanced techniques to you? Sorely disappointed in the book. My quest goes on for a cutting-edge PowerPoint book.

Rating:
Summary: Great next step after the basics
Review: I found this book to be just what I needed to go to the next level. Not only does it go into detail about features of the program, including ones I never knew existed, but it also gave me a lot of ideas for creating effects. For example, using custom animation on a stack of objects to make them appear and disappear in various combinations, and tying in music to individual objects as well as overall soundtracks from CDs.

I liked how it took things that I have used a lot before, like text boxes, and then ran through everything there was to know about them, every little-known option and piece of it. Yeah it does have entire chapters on things that someone might consider a basic feature, but it covers those features in an exhaustive way, way beyond what any other book talks about for them, including links to Web sites with add-ins and articles to go beyond.

This book will definitely have a place on my bookshelf for a long time to come. Any time there's something I want to do out of the ordinary with PowerPoint that I'm not sure about, here's where I'll go.

Rating:
Summary: Complement to Tufte's classic text
Review: This book wants to take you beyond simple bullet points of text in PowerPoint. Most of the discussion involves using images in some clean way. It is here that you might run into problems, when attempting this for the first time.

Wempen goes into a fair amount of detail. All the way from making artworking libraries to adding motion video. The latter can be especially attention grabbing to your audience, if done well.

I would compare this book to Tufte's classic "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information". That book is independent of any editing tool or software. Leaving it free to focus strictly on teaching general guidelines. Wempen's book does speak to some of these guidelines. But the bulk of the book concentrates on the details of using PowerPoint. A nice complement to Tufte's book.