Presentation Canvas - Not Your Average PowerPoint

The linear style forced by PowerPoint and the metaphor of a slide may have reached their limits. At least support for other styles is on its way ... of course also from the Office team. The innovation team in Office Labs to be exact.

If you've seen my "interactive deck" from TechEd or the some recent Bill Gates demos then or the cool TouchWall demo for example, both showed the concept of a single canvas that you explore during a presentation instead of flipping from one slide to the next.

The concept is very cool and promising, especially when you want to keep around all the information you collect as you build up a presentation. I tend to collect quotes, images, web pages, screenshots, all sorts of stuff that may or may not make it into the presentation. I have tons of OneNote books just filled information I collected for presentations.

Of course, there's always this one guy in the audience that asks questions about things I didn't include in the deck.

With the new tool from Office Labs, pptPlex you get a PowerPoint add-in to build these single canvas presentations in PowerPoint.

image

It's way easier to use than my rather manual process for my DeepZoom app, which is build the image with DeepZoom  composer, then add various types of hotspots with a little Silverlight app.

Have fun with the app.

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