While training in the UK recently I ran across Jamie Garroch, a brilliant entrepreneur behind a potent new PowerPoint addin called “ActivePresentation Designer.” Interactive speakers may want to give this software a serious look. Although PowerPoint already contains basic tools for creating hyperlink-based navigation within slide shows, this software grabs hold of PowerPoint and automates many of the otherwise labor-intensive steps for creating non-linear navigation menus.

Using the addin, for example, it’s easy to build a 2- or even 3-teired navigation menu for a slide show within minutes. Then, during a performance immediately access any slide needed to answer questions or spontaneously display extra detail about a particular topic. I was impressed with its ease of use.

Two other features caught my eye as well:

The addin automates the use of “triggers,” a very little-known yet extremely useful aspect of PowerPoint’s functionality. This feature lets you quickly display or hide popups on individual slides—on demand. For example, a presenter might wish to have several contrasting views of products available on a single slide, or control access to sensitive information that is appropriate for some viewers, but not all.

And if you’ve struggled with the issue of how to make a “handout” when delivering interactive talks, check this out. Let’s say your interactive slide show contains 200 slides, but during a given performance you display only 30 of those slides. The Export Wizard in this addin can track which slides you showed, and note confidentiality levels set by the author for each one. Then it creates a customized slide show for you (that can be emailed or used to print a handout) based solely on the slides displayed during the talk and whether those slides may be distributed or not based on their confidentiality setting. We’ve wondered for years why PowerPoint couldn’t do that all along!

One need for future development—from my perspective at least—is expanding the ActivePresentation Designer current potential so that it goes beyond working only with single slide shows. In other words, it will be a stronger tool when the presenter can link together multiple separate slide shows as well, rather than working merely within a single show—basically giving PowerPoint the networking potential of FrontPage or Dreamweaver. Jamie says that kind of functionality is in the pipeline for an early 2011 edition. For the time being, manually linking to external shows using PowerPoint’s standard features is still a viable option.

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