Flash in PowerPoint

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Sometimes it makes sense to create an animation in Flash and then to embed it in PowerPoint. Here are some instructions I wrote up a while back. The screen grabs are from an earlier version of PowerPoint, but PowerPoint 2007 looks the same.

1). Go to the slide where you want the Flash animation to appear. It’s helpful, though not necessary, to place the Flash movie in the same directory with the PowerPoint presentation. That way you don’t have to worry about the path.

2) Right click in the toolbar area to make the “Control” toolbox visible.

3) Click the icon that looks like a hammer (”More controls”).

4) A menu of controls appears. Scroll past the “Macromedia Flash Object” down to the “Shockwave Flash” object (hit the ‘S” key a few times).

5) At this point, PowerPoint will present you with a crosshair cursor. Use it to draw a rectangle. Set the rectangle to the size you want your Flash movie to play at.

6) Now you need to set properties for the Flash movie. Click the “custom” item at the top of the properties list (ppt 2003) or the “properties” icon at the top left of the control toobox (earlier versions). This will pop up a dialog box containing the essential settings. The settings shown here work well. You don’t have to embed the movie, but if you do, you won’t have to worry about PowerPoint forgetting the path.

7) Save the presentation and run it in slide show view.

Getting Flash movies to work in PowerPoint is no problem, but they don’t rewind to the beginning reliably, so it’s a good idea to put a rewind button (or other interactive controls) in the Flash preso.
If the Flash movie is interactive you’ll need to click away from it, on the slide, to give keyboard control back to PowerPoint.

Here’s a PowerPoint Presentation with Flash in it. The animation is a simple step-through illustration of the putative advantages of outsourcing globalization and internationalization services.

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Random Thoughts

Monday, June 9th, 2008

The idea of randomness seems to be in the air. The difficulty human beings have in achieving true randomness is an important clue in One Shot, the Lee Child thriller (”Reacher said nothing”) I listened to recently on a trip to Vermont. Probability, randomness’s opposite number, is the subject of The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow, favorably reviewed this week in the New York Times. Probability was discussed in the In Our Time podcast I listened to this weekend. And I’d been thinking about randomness in connection with our website.

What I wanted to do on the website was to present our clients’ logos and testimonials in a different (random) order each time the home page is loaded. I didn’t have any bright ideas on how to do this, except that it was rather like shuffling cards. I’m glad I Googled the solution, because my notions of how to do it were far more naive than the naive solutions.

Turns out that the preferred solution represents the thought of some very deep thinkers indeed. It’s called the Fisher-Yates shuffle. Fisher is Ronald Fisher, the biologist who was Darwin’s greatest successor (according to Richard Dawkins). Frank Yates was an eminent statistician who worked with Fisher. It’s a variant of the Knuth shuffle, developed by Donald Knuth, the revered computer scientist.

Here are Perl and JavaScript versions. I adapted the latter for use with the jQuery library. It shuffles an array of DOM elements.

jQuery.fn.shuffle = function() { //jQuery Fisher-Yates shuffle
  var myArray = this;
  var i = myArray.size();
  if ( i == 0 ){
    return myArray;
  }
  while ( --i ) {
     var j = Math.floor( Math.random() * ( i + 1 ) );
     var tempi  = myArray[i];
     var tempj  = myArray[j];
     myArray[i] = tempj;
     myArray[j] = tempi;
  }
  return myArray;
}
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Good questions

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

One of our clients asked us to write down some questions, so that the people providing us with background info could be prepared when we call. We don’t like to come on like a pop quiz, and we don’t normally require any advance prep. We just try to keep up our end of a conversation until a story emerges.

Here are some productive conversational gambits:

  • What’s your prospect’s job?
  • How much does he or she know about your product, or what it does?
  • What’s the problem you solve that they worry the most about? Second biggest worry? Third?
  • What can they do with your solution — that they can’t do now?
  • How is championing your solution going to help them get a promotion, or just look smart?
  • Who’s the competition, and what’s their pitch?
  • What makes your solution better?
  • What do people have a hard time understanding about your product?
  • How would you start out a 2-minute sales pitch?
  • What questions have we failed to ask?

One of these is going to take us in the direction where we find out what salespeople say that piques the prospect’s interest.

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About messaging . . . hmm

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

In our experience, messaging is the Bermuda Triangle of B2B marketing communication — where sales initiatives (like the idea of creating a 2-Minute Explainer), mysteriously disappear without a trace. Oddly enough, although I hear about messaging pretty often, it’s not defined anywhere I know of.

What goes on in these “messaging exercises” so many businesses take up? How does it come about that a business selling to other businesses can raise capital, rent offices, develop products, and engage sales staff without being able to say who is the likely buyer and why he or she might want to buy what they’re selling?

Anyway, here’s what we think makes for good messaging:

  • Find out what successful salespeople say.
  • Find out what customers ask about your product before they buy it, and what they say about using it.
  • From all of this language, pull out the phrases that seem most resonant. Try them out. Replace them with better ones as you discover them. Today’s messaging technologies — phones, websites, email, PowerPoint, even 2-Minute Explainers — allow for continuous improvement.
  • As much as possible, try to keep these messages in words that people actually use. A lot of engineers seem to believe that people in “marketing” speak a language that’s somehow more magical than the one the engineers use. Nonsense. If the marketing language sounds funny, it’s probably puffery, not magic.
  • Relax. If you know your product, how likely is it really, that you’ll “send the wrong message”?
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Educating VITO

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

Last week, Bill Butler stopped by to talk Sales 2.0. Bill has honchoed sales at several tech companies, including corporate social networking pioneer Visible Path Corporation (now part of Hoovers). Visible Path was one of our first 2-Minute Explainer clients, so he has more experience using 2-Minute Explainers than most folks — and, we’re glad to say, is an enthusiast.

He didn’t seem too surprised that we were unfamiliar with, and then skeptical of, the notion of “Sales 2.0″ even though it has taken hold to the point where (I subsequently learned) it has its own tradeshow. We could probably get used to the idea, since the 2-Minute Explainer is, in Bill’s view, a Sales 2.0 sine qua non.

He did seem surprised that “selling to VITO” (”Very Important Top Officer”) wasn’t in our vocabulary.

All the VITO\'s I\'ve heard of
I am chagrined to see that Google places this VITO ahead of Vitos more familiar to me — the real gangster Vito Genovese, and New York’s headline- grabbing Republican ex-congressman Vito Fossella. So I guess we’ll add it to the pitchbook.

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