Articulate Studio Cookbook: Go from Studio newbie to Studio guru

In the first chapter, we briefly explored how to put a presentation together and publish it; however, Articulate Presenter has much more capability than what we've already explored. So now we're going to start exploring what you can really do with Articulate Presenter.

Please keep in mind that we will be using the capability of PowerPoint, just as we did in the last chapter. However, we are not going to use PowerPoint for inserting any media files into the presentation; instead, we'll insert them via Articulate. In this chapter you'll learn how to do this.

Everything you will need to access for creating your final Articulate Flash video presentation is on the Articulate ribbon in PowerPoint. Here you will find the necessary tools for creating the player skin, inserting media into the presentation, and establishing your presentation's defaults. You will also be telling the presentation how to play, what to allow the viewer or learner to do, and creating any narration to go with...

Animating your objects is done on the Animations ribbon. Please note that this ribbon is different on PowerPoint 2010 than it is on PowerPoint 2007. Just about everything you do will be the same, however the locations and names of some things may be different. For the purpose of this book, we're going to look at PowerPoint 2010, but we will tell you about the differences.

Getting ready

To start we'll need a slide with a couple of objects on it. You can copy a slide from an existing presentation, putting it into a new presentation to experiment with. I'm going to use the first slide from our "Mary Had a Little Lamb" presentation. So that we can do anything we want to with this slide, I'm going to add a few buttons and an arrow to it, giving us some more objects to work with.

When animating objects, it can be extremely useful to group them. This causes the animation to act on the group of objects as if they are one object. To group two or more objects, select them...

Articulate Presenter allows the use of two different types of audio in your presentation. The first is the audio track, which provides background music for your presentation. The second is narration. This program automatically adjusts the volume of your background music whenever there is narration, avoiding competition between the two.

There are two ways of creating your narration in Articulate Presenter, either by recording the narration right into the presentation, or by having your narration recorded professionally and importing it into your presentation. In this section, we will look at how both of these methods are accomplished.

Rarely does it work out that the recording of a narration comes out perfect. While it may be usable, there is always the opportunity for improvement. While you may not think the audio is anywhere near as important as the graphics you use on your slides, poor quality audio can become a distraction, especially if the volume is too low to be clearly audible.

Knowing this, the creators of Articulate have built a simple but very capable audio editor. With it you can easily overcome any deficiencies in the quality of your narration, taking mediocre recordings and turning them into something that sounds as if it came out of a professional recording studio.

When you watch a movie, do you notice the background music? If you're like most of us, you probably don't unless there's some really dramatic music at one point or another. We might notice the introductory theme music, but after that most of us don't pay much attention to the music, although it is an important part of any movie scene. It is the music more than anything, which sets the scene, telling us if it's going to be suspenseful, romantic, humorous, or sad.

Adding background music to your presentation has the same affect. The right music can have a lot to do with how the viewer receives the message you are presenting, whether for a corporate proposal or for the training session of a sales message. Selecting and adding your music is an important part of creating the total effect of your presentation.

This is one of the places where we want to do the work from Articulate instead of PowerPoint, even though PowerPoint has the capacity to add music...

Although we set up the animations in PowerPoint, we've got to sync them to the narration in Articulate. Remember that we're creating a Flash video presentation, so we really can't make it in a way that the viewer clicks on the mouse button to start the animation sequence, even though we told PowerPoint that we wanted the animations to start on a mouse click.

In most presentations, the animations need to run at a particular point in time to match the narration. So what we are going to do is sync them with the narration. In the Flash video presentation, the animations will run automatically as part of the presentation. What we're going to do at this point is tell them when to run.

There may be times when you want to add video to your training course or presentation. Video is a great way of presenting a lot of information quickly, which can save you a number of slides in your presentation. At the same time, you need to realize that adding video to your presentation will make the file size considerably larger. This may cause bandwidth problems, especially for people who have dial-up connections.

As a software package creating Flash video, Articulate can only work with Flash videos created in the .flv, .mp4, or .swf formats. If your videos are in any other format, you will need to convert them.

There may be times when you want to add a video from the Web to your presentation, rather than something that is available locally. There is a lot of good video content on websites such as YouTube and Vimeo, many of which are useful for training and other purposes.

There may be times when you wish to highlight certain information on a slide in your presentation. This would usually be due to a need to attract the viewer's eye to specific data or information that you are presenting on the slide. While you can use animations to do this, specifically an Emphasis animation, Articulate Presenter comes with a series of annotation tools to assist you in adding graphic emphasis to your presentation.

These annotation tools are a series of small Flash animations, which can be placed anywhere on your slides. They are somewhat customizable both in their appearance and in the timing of their appearance. This allows you to synchronize the appearance of your annotation to go along with the narration of your slides.