the reasons..

Sunday, January 01, 2006

"Without doubt, PowerPoint is the most used product for creating 

effective visuals for many types of training," says Jan van Vledder 

( jan@vanvledder.myadsl.nl ). "As reader Heather Smith mentioned in 

the December 1 issue, it does the job. You can quickly create a great 

course outline, review and edit, and in the end have an excellent set 

of training material."

van Vledder uses the Notes view to create speaker notes for 

instructors (not for the students), and she often uses the normal

PowerPoint handouts (e.g., three slides on a page) -- but says that 

this method has "known limitations."

“For more flexibility in creating effective and attractive student 

guides,” van Vledder copies and pastes the PowerPoint slides into 

Word. "You can copy the slide from the Notes view. In Word, you can 

create the student manual/handout by adding text, questions and 

exercises. Especially when you paste the illustrations into a simple 

table (one row, two columns), you can manipulate the layout of every 

page according to your ideas, including short captions next to the 

illustrations. Furthermore, you can resize a slide when required, 

crop a picture, and use each slide more times in this manual when 

required."

The only downside? "When you change your PowerPoint slideshow, you 

may have to edit the Word handouts. But, then again, that's only a 

matter of copying and pasting." 

van Vledder is a training consultant at MultiWare, which provides 

managed training services for multinational organizations and is 

based in The Netherlands.

Blogged on 8:48 AM

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