Design, Feng What? The Essentials of Feng Shui

I've always been interested in holistic practices and feng shui is another subject I've become attracted to learning about. Mostly because, I do believe (even in PowerPoint) design and clarity are important to achieve success in what you aim to do. The idea that you can design a workspace at home or at the office that brings about more creativity, productivity and yes, even financial improvement intrigues me.

Here's a short posting on the basics of how feng shui may be applied to the home office or the external office.

Design, Feng What? The Essentials of Feng Shui

You might be interested in these videos as well:

 

Feng Shui Your Home - Professional Tips - The most popular videos are a click away

Enjoy!

Nan @ brainy betty

.:: Microsoft presents :: The Ultimate Steal ::.

College students can get a MASSIVE deal on Office 2007 right now. Visit Microsoft's Ultimate Steal page. You save 91% (gasp)!

.:: Microsoft presents :: The Ultimate Steal ::.

Are you a Mac or a PC?

Watch this brilliant series of videos with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in a rare interview together.

Have a great week!

Nan @ brainybetty.com

PowerPoint Live User Conference 2008 and more...

Happy New Year Everyone!

Make sure and put this in your Outlook calendar. September 21 - 24 of this year, make a plan to go to gorgeous San Diego, California and attend the PowerPoint Live User Conference this year hosted by expert Rick Altman.

There, you will learn presentation techniques and methods from all of the top experts and Microsoft MVPs and have 3 days of glorious fun and education. You can see last year's schedule here for reference to get an idea of how the 3 days are usually planned.

I'm planning to be there myself and hope to meet some of you in person.

Also, Crystal Graphics has added 200 more background templates to their library on January 14th. This is an amazing deal $99 for the entire year for access to the entire library with unlimited downloads. Or, for $199, you can get access to the entire library of thousands of backgrounds AND a custom template for you, specifically. Good deal.

Finally, start off the new year with a more organized inbox. Here are 6 tips to avoiding email clutter in 2008!

The Brainy Betty newsletter comes out in a few days. Hope you are subscribed! Lots of free goodies this month to start off your year right. I've scoured the web and found some great resources for you.

Again, Happy New Year and have a wonderful week!

Nan @ brainybetty

Geetesh Bajaj, Microsoft PowerPoint MVP - Book Release!

Geetesh Bajaj, one of the most respected PowerPoint MVPs at Indezine.com and PPted.com has come out with a new book co-authored with Echo Swinford called PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit.

It was just released last week.

Here's an excerpt from the book that you can read online.

Here is the full description of the book: Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover KitThis book is not as much about reading as it is about seeing and doing! That’s why we call it a kit. Full-color pages show you exactly how your slides will look as you follow the makeover steps, and all presentations in various stages of the makeover are on the accompanying CD.

Each of the eight makeovers has been carefully chosen so it’s relevant to anyone who has ever used PowerPoint. And if you just upgraded to PowerPoint 2007, this book gives you a great introduction to the new version of the program, along with ample experience in using all the new features. There’s no better way of getting up to speed with PowerPoint 2007.

Learn the tricks used by the creators of award-winning presentations

Every makeover includes step-by-step instructions that are illustrated in full color

Separate chapters dedicated to the PowerPoint 2007 interface and galleries

Explore everything from choosing appropriate colors to visually representing data

Perfect presentations by incorporating high-impact animation and multimedia elements

It also comes with a CD!

ON THE CD

All sample presentations, plus all the files you need to do the makeovers

Royalty free pictures

Music tracks

Templates and Themes

This is a great buy for someone this Christmas who works on any kind of PowerPoint presentations!

Happy Holidays!
Nan @ brainybetty

Betty's Xmas Pack for 2007

Once a year, we like to do something very very special for the millions of visitors to our site as a way of saying Thank You! This year, we have made available a Xmas pack download that's chockfull of goodies you can use this season - and we are making it available for just $1.99!

30 megabytes of goodies including:

6 Christmas animations for use on blogs and web pages or in PowerPoint or other documents

1 beautiful and elegant customizable PowerPoint show greeting card already programmed with music and animations. - All you have to do is add your family picture or any other picture to it and send it on to others!

1 free penguin dancing flash animation

6 Christmas and Holiday themed postcard printables

6 Xmas themed PowerPoint backgrounds for PowerPoint 98 - 2003 version for your own year end presentations

2 Xmas themed backgrounds for PowerPoint 2007 version for your own year end presentations

1 printable vintage holiday clipart sheet with year long holiday art

2 Royalty Free Christmas mp3 files: Carol of the Bells and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen for your use

Our very useful Advanced PowerPoint Masters course

You can get it here until December 24th. Happy Holidays!
With love from the BB family. :)

Did you ever want a moving video background for your PowerPoint presentations?

Here's a great opportunity to get the only software that allows moving video backgrounds behind the text in your presentations. It's only available for 4 days until Thursday, December 6th - so act fast.

It's only available here at 33% off for $198 for the combo deal. It's $149 each for the individual deals - see bottom of the page for details.

Happy Holidays,
Nan

PowerPoint to iPhone and iPod? Yup.

"Getting presentations from PowerPoint 2008 for Mac to your iPod or iPhone is easy. PowerPoint exports your presentation as a series of pictures directly to iPhoto, or saves those same slide images as pictures to your Pictures folder. From there, sync pictures to your iPod or iPhone through iTunes as usual, then use the built-in Photos or slide show program on your iPod or iPhone to show your presentation. No sweat!

“Presentations look great on the big wide screens of iPhone and iPod Touch, but they look even better on a big screen TV or projected. Plug your iPod into a television or projector using the Apple Component AV or Composite AV cable and leave your laptop in the case.”

- Announced today at Microsoft Mojo

Thanksgiving templates and creating montages in PowerPoint 2003

Happy November all!

You can find 35 Thanksgiving related templates here at Microsoft this month... from PowerPoint backgrounds to menu placecards you can print out from Word.

In addition, for some of you who love to play around with the graphics in PowerPoint, you can find a tutorial here by Geetesh Bajaj - a Microsoft MVP and owner of the Indezine site - about how to create Images with gradients for a montage look and feel. It's fascinating and useful to know - something new and cool to add to your skillset!

Football season is over here in Kentucky and fall is in full force. I drove back home on the AA Highway yesterday and was simply amazed at the beauty of all the colors in the mountains and hills - oranges, reds, yellows, greens and pinks! Wow. Nature is bountiful and beautiful - and I am thankful.

Have a wonderful and warm Thanksgiving!

Nan @ brainybetty

P.S. If you are seeking out a way to generate some additional income - not a lot, but free money is always a good thing, huh? You can sign up for an account at Gomez Peer - they are a highly respected metric and web firm who need peer testers. You can find out more here. Basically, you get paid to get on the net - which is something all of us do every day anyway. Click below to learn more:

For all of you who want to put Flash in PowerPoint

I get questions about this all the time. For years, I studied how to use Macromedia Flash. I finally gave up on it because it was so complex. Around 2000, someone introduced me to Swish - the easy version of a program that creates Flash animations and man, was I ever glad.

Swish is much much more user friendly and intuitive than Flash was for me and I started creating lots of Flash movies and putting them in PowerPoint. (You can find the free flash movies here as well as some swish templates to play with as well.)

This is really the best time to start using Swish because they have just come out with a new version.

If you use swish you can modify some of the free templates on the brainybetty site with your own text and create fabulous moving animations with video, sound and more.

I love to play with the program and still do for my really special presentations where I am wanting to make a big impact visually.

Have a great weekend, and don't forget to buy candy for the 31st if you are in the U.S. for Halloween!

Nan @ brainybetty