Create presentations

Adobe Presenter lets you create sophisticated, high-impact presentations and e‑learning content quickly and easily in three steps:

Design your presentation.

From within PowerPoint, Adobe Presenter can help you do the following tasks:

• Use an existing PowerPoint presentation as a base for an Adobe Presenter presentation, to save you the time and effort of creating a new presentation.

• Perform accurate PowerPoint conversions quickly, including full support for most of the PowerPoint animations.

• Customize the appearance of the presentation viewer interface with company logos, colors, and Adobe Presenter biographies and photos.

Edit your presentation.

Adobe Presenter helps you change presentations to suit your needs in the following ways:

• Enhance PowerPoint presentations with multimedia. Add multimedia, including audio (such as voice-over narration), video, and quizzes and surveys, without leaving PowerPoint.

• Import prerecorded audio into a presentation and synchronize the audio with PowerPoint slide animations.

Publish your presentation.

Publish your presentations so that users can view them. Adobe Presenter offers the following features:

• Adobe Presenter is deeply integrated with all Adobe Connect Central applications, including Adobe Connect Training and Adobe Connect Meetings, as well as Adobe Captivate, SWF, and FLV files.

• View presentations in the interactive Adobe Presenter viewer.

• Integrate Adobe Presenter content with learning management systems (LMS). Adobe Presenter creates SCORM‑ and AICC‑compliant content.

Adobe Presenter has the following components that work together to help authors create and deliver content to users:

Enables authors to create content.

Allows users to view and interact with converted Adobe Presenter presentations.

For content authors, all Adobe Presenter features are accessible from the Adobe Presenter ribbon in PowerPoint.

Elements of presentations

When planning, consider adding the following elements to your presentation:

Title slides are usually the first or second slide in a presentation and state the subject of the content.

Include the name, title, photo, contact information, and a short biography of the Adobe Presenter or presenters.

Add a company or organization logo to brand and personalize a presentation.

Depending on the length of the information, include copyright text on the first or last slide in a presentation. You can also add a separate slide containing only copyright information.

Create a distinctive start and finish to clearly show users the beginning, middle, and end of the presentation. You can use the same opening and closing slide across a series of presentations for a unified professional look.

Use divider slides to delineate sections within a presentation. Divider slides are especially useful in long presentations.

Voice‑over narration, music, or sound effects can add a new dimension to presentations.

Let users interact with the presentation, while you track their learning progress or obtain information (surveys).

Add existing information as supporting content for presentations. You can include documents, spreadsheets, links to web pages, and images as attachments.

Planning a presentation

It is helpful to do some planning before you create a presentation. First consider what you want the user to learn from your presentation. Defining this goal at the beginning lets you create a comprehensive plan for success. After you have defined the goal of the presentation, you can use an existing PowerPoint presentation and enhance it with the most effective Adobe Presenter options.

Design your presentation.

Use storyboards, scripts, or whatever organizational materials are appropriate. Consider what elements to include in the presentation. (For more information, see Elements of presentations.)

Start PowerPoint.

You can open an existing PowerPoint presentation or create a new presentation.

Include narration and other special elements.

In PowerPoint, from the Adobe Presenter ribbon, add audio narration, quizzes, videos with narration, presenter information, and other options to your presentation. Include attachments, such as web pages or documents, and customize themes (the appearance of the presentation viewer) for each presentation.

Preview your presentation.

Test how your presentation output looks like by previewing a part or entire presentation.

Publish the presentation.

Publish the presentation to Adobe Connect Server. You can also burn the presentation onto a CD or upload the presentation to the web using a third-party FTP software.

Adobe Presenter best practices

Adobe recommends these best practices for creating presentations:

• Design your online presentation based on the bandwidth capabilities of your audience. If your audience has fast, broadband connections, you can create a graphic-intensive presentation that includes many animations. However, if your audience has slower connection speeds, consider using graphic images only (no animations) or no graphics at all. By doing so, you provide a good viewing experience to your audience. Adobe Presenter also enables you to lower the quality level of images and audio files to create content suitable for audiences with low bandwidth.

• Consider creating a written script before recording audio for your presentation. Speaking into a microphone can be more difficult than giving a presentation to a live audience. To ensure a smooth delivery that covers all of your important points, consider creating a script for the entire presentation before recording audio for it. (If you have slide notes written in PowerPoint, you can easily import them into Adobe Presenter).

• Add animations to enhance the overall presentation, if your audience has fast connections. Adobe Presenter supports PowerPoint animations so that you can create powerful, animated, multimedia presentations. Animations add impact to your message and improve the overall viewing experience of users.

• Add video to presentation slides or to the sidebar to reuse information you already have. Video is appropriate if your audience has high bandwidth.

• Create presentations that are a manageable size. A single PowerPoint presentation typically corresponds to a single module or course. Usually a module contains 20–40 slides and results in a 15–45-minute session for users.

• Preview the presentation by publishing it locally before publishing to a Adobe Connect Server. Previewing enables you to see the converted presentation and ensure that it meets your requirements.

• Create slide titles to give users easy access to any slide. Check that titles appear in the PowerPoint outline for all slides, including graphic-only slides, before publishing your presentation.

Create an Adobe Presenter presentation

Adobe Presenter presentations are always based on PowerPoint presentations. To start a new presentation, you open an existing PowerPoint presentation (or create a new one) and then add all of the features available in Adobe Presenter. For more information about how to add these features, see the appropriate section.

Preview a presentation

Previewing is an easy way to see how a presentation looks to users. If you want to check your work, preview presentations at any time using the Preview options in the Presentation group.

When you preview a presentation, it appears in your default web browser. All of the functionality in the presentation, such as audio and quizzes, works exactly the way it will in the Adobe Presenter viewer. The presentation appears with all of the theme settings and colors you have chosen.