I thought I would give the Microsoft Office Labs team a plug after using one of their Office add-ins in a presentation I delivered last week. It had been a while since I last put together a Powerpoint presentation and I wanted to find out if there were any new funky ways of delivering presentation content.

If you cast your mind back to Tech-Ed Africa 2008, you might remember a few demos of Deep Zoom, a technology that allows you to “infinitely” zoom and pan through a large collection of high-res images. The demos were impressive but sadly, I haven’t really seen the technology applied in the wild. So, I decided to look into any advancements in the Deep Zoom toolset that would allow me to put together a presentation relatively simply. It was at this point I stumbled across PPTPlex, a plug-in for Microsoft Powerpoint. It allows you to add some cool Deep Zoom type features to your presentation. Strictly speaking, its not as robust as a true Deep Zoom compilation, but it does allow you to put together a neat presentation without too much work.

Overall, I thought the plug-in was pretty cool and had an extremely low learning curb. I successfully delivered my presentation using the plug-in without any issues. I did have one or two gripes about the plug-in though, the main being that I could not find a way to publish my presentation (I had to have Powerpoint open to present it). Also, you cannot animate any of your presentation elements through PPTPlex – I can understand why this is missing (it would be pretty complex to implement) but it is just something you need to bear in mind.

So, if you’re bored of compiling presentations using the defacto Powerpoint toolset then I would definately recommend looking into PPTPlex. Have fun…