Articulate just released its most recent update to Studio 09, which is now compatible with PowerPoint 2010. Since I recently purchased Office 2010 and was waiting for this update to install it, I was anxious to test it out as soon as possible.

In this, my first trial, I was most interested in seeing how to create an different style of presentation rather than trying out every feature of PowerPoint 2010 and the updated Articulate Presenter. My inspiration came from an online gallery clip from the Sackler Gallery web site. Take a look at my demonstration project here.

There seem to be even more picture editing features in PowerPoint 2010, so I was able to edit out parts of the backgrounds of images in addition to cropping and resizing them. PowerPoint makes exporting the edited image into a graphics file easy, with just a right-click and drop-down menu selection.

I saved isolated portions of the images as png files so that the background is transparent when the image is re-inserted into PowerPoint. That's how I created the animated images on the opening screen. I cropped and resized portions of images and exported those to png files also. They became the menu buttons in the picture display area. The menu buttons simply have hyperlinks created in PowerPoint to other slides within the presentation. There are also some hyperlinks to external HTML files, all of which worked with no problems.

For the animation on the opening screen, I used motion paths and fades for the entrances and exits. In the picture viewing area, I used fades and wipes to animate the text and decorative line respectively.

Articulate continues to support all of these features and did not give me any hiccups at all while working on the PowerPoint file. Since this demonstration does not includes audio, I have not tested that feature yet. It will also be important to see how well the insertion of Flash and web objects works. That will be next on the agenda.