Creating NovaMind Presenter Slides

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Transcript is as follows:

In this video, we will go into detail about how to create presentation slides using the Presenter, available in NovaMind Platinum.

NovaMind allows you to define a presentation, by setting up virtual slides which define which topics you want to show, which topics have their subtopics collapsed, how far to zoom in to the topics when giving your presentation, and whether to automatically highlight the topics during the presentation.

The slides are dynamic, and automatically adjust where necessary as you edit your Mind Map.

The slides are defined for the entire document, and can include topics from all the Mind Maps included in the document.

So let’s define some slides for this document, and look at how they will be presented.

Firstly, let’s say we want to start the presentation by showing just the title and main topics, and none of the subtopics. So let’s select the Mind Map title and use Option+Command+1 to show just down to one level of subtopics. Now with the title still selected, we will create the slide. And we want to make sure it’s presented loud and clear, so we will use the inspector to say that we want to zoom right in.

Let’s just test the slide to make sure it’s going to do what we want it to do by double clicking on it. When you do this, it will show the slide as it would be as if it was presented during a presentation, except it will just use the space that it currently has on the canvas. You will see that the Mind Map title has green glow around it for a couple of seconds because that was what was used in the definition of the slide, and you can see that we zoom right in so that the Mind Map fills the available area.

When you say you want the slide presented close up, it will take all the topics shown on the slide and make that fit into the screen, no matter how much it needs to zoom in, right up to 500% zoom. You should be careful about using this option if you have images on your topics, because it does zoom right in, and the images may look all pixellated or blocky. The normal zoom amount for the slides will only zoom in to a maximum of 200%, so that images will still look good. Adornments are always sized at 50% of the actual image size, and by default texture images are sized at 50% deliberately so that when you do a presentation with the normal zoom in effect, the images still look good. The task information like priority and percentage complete is drawn in code, so that will still look good no matter how much you zoom in, and the icons for attachments, links, and notes are vector images, so also will look good no matter how much you zoom in.

Now let’s say we want to present the first of the subtopics with its subtopics, but make sure the other subtopics are still collapsed. We just expand that one subtopic and select it to define the next slide from there.

Now let’s see what happens when we edit the topics that are included in the slide. In this case, we will add a subtopic. Now when you double-click on the slide, you will see that the slide is different and includes the new subtopic. The slides are updated like this as you add and remove topics. If you remove topics that are included in the definition of the slide, the slide definition will be updated automatically, and if you remove all the topics that define the slide, the slide will be deleted automatically.

You can select multiple topics from anywhere on the Mind Map to define the slide, so for instance, we could select this topic, this floating topic, and this shape, and when you show the slide, all of those will be visible.

An advanced option that you might like to try is if you just want to present one piece of information, or just a few topics on a slide, you could either add a shape that is away from the Mind Map, and use that to define your slide, like this…, or add a floating topic with a few subtopics like this…, or add another Mind Map to your document and present from that, in which case the presenter would fade out your main Mind Map, and fade the other one in, then you could copy the previous slide to go back to where you were, by Option-dragging it, or you could have a Mind Map that just has a title, and has a whole bunch of shapes on it, spread out, and you could use that as a pool of things to switch to, before going back to your main Mind Map.

Another thing you might like to think about is creating a slide for a boundary. Just select the boundary and create a slide. When you go to present that slide, it will position the whole boundary and everything within it appropriately.

You can see that if you think about it, there is a lot of flexibility built in to the Presenter beyond purely presenting a Mind Map topic by topic.

Now you can see that there is an option on the inspector to highlight topics. When you turn this option on, when you go to that slide, all the topics that define what is shown on the slide are highlighted. Note that this is not just the topics that you had selected when you created the slide, but all the topics that define the slide. So for instance if you have a topic with a couple of subtopics like this, and select the parent and one of the children, then those will be highlighted, but if one of the ones you have selected has children topics which you haven’t selected, and they are not collapsed, then they will be highlighted too.

Normally if you have topics which have shapes attached, you wouldn’t want the shapes highlighted, so these would not normally be highlighted, but if you do want them highlighted, just make sure they are included in the selection when you create the slide, and they will be highlighted.

The option for highlighting topics is useful if you want the topics highlighted when you go into that slide. During the presentation you can highlight and unhighlight topics at will.

You can see which topics will be highlighted by double-clicking on the slide. All the topics which will be highlighted are selected.

Having the topics which are highlighted automatically updated allows for the highlighting of topics to be updated automatically as you edit your Mind Map, but there is a situation where this could be not exactly what you want to happen, and that is where you have leaf topics selected. Since they currently don’t have any subtopics, you can’t collapse subtopics, so when you go back later and update your Mind Map and add subtopics, they will automatically be displayed. So there is an extra option for this situation. Just hold the Option key down while you create the slide, and now even if you add subtopics later, they will be collapsed when you show the slide.

If you want to keep a slide but not use it in the current presentation, select it and use the inspector to hide it. You will see a diagonal bar across it, and it will not be included in your presentation. You can select multiple slides at once to hide from your presentation. And just uncheck the slides to include them in the presentation again.

You can reorder your slides just by dragging them into the order you want them.

So that pretty much covers the setting up of slides, so before we go into the presentation itself, let’s set up the introductory slide for the presentation. This is a slide that is shown before you begin your presentation, typically while you are being introduced for your talk, or you can just show it quickly at the start of your presentation if that is what you would prefer.

The configuration options are on this inspector.

If you don’t do anything at all, there will be an introductory slide with the basic options set, and it will show the title of the first Mind Map in the document as the title, but you probably want to make it a bit more interesting than that.

The first option lets you not use an introductory slide at all, but I think the introductory slide is cool, so I’ll leave it showing.

Then we have the title. If you leave this blank, it will use the title of the first Mind Map in the document, but if you want the title to say something different, just type it in there.

The subtitle is shown a little bit smaller than the title, and can be as long as you like – it will wrap and shrink to fill the space, but of course we recommend that you don’t write a novel there. You can leave it blank if you don’t want a subtitle, or we would suggest using something less than about 10 words so it is still easy to read.

The scrolling text section allows you to set up lines of text which will scroll across the screen slowly at random time intervals. You can enter multiple lines of text, and each line will be scrolled across the screen, in random order at random times. It will be positioned so that it doesn’t go across any of the other lines of text that you have defined for the slide, like the title and subtitle.

If you have the “Display Time” checkbox turned on, it will use the default short time format that you set in your system preferences to display the time. The time will be displayed as a digital clock that floats across your screen.

If you define something in the Twitter Search field, and you are connected to the Internet, NovaMind will find tweets based on the search term, and show them in the introductory slide. This can be fun if you are at a conference and give people a hashtag for them to include in their tweets. If you use that hashtag as the search term, your introductory slide can show tweets that the audience tweet using that hashtag.

And lastly, the “Help spread the word checkbox”. If you check this, there will be a small note on both the introductory slide and at the end of the presentation that it was created using NovaMind. Most people have never seen a NovaMind presentation before, and we hear that lots of people who use NovaMind for their presentations have a crowd of people coming up to them after the presentation asking what software they were using. This option allows you to give this information to your entire audience, which helps spread the word about NovaMind, so that we can continue to make it better for you.

So now you know everything there is to know about creating your presentation, and seeing as there is so much information, we’ll create a separate video about giving your presentation using NovaMind.