Announcing SmartDraw 2009 – Automatically Sequence SmartDraw Drawings in PowerPoint®
Normally we don’t focus an entire blog entrie on our product, SmartDraw. But given that we’ve officially released the newest version of SmartDraw today, I thought I might make an exception. Today we released SmartDraw 2009, which comes with a huge number of improvements to the software. Click here if you’d like to read about them in more detail.
There is one SmartDraw 2009 feature in particular that I’d like to discuss: our Smarter PowerPoint® Integration, because it relates directly to a number of the points that we’ve made about using animation to produce more effective PowerPoint® presentations.
What the Feature Does
SmartDraw 2009’s Smarter PowerPoint® Integration adds an entirely new dimension to SmartDraw’s PowerPoint® export capabilities: it allows you to “pre-animate” your SmartDraw drawings within SmartDraw before you export them to PowerPoint®.
You can animate any drawing in SmartDraw 2009 including floor plans, flow charts, org charts, Gantt charts, timelines and any other type of diagram with a few simple clicks of a button. It’s pretty easy.
How this Feature Benefits You
Rick Altman wrote a guest piece for us a while back called “Thriving with Animation,” in which he explained that animation, when used correctly, “isn’t noticed at all. It’s not unlike being a major league baseball umpire who gets no respect for doing a good job.” Putting large amounts of data on a slide and dumping it all at once onto your audience is not an effective technique for getting your point across; however, by using animation, you can sequence your data in a paced, measured fashion that keeps you and your audience on the same page.
It’s hard to appreciate how useful the feature is without seeing it; so if you look below, here is our brand new help video which demonstrates the feature and explains the payoffs concisely:
If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.
