This guest blog entry was written by Articulate VP of Community Tom Kuhlmann.

Browse through the product tutorials and you’ll see that Presenter ‘09 has a lot of neat new features and they’ll make your courses look great. However, in today’s post I want to share some of the improvements that might not be as evident but really contribute to a better user experience. They’ll save you time and make recording your narrations and working with PowerPoint animations that much easier.

Record Narration, Sync Animations & Add Annotations all from the Same Window

When you click on the record narration button, you get one window. That’s a change from the previous version where you had to open and close windows. Because everything happens in one window, you’ll notice a big improvement in work flow.

You can record your narration, sync animations, and add annotations in one production area. You can even modify your transcript in slide notes!

Working with Narration & Animations is Simple

If you look at the image below, you can see the three choices you have. The cool thing is that you can do these all together, on the fly. Or do them in individual segments.

Typically, I find that it’s pretty easy to do them on the fly. I record narration, sync animations and add annotations all at the same time. It’s just a matter of a few clicks here and there.

However, there have been some projects where there’s a lot going on. In those cases, I’ll record the audio first. I don’t worry about the animations or annotations at that time. When I’m done with the audio, I’ll sync any animations. And last, I add annotations.

Modify the Slide Notes Inside the Record Window

One of my favorite new features is the ability to make changes to the transcript in real time. Like many of you, I use PowerPoint slide notes for my narration transcript. It never fails that as I am recording, I need to make changes to my transcript.

There’s nothing more frustrating then having to stop recording, close out the record window, modify the PowerPoint slide notes, and then re-open the record window. That’s not the case anymore. Your slide notes have been liberated!

If you want to make changes to your slide notes, you can do so in real time. No need to open and close anything. And once you’re all done, the changes show up in your PowerPoint slide notes. That’s pretty cool.

Here’s a quick tutorial to see what I wrote about in action:

Click here to view the tutorial (7 min).

So it basically boils down to this. In Presenter ‘09, you get a great looking product with nice new features. But more important, you get an enhanced user experience that helps you do your job better because the workflow makes sense and will save you time.