Summary: Using the transparency features of Studio ’09, you can use the same master slide throughout your presentations giving them a more consistent look.
Difficulty: Easy

There are so many new features in Studio ’09 that it takes time to explore everything. This article looks at a great new addition to Presenter ’09, Quizmaker ’09 and Engage ’09 which allows you to really make all three appear great together. Last year, I was asked to write an article on how to make Engage and Presenter appear consistent together. Much of what is said also applies to Studio ’09 but now there is a better method and frankly, it is just great!

When you are creating a presentation in PowerPoint, one of the easiest and best ways to make sure that you get a consistent feel throughout the project is to use master slides. Now we can have those same master slides with embedded Quizmaker ’09 quizzes and Engage ’09 interactions.

Have a look at this demo to get an idea of some of the things you can now do in Studio ’09.

How Do We Do It?

So you should have seen that we can make a PowerPoint masterslide appear through most Engage ’09 interactions and Quizmaker ’09 quizzes. The question now is how?

Three things need to be done:

Change Presenter Settings

1) The first thing to do is to set Presenter ’09 to show the Master Slide behind both Quizmaker ’09 and Engage ’09 and for this there is a simple setting that needs checking.

Go to Articulate -> Presentation Options -> Other

and select “Include slide master behind quizzes and interactions“:

Change Engage Settings

2) Next, you need to edit the Color Scheme for your Engage interactions to allow the Masterslide to show through.

There is only one area that you can make transparent in Engage and that is the Background.

Either create a new Color Scheme or Edit an existing scheme and change the Background transparency to 100% (or a little less if you want the background to show a little).

Make sure you choose this Color Scheme when you publish to Presenter.

Change Quizmaker Settings

3) Finally, edit the Player Template in Quizmaker ’09 to also allow transparency in the template.

Video Demo

The above steps are slightly simplified. You clearly need to create a master slide or several master slides in PowerPoint to use with Engage and/or Quizmaker. Also, unlike Engage, there are a number of areas in the Quizmaker template which you can make transparent giving you more scope to customize the look as you want. The video demo below goes into more details and shows how I put the presentation together.

Project Files

If you want more help on this, why not download the project files for the presentation I made? I haven’t included the audio files to make the download file smaller but you will be able to see the masterslides and the transparency settings I selected for the Quizmaker and Engage templates. You can download the project files for the first demo above here:

Notes

One of the new Community interactions, the Flashcard interaction, does not allow changes to the Color Scheme so transparency will not work. The Flipbook interaction does allow transparency in the latest version of the interaction. Be sure you download the latest version from this page.

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