Making your PowerPoint presentations interactive with Near-Life is easy. Let’s talk through it.
Design your PowerPoint presentation
First up, design your presentation as normal. The main thing you need to consider is how the end user will interact. On the example above, I made all the button shapes on PowerPoint. Then later, on Near-Life, I highlighted each button to make them interactive. This means you can make anything on the screen interactive. However, Near-Life allows you to add buttons on the Near-Life platform – you’ll see all of the orange Next buttons on the above example are added on Near-Life. If you opt for this, leave the area blank on PowerPoint and add the buttons later. However, bear in mind that if you do this, all your buttons will be the same colour.
Download your PowerPoint presentation
Once each slide was made, I could then export the entire PowerPoint to images on my device. You can do this by clicking files, export, and then export to images. This will make a zip file with all your slides in.
Make it Interactive with Near-Life
Next, go onto Near-Life, add a new project if necessary and create a new scenario. Near-Life’s new AI wizard tool can speed up the creation process. You will need to know how many decision points there are (such as how many questions there are on the quiz), and you can add any additional nodes, choose whether hotspots or Near-Life’s buttons will hold the interactions, delete nodes and more. This will leave you with a storyboard that you can drag and drop each of your slides into. You also have the choice to build it as you go – whatever works best for you.
If you use the AI Wizard:
Upload all your slides to Near-Life using the media tab. You can then drag and drop each slide into the correct node. You can then go onto each node and make any refinements, such as aligning hotspots in the right areas.
If you build it manually:
Upload your media using the media tab and add the first slide to the first node on the screen. Double click on the node and choose from the overlay options whether to add a hotspot or button. When you make your choice, name the overlay and set it to go to a new node. If there’s a button, remember to input the text you want to appear on the button.
If you have more than one overlay on the screen and want each one to take you to a different next node when clicked, click create new under the go to section for each overlay. If you want the interactions to all go to the same next node, don’t click create new for the next interactions. Instead, select the name of that first new node you’ve created that you want them all to go to. You can make this easier for yourself by always immediately naming any new nodes you create, so it is easy to direct interactions to that node. Use this exact same method through the rest of your building process.
Adding scoring:
You may want to score the end-user if you’re making a quiz or lesson like me. To do this, go to each of the correct answers on all of the nodes and tick the score button. You can then decide how many points to add. You also have the choice to take away points for incorrect answers. If you want, you can set a pass score on the settings tab so the end-user will see whether they passed or failed based on how many questions they got right. You can also choose to include feedback based on their answers. Do this by ticking the feedback option in the settings tab and going to each answer and typing in the feedback box what you want the end-user to see should they give that answer.
Set the media duration:
If you want to give the end-user a certain amount of time to answer each question, you can set the media duration on the node properties tab. This works on a node-to-node basis, so you will have to set this on each node you want it rather than it being a universal setting. You can also set when you want the countdown to appear. If the user does not make a decision in time, they will go to the end screen where they can see their final score.
For the ending:
For the video to end, you will need to either make the last scene a video, or set a duration for your final scene. This means that when the countdown/duration runs out, it will lead to the results page where the end user will see their final score.
Want to create your own interactive PowerPoint presenations?
Book a demo to get started.