I was invited to prepare a 45 video for the Collab 365 conference. I designed a power point presentation on the topic, “Preparing the Shift to Office 365” and decided to use Office Mix as the tool to create the video and publish it to the web. You can see the final result here.
Office Mix is a new PowerPoint add-in that allows you to take a PowerPoint presentation and turn it into interactive content. It is currently in preview. It allows you to take an ordinary PowerPoint presentation and add in audio, screen recording, full screen video and learning quizzes to create interactive presentations. When you’re complete, you can publish your interactive presentation to the Office Mix web site and share it to either a private or public audience. You can also publish your presentation to a video file as well.
Downloading the Add-in
In order to use Office Mix, you will need an account (either a Live ID, Office 365, Facebook or LinkedIn account will work) and the Office Mix Add-in. You download the add-in and install it on each client that needs to create content.
The one challenge with the download is that I found that the 64 bit add-in doesn’t seem to install properly. In addition, I have not yet tried the add-in with Office 2016.
Adding Audio and Video
Adding audio and video is really easy. You just insert the audio or video through the add-in and make sure that the settings are that the files play automatically when you hit the slide. Office Mix converts these files into streaming files when published online or incorporates into your video file when published locally.
High quality audio and video definitely makes a big difference – given that the publishing process can handle up to 1080p HD video. Split your audio and video files so that they are attached to each slide.
Publishing the File
There are two publishing channels – online and to video. Publishing online converts your slides to a set of PNG files and uploads the embedded audio and video. It’s a reasonably quick process – for my 45 minute video it took about 15-20 minutes.
For publishing to video, you choose the size and file format for your video. Note that publishing to a 1080p video will take quite a bit of time and the file sizes are quite large. My 45 video was more than 1 GB and took about 2 hours to render into the video file.
Test Your Transitions and Animations
When you publish to Office Mix, you may find that your transitions or animations don’t work as expected. I found most basic animations and transitions worked but a few did not. For example, I have a slide that wipes in a number of items and the wipe didn’t work in Office Mix, resulting in all of the items showing up at the same time.
Overall, this is an exciting and very easy to use publishing technology. In building my presentation, I found it very easily to assemble all the components and publish it to video and Office Mix.
