CounterPoint Tutorial

Welcome to CounterPoint! If you have made it this far, you have already mastered the first step to using CounterPoint which is creating your presentation in PowerPoint. The next step is to make your presentation zoom. Below you will find a description of the tools available to help you author and present in CounterPoint's zoomable space. Because CounterPoint is an ongoing research project at Palo Alto Research Center and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, you should look for new versions and bug fixes at the CounterPoint web site.

In CounterPoint, there are two new parts to the presentation in addition to the PowerPoint slides: 1) the layout of the slides in the CounterPoint space and 2) the path through this spatial layout.

Layout Organizer Mode

First, we'll layout the slides in the CounterPoint space. When CounterPoint first started, it opened your presentation in Layout Organizer Mode. This mode is also available through the VIEW->LAYOUT ORGANIZER menu item. The layout organizer is used to help simplify layouts according to some common shapes.

This mode should have displayed two main panels: the left panel containing a tree representation of your slides and the larger right panel displaying your slides in a grid arrangement.

The Right Panel

First, look at the right panel that initially contains the grid arrangement. In this panel you will spatially arrange your slides as you want them to appear in your presentation. If you are familiar with Zoomable User Interfaces, you can expect this panel to function in much the same way as most other programs built on Jazz or Pad++. If you would like more information on Zoomable User Interfaces you can look at the jazz web-site for a detailed discussion, other references, and more demos. Briefly, these types of programs offer a semi-infinite surface where you can pan and zoom through information on the surface.

You can interact with this right hand panel in three major ways. First, when the hand tool

on the toolbar is active, you can pan on this panel by clicking and dragging the mouse using the left mouse button. With the hand, you can also zoom in by moving the mouse over an object and clicking the left mouse button. Likewise, you can zoom out by clicking the right mouse button. Second, when the arrow tool

on the toolbar is active, you can move objects by clicking on them with the left mouse button and dragging the mouse. Also, when an object is selected using this arrow tool, you can zoom it in and out by pressing the PAGE-UP or PAGE-DOWN keys. Lastly, you can create text labels on the surface by clicking the left mouse button when the text tool

on the toolbar is active.

The Upper-Left Panel

The first thing to do in this mode is to create the hierarchy in a meaningful way. For instance, if you had a main slide titled "Films" with sub slides titled "Sci-Fi", "Action", and "Drama", you could organize these sub slides as children of the main slide in the hierarchy. To make one slide a descendant of another slide in this hierarchy, you simply drag the child slide on to the parent slide. The currently selected slide in the hierarchy is highlighted in red. When dragging this slide onto another slide, you can tell which slide will become its parent by looking for the slide currently highlighted in red. You can also increase and decrease a slide's level in the hierarchy using the

and

keys. The

and

buttons expand or collapse all slides simultaneously.

The Lower-Left Panel

If you select an item that is the parent of other items in the layout hierarchy, you will be given a set of layout options. The only option initially available is whether to apply an automated layout or not. Once you have chosen an automated layout, you are given further layout options. These options give you control over the parameters that affect the layout shape.

Path Editor Mode

Once the layouts are created, we can create a path through the slides. The Path Editor Mode is available through the VIEW->PATH EDITOR menu item. This mode should have displayed two panels: the left panel containing a vertical list of the slides and views on the path and the larger right panel displaying your slides in their spatial arrangement.

A new feature in CounterPoint automatically creates a reasonable default path for you. If the path gets out of sync with the spatial layout of the presentation, you can select PATH->SYNCHRONIZE PATH WITH LAYOUT to update the path to match your current layout.

The Lefthand Panel

This panel is used to author animated paths through the arrangement you created using the righthand panel. By default, CounterPoint adds each of your PowerPoint slides as stops along the path. However, you can modify this path by rearranging, removing, or repeating slides. To rearrange a slide you simply click and drag the slide to the desired point in the path or use the

buttons. To delete a slide, you select the slide by clicking on it and by then pressing DELETE key. To repeat a slide or re-insert a deleted slide, go to INSERT->SLIDE ON PATH on the menubar. This brings up a dialog box from which the desired slide can be selected. You can also add particular viewpoints in the space to your path. When you have navigated to the viewpoint of interest in the righthand panel, press the camera button

button on the toolbar to add the viewpoint to the path. This should result in a thumbnail version of the snapshot being added to the path. In these last two operations, (re)inserting a slide or adding a viewpoint to the path, the new slide/viewpoint is added to the end of the path by default. If you want this slide/viewpoint added at a different point in the path, select the slide at the point in which you want the slide to be inserted before carrying out the operation.

As you change your CounterPoint layout, or add slides to your presentation in PowerPoint, your path may become out of sync with your slides or layout. You can let CounterPoint try to automatically update your path to reflect your current slides and layout using the

PATH->SYNCHRONIZE PATH WITH
LAYOUT

menu item.

The Righthand Panel

The right hand panel has essential the same function as in the Layout Organizer mode.

Path Selecter

One of the advantages of CounterPoint is that it allows you to have multiple paths through the same presentation. To add a new path, go to PATH->NEW PATH on the menubar. You can rename or delete a path through the PATH menu.

Slide Sorter Mode

This mode, available through the VIEW->SLIDE SORTER menu item, should look very familiar to PowerPoint users. It is very similar to PowerPoint's Slide Sorter mode. In this mode, the righthand panel is used in the same way as the lefthand panel in Path Editor Mode to rearrange slides/viewpoints in the path. Likewise, the path selecter is used in the same way as in Path Editor Mode to switch between paths.

Slide Show Mode

This mode, available through the VIEW->SLIDE SHOW menu item or the projection screen button

, is used to view your current presentation. The path last selected in the path selecter determines the default traversal through the space. As in PowerPoint, pressing the RIGHT ARROW key, the SPACE BAR, or the left mouse button advances the presentation to the next slide or viewpoint in the path. Likewise, the LEFT ARROW key goes back to the previous slide or viewpoint in the path. At any point in the presentation, you can press the UP ARROW key to zoom out one level in the hierarchy you defined using the layout organizer. If you haven't defined a hierarchy, CounterPoint zooms out so that all slides are visible. At any time, you can click on a visible slide by moving the mouse over the slide and pressing the left mouse button to go directly to that slide. Also, if your mouse enters the area contained by the slides in your hierarchy, a navigation rectangle will appear highlighting this area. Clicking the left mouse button within this highlighted area will zoom to that area. Pressing the ESCAPE key at any time will exit presentation mode.

Other Controls

You can insert images (GIFS, JPGS, and some SVG files) into your CounterPoint presentation using the INSERT->PICTURE menu item. Note that these images do not appear in the Layout Organizer.

You can change the appearance of the borders of your slides in CounterPoint using the FORMAT->SLIDE BORDERS menu item. This brings up a dialog box in which you can specify both the border shape and color. This dialog also allows you to specify how the slide border will appear after it has been visited during a presentation.

You can also change the appearance of the navigation rectangle that appears during the presentation using the FORMAT->NAVIGATION RECTANGLES menu item. This brings up a dialog box in which you can specify the navigation rectangle fill and border colors.

Similarly, you can also change the color of the background using the FORMAT->CANVAS BACKGROUND COLOR menu item.

Saving and the CounterPoint File

Before exiting CounterPoint, it is important to save any changes you wish to preserve. To save your changes go to FILE->SAVE on the menubar. CounterPoint presentation data, such as slide arrangements, paths, border colors, etc, are stored in a file in the same directory as your PowerPoint file with the suffix ".cpt" So if your presentation is named "Widgets.ppt" the CounterPoint file will be named "Widgets.cpt" in the same directory. You should usually be able to ignore this file and things should work fine. However, in some cases, changing the number of slides in PowerPoint can cause problems in CounterPoint. If this happens you have two options:

Delete the ".cpt" file and recreate the CounterPoint portion of your presentation
Edit the ".cpt" file. This file uses an XML format, so you can potentially fix these problems with a text editor.

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