Powerful PowerPoint for Educators: Using Visual Basic for Applications to Make PowerPoint Interactive

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Met a phors
A metaphor is the way the user will think about the pro ject. For example, a
geography pro ject might choose a map metaphor where users click on certain lo-
cations on a map to visit the lo cation. You might choose a book metaphor, start-
ing with a cover and a ta ble of contents and referring to each slide as a page
(complete with page num bers and graphics that make the slides look like pages).
Metaphors can be complex or simple, with more complex metaphors pro viding
somewhat of an illusion that the user is ac tually in the metaphor. For example, a
travel metaphor might in clude an imations of planes taking off and land ing to
give the il lusion that the user is actually going someplace.
Metaphors can be particularly help ful when you are not creating a pro ject
but are as signing your students to create a pro ject. This helps stu dents to “un-
leash their cre ativ ity by find ing new met a phors for in for ma tion. Met a phors
stim u late vi su al iza tions” (Agnew, Kellerman, and Meyer, 1996, p. 121). Meta-
phors are a pow erful tool to help users nav igate a pro ject and to help de signers
think creatively about a project.
Storyboards and Flowcharts
Once you have chosen an or ganization and a metaphor for your pro ject, you 
need to fig ure out how the entire pro ject will work. The more complex the pro -
ject, the more this step is needed. At a min imum, you should sketch in ad vance
your en tire pro ject, not necessarily with all the details, but with enough details so 
you can see how the pro ject holds together. In dicate how each slide will be
linked to any other slides and the kinds of (if not the exact) in formation that will
be on each slide.
Although you can do this with a computer drawing pro gram, a small screen
size is lim iting. You might want to map out your pro ject on a large poster board
or a gi ant piece of newsprint. Index cards can represent each slide in your pro -
ject. You can use for mal flowcharting sym bols (see, for ex ample, Ivers and
Barron, 2002, pp. 64–65), or you can use a less formal sys tem, but you must un -
derstand and map out the project.
If you are not creating the project your self but assigning it to your stu dents,
this step becomes even more im portant. Your students are un likely to do any
planning un less you specifically re quire it and require them to hand in their de -
signs. When they don’t plan, the qual ity of their work will suf fer, and the time it
takes for them to com plete their work will increase.
As you design the flow of your pro ject, you also need to map out what will
happen on each slide. You might use your gi ant flowchart to fill in the de tails, or
you might use the cards on your flowchart as placeholders and have a sep arate
drawing of each slide. As you plan the flow of your project and what in formation
goes on each slide, you will be able to broaden and narrow your view of the pro -
ject, alternately seeing an overview of the project and fo cusing on the details.
Storyboards and Flowcharts 7

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This will help you ad just your de sign as you need to. It is much easier to move a
card or add a card or de lete a card than it is to take a half-finished project, includ-
ing VBA scripts, and move ev erything around, re writing the scripts to match the
redesign.
This does not mean that your design is fixed once you start developing your 
project. But with a good idea of how the pro ject works and most of the de tails in
place, you will find it eas ier to cre ate the project and make changes as needed.