Storyboard your ideas using PowerPoint

  • Article

With storyboarding, you turn your ideas and goals into something visual. Your ideas are easier for other people to understand, so they can give you constructive feedback, sooner. You can bring your ideas to life with storyboard shapes, text, animation, and all the other features that PowerPoint Storyboarding provides.

Use storyboard shapes and PowerPoint features

  1. If you don't have Office PowerPoint 2007 or later, install it.

  2. If you haven't installed Visual Studio Premium 2012, VS Ultimate 2012 or VS Test Professional 2012, you'll need to install one of these versions to create and modify storyboards.

    The only way to get the TFS Storyboarding add-in is by installing one of the premium editions of Visual Studio.

  3. Open Power Point Storyboarding and start with a blank slide. You should see the Storyboarding ribbon and Storyboard Shapes library. If you don't see the Storyboarding ribbon, see step 2.

    Open PowerPoint Storyboarding

    Or, you can open PowerPoint Storyboarding from the Storyboarding tab of a backlog work item.

    Start PowerPoint Storyboarding from work item

  4. Add a background shape that's appropriate for your app. To add a shape, just drag it onto the slide.

    Drag a shape onto the slide

  5. Search for more shapes to complete your design.

    Search for shapes

  6. Create mores slides to show the flow of your app. Share them with your team to get early feedback on the design.

    Develop your storyboard with multiple slides

Tip

  • Use animation to bring your flow to life.

  • Take screenshots of your apps. For example, add a screenshot as the background of a master slide.

  • Use =lorem() to insert text when you don't have the actual text ready.

When you share your storyboards to a shared network location, you can link the storyboards to work items that they support. That way, your team members will be able to open the storyboards from the work items and annotate them with their suggestions.

  1. Save or upload your storyboard to a shared location that everyone on your team can access.

  2. If you started Power Point Storyboarding from a backlog item, then you are already linked to the initial item and you are done.

    Otherwise, open Storyboard Links.

    Open Storyboard Links to link to a work item

  3. If you're not already connected to TFS and a team project, connect now. If you can't connect, get added as a team member.

    Connect to TFS

  4. Then, link to a work item.

    Choose to link to a work item

  5. Select a work item to link to. The next screenshot shows how to do that using a saved query. You can also do a simple search on the title, or just provide the ID.

    Select query to find work items

    Find work items from the query to link to

    Choose the work item to link to

  6. Now the storyboard is linked to the work item.

    Storyboard linked to work item

  7. And, whoever views the work item can also access the storyboard.

    Storyboard tab with linked storyboard

With PowerPoint Storyboarding, you can illustrate a new or a modified interface. You can capture existing user interfaces and build a storyboard from a collection of predefined storyboard shapes. Also, you can customize the slide layouts for your web, client, or phone applications. And, by linking the storyboard to a work item stored in TFS, you automatically share it with your team.

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