Page 098 of PowerPoint tutorials, presentation essentials, personality interviews, and PowerPoint news.
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Author: Geetesh Bajaj
Product/Version: PowerPoint
April 6, 2012
Melissa Marshall is a faculty member at Penn State University in the Department of Communication Arts & Sciences where she teaches scientific presentation skills to engineering students. She is a crusader against bullet points and an evangelist for effective slide design. Along with her colleague Michael Alley, Melissa provides guest lectures and workshops on the Assertion-Evidence slide design all over the world. In this conversation, Melissa discusses how you can effectively design scientific slides.
April 6, 2012
If you want to add some visual content to your presentation slide, adding pictures is a great way to get started. There are two ways to insert a picture on your slide in PowerPoint. You use a layout that includes a content placeholder, or you insert a picture within a slide irrespective of its layout. Whichever option you choose depends upon your choice -- we cover both of them in the following steps.
Learn how to insert a picture on a slide in PowerPoint 2011.
April 5, 2012
AKVIS Decorator 3 is an Adobe Photoshop compatible plug-in that applies color or texture to the selected part of your image. It preserves the volume of the object, following its folds and creases. The overlaid pattern looks absolutely natural.
Read the Indezine review of AKVIS Decorator 3.
April 5, 2012
Motion path animations in PowerPoint enable you to make any slide object move into or off the slide, and also make it move around on the slide in a particular path! PowerPoint provides dozens of motion paths, in every shape that you can imagine. To add a Motion Path animation to any object on a PowerPoint slide, follow these steps.
Learn how to apply Motion path animations to slide objects in PowerPoint 2010.
April 4, 2012
Like Slide Executive xPoint Desktop Edition, an add-in that we have already reviewed, the Web Edition of the same add-in searches and inserts slides and images from the web, straight into your PowerPoint presentations. The add-in installs as a tab of the Ribbon within PowerPoint providing access to a local and/or a central slide library in the cloud. xPoint includes free online search capabilities -- and subsequent insertion of slides and images from the internet. In addition, xPoint also enables you to use SlideFinder, a PowerPoint search engine that scours the web for slides. Whether you choose to purchase xPoint or not, you will have the full search capability of SlideFinder inside your local version of PowerPoint.
April 4, 2012
After Bruce Gabrielle posted the original technique on his blog, we created this alternative or complementary sequence of steps for creating Cookie Cutter shapes in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows – Bruce’s video shows you how you can create a triangular table in PowerPoint by either creating a picture of the table itself (which makes the table non-editable) or by creating a picture of the table with just empty cells so that you can place a transparent table with figures or words over it. While both techniques are amazing, we wanted to use a process whereby not only is the table editable, but the ending shape need not be limited to just a triangle – and we wanted this technique to work for PowerPoint for Mac users as well.
Learn how to make cookie cutter shapes in PowerPoint 2011.
April 3, 2012
There's so much you can do with a blank slide! Yet, most users will create a list on those blank slides -- yes, I just call them "lists" , but others may call them bulleted lists. It's just another name, and yet there has to be a reason why 9 of 10 PowerPoint users seem to be so comfortable creating all sorts of lists on their slides? Now when I say 9 of 10, I haven't done a survey or research -- just something I have explored. Experts seem to agree with my observation though and they also believe that bulleted lists are a huge problem. Many presentation design experts seem to believe that bullets may cause "death by PowerPoint".
April 3, 2012
The three basic animation types in PowerPoint: entrance, emphasis, and exit animations are something we have already explored. The fourth animation type is called Motion Path animations, and this is something more advanced in nature than the basic animation types explored so far. Motion Path animations determine the route (path) and the direction in which the animated slide object moves across or around on the slide. For example, you can move the slide object up, down, right, or left -- on a preset or created motion path.
Explore Motion Paths animations in PowerPoint 2010.
April 2, 2012
The slides in this presentation use the same shapes as our Lines All Over sample presentation, but that’s where the similarity ends. All shapes in these slides are filled with seamless textures from the Ppted Texture collection. And they are animated so that each shape starts as a double-sized specimen that reduces to its original size. It then grows again in size, and reduces as long as the slide is showing. We used PowerPoint 2010 to create this presentation, and it works best in either that version or in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
Download and use this slide for your own presentations.
April 2, 2012
After we did a tutorial on creating a graphic of a CD or DVD using PowerPoint for Windows, there were many who asked for a similar tutorial using PowerPoint for Mac. So here it is -- a tutorial that shows you how to create the image of the CD within PowerPoint 2011 for Mac -- of course although the finished graphic looks like a CD, you can use it for a DVD or Blu-Ray disc as well! In this tutorial, you will also learn how a slide program like PowerPoint can be a very capable drawing program. And creating a CD in PowerPoint 2011 is indeed a cakewalk!
Learn how to draw a CD or a DVD using the default Donut shape in PowerPoint 2011.
March 30, 2012
Tom Kuhlmann is VP, Community for Articulate, where he manages the Articulate user community. He also writes the Rapid E-Learning Blog which is published weekly to over 80,000 readers. Tom has developed and managed e-learning courses for both large and small organizations. He’s passionate about learning technology and his core focus is on helping people succeed and grow. He is known throughout the industry for his practical, no-nonsense approaches to e-learning. He’s also a frequent speaker at ASTD and e-learning industry events. He has a Master’s in Education Technology from Pepperdine. In this conversation, Tom discusses how PowerPoint users can start using Articulate tools to create e-learning content.
March 29, 2012
We have already explored both entrance and emphasis animation types. The third type of animation in PowerPoint is called Exit animation, and the various Exit animation effects determine how an animated slide object disappears from the slide. For example, the slide objects can fade out or fly off-screen. Of course, both Fade and Fly off are just two of the many Exit animation effects available.
Explore Exit animations in PowerPoint 2010.
March 28, 2012
Phillip Gibbs has been involved in the audio-visual production business for 25 years and co-founded IMS Communications, an events production business, in 1991. Over time, clients’ expectations for their conferences have climbed higher and higher; they want them to be memorable and efficient in communicating their messages. They also want them to be eye-catching and to run as smoothly as a TV programme. As technology has changed, shows have become slicker requiring custom software to manipulate graphics, video and interactive devices. IMS designers have taken this development one step further – to help presenters keep to time. In this conversation, Phillip discusses PresenterClock, a PowerPoint add-in that allows presenters to be on schedule.
March 28, 2012
In addition to being a ubiquitous presentation program, PowerPoint also works great as a simple drawing program as you have explored in our Drawing Trees in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac tutorial. We have already done an extensive series of tutorials on shapes, and in this tutorial, we will show you how to use simple techniques already explained in other tutorials to draw a shopping bag in PowerPoint 2011. You need not go back to those older tutorials since most concepts are drop-dead easy – yet if you want to know more, we have linked to all technique tutorials in the relevant parts of this page. So let’s start drawing our shopping bag!
Learn how to use default shapes in PowerPoint 2011 to draw a shopping bag.
March 27, 2012
Among the four animation types in PowerPoint, we have already explored Entrance animations. The second type of animation is called Emphasis animation, and this animation type determines how the slide object moves while it is on the slide. For example, you can change a text object's font size, make it spin, or even cause it to flicker. Of course, animation effects such as changing font size, spin, or flicker are just a few of the many Emphasis animation effects in PowerPoint.
Explore Emphasis animations in PowerPoint 2010.
March 26, 2012
Even though PowerPoint has been considered as a slide program, it is also a great drawing program that can in many ways be more easier to use than full-fledged illustration programs. Agreed, PowerPoint is not that full featured as far as drawing goes, but sometimes quick and easy is all you need! In this tutorial, you will learn how to draw a tree with just two simple shapes in PowerPoint 2011.
Learn how to draw a quick tree using default shapes in PowerPoint 2011.
You May Also Like: Learn PowerPoint 2010: Motion Path Animations -- Reversing Motion Paths | Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Insert and/or Link Pictures
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