Page 101 of PowerPoint tutorials, presentation essentials, personality interviews, and PowerPoint news.
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Author: Geetesh Bajaj
Product/Version: PowerPoint
May 14, 2012
PowerPoint enables users to edit inserted pictures using the adjust picture options, and provides them with some preset Picture Styles which can be directly applied to the selected pictures. Also, they can add beautiful borders to the pictures. But, this is not the end -- they can also apply individual effects to the inserted picture like, a shadow, glow, bevel, 3-D rotation etc.
Learn about Effect options for pictures in PowerPoint 2011.
May 11, 2012
A few days ago, our PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff LinkedIn group had a great discussion on Pecha Kucha. It started with one of our members asking for some guidance on how to go about preparing for a Pecha Kucha presentation. To those of you who do not know what Pecha Kucha is, it is a presentation format that originated in Japan in the year 2003. In Japanese, Pecha Kucha translates to chit-chat or chatter. Each Pecha Kucha speaker presents with a deck of 20 slides (or images) each. Each of these slides progresses automatically to the next one, after being visible onscreen for 20 seconds. This is the reason why Pecha Kucha is often called 20x20. Getting back to the question about how you can prepare a better Pecha Kucha presentation, the forum responses did bring in some awesome answers. With the permission of those who responded, I've compiled this list of 10 tips that will help you prepare for a better Pecha Kucha presentation.
Read how you can create and present a better Pecha Kucha presentation.
May 11, 2012
The main advantage of the Advanced Timeline is to edit the timing and sequencing of your animations. You can easily control the start time, duration, and end time of your animation to the most minute level. In addition, you can also animate any slide object very slowly to span over a whole minute or more by just dragging the start and end points of any animation bar outwards in the timeline. We have already explored how to show/hide the Advanced Timeline within PowerPoint 2010, and in this tutorial, you will learn how to control animations with the help of Advanced Timeline.
Learn how to control animation timings with the help of advanced Timeline option in PowerPoint 2010.
May 10, 2012
Although it is so easy to insert a picture in your PowerPoint slide, you should almost always look at doing more with your pictures thereafter. Probably the first thing you can do to make the picture more effective is cropping. In addition, you can also adjust how the picture looks by applying adjust picture options. Thereafter, you may apply any of the preset Picture Styles available. However, PowerPoint packs quite a punch as far as picture edits are concerned -- you can even play with the borders that surround your pictures. In this tutorial, we will explore the Border options that allow you to add anything from a simple outline to a beautiful frame to make your pictures stand apart.
Learn how to add and edit Picture Borders in PowerPoint 2011.
May 9, 2012
Slidevana is a presentation toolkit which provides over 150 ready to use slide layouts including charts, diagrams, tables, and frameworks. Slidevana slide layouts use a clean, minimal design, and are available in dark and light color schemes which can be edited to meet your specific needs. You can also customize logos, graphics, and color palettes, or even add an entirely new layout. Slidevana is already available for Keynote for Mac, iPad and iPhone. In this tutorial we'll explore Slidevana for PowerPoint, that works on both Windows and Mac versions of the program.
Learn about Slidevana, a collection of slide layouts that can be used within PowerPoint.
May 9, 2012
PowerPoint 2010's default Animation Pane allows you to perform many tasks such as adding animation to any slide object, changing the animation event, and setting the speed of the animation, as required. Most of the time, that may be all you need -- but at times, you may want more minute control. You might want two animations to start at the same time, but you want one of them to start just two seconds before the other. In situations like these, you'll need to use the Advanced Timeline option. Unlike in PowerPoint 2007 and previous versions, you no longer need to change to the Advanced Timeline since that's the one that is active by default. However, you may have turned it off to enable the Basic Timeline -- read on to find out how you can make the Advanced Timeline visible or invisible by following these steps.
Learn how to make the Advanced Timeline for Animation visible/invisible within PowerPoint 2010.
May 8, 2012
Silhouettes are the topic for this week's editorial again -- we already looked at them last week, and this week we have more free silhouettes for you to download and use in your slides. What sets these silhouettes apart from the other silhouettes that you can get from stock photo sites is that these are all PowerPoint native graphics. This means you can select any of these silhouette graphics and use any of PowerPoint's fill, outline, and effect options to make the graphics look coordinated with the rest of your slides. Also let us explore more advantages of using silhouettes -- since these don't consume a large file size, the silhouettes can be animated easily, even if you use multiple animations happening at the same time.
Read more in the newsletter here.
May 8, 2012
PowerPoint's adjust picture options enable you to customize inserted pictures in your slides in many ways. Additionally, PowerPoint also provides you with a collection of preset Picture Styles, which can be directly applied to any selected picture. Picture Styles are somewhat similar to the Shape Styles since they take just a single click to provide the selected picture with a great look -- but, that's where the similarity ends. Because, the Picture Styles are not Theme specific. They just make the picture stylish by applying a border, changing the frame shape, or, by adding some 3-D effects.
Learn how to apply preset Picture Styles to your pictures in PowerPoint 2011.
May 7, 2012
These businesswoman silhouettes are ready to use within your PowerPoint presentation slides -- and have been provided in both black and white colors. Both variations are contained within two separate slides in one presentation that you can download. In addition, you can use PowerPoint's fills, lines, and effects to make these silhouettes appear coordinated with your slides. Copy the silhouettes graphics (clip arts) of your choice from the downloaded presentation, and paste them into your PowerPoint presentation slides. All these silhouette graphics can be used and customized with Shape Styles just like any other PowerPoint shape. You can also paste them into a Word document, an Excel worksheet, or any other program.
Download and use this presentation.
May 7, 2012
Let's say you have used a Fade animation for a slide object, and now you want to use a Wipe animation instead. It's been observed that most of the time, typical users just remove an animation and apply another one rather than using the change animation option. This may be because in PowerPoint 2010, you see no Change option within the interface, but it's still a very easy one-click operation to change an existing animation to another one, as you will learn in this tutorial.
Learn how to change animations for a given slide object in PowerPoint 2010.
May 4, 2012
These businessman silhouettes are ready to use within your PowerPoint presentation slides -- and have been provided in both black and white colors. Both variations are contained within two separate slides in one presentation that you can download. In addition, you can use PowerPoint's fills, lines, and effects to make these silhouettes appear coordinated with your slides. Copy the silhouettes graphics (clip arts) of your choice from the downloaded presentation, and paste them into your PowerPoint presentation slides. All these silhouette graphics can be used and customized with Shape Styles just like any other PowerPoint shape. You can also paste them into a Word document, an Excel worksheet, or any other program.
Download and use this presentation.
May 4, 2012
In PowerPoint, shapes and pictures are important parts of a slide -- both of them are mainly used to add visual elements to your presentations. However, there are some problem areas when you use a picture as a fill for a shape. Primarily, you'll find that PowerPoint insists on filling the entire picture to a shape -- in the process, the picture itself may appear distorted. Figure 1 depicts an example -- on the left is the actual picture we used to fill the shape on the right -- note that the man's face is squeezed and squashed when used as a picture fill. This completely destroys the look we wanted to attain. Fortunately, regaining the proportion is an easy option, as you will learn in this tutorial.
May 3, 2012
In our ongoing animation tutorial series, we showed you how you can add an animation to any slide object in PowerPoint. However, there's more to text animation than just adding animation. By default, when you animate a text placeholder or text box, all the text contained animates at one go unless your text content is within a bulleted or numbered list -- in that case, all text animates in sequence. Even then, the animation is sequenced to first level paragraphs (first level bullets) -- and any sub-bullet levels contained in your text placeholders or text boxes animates along with its parent level. In this tutorial, you will learn how you can access some specialized options for animating paragraphs and bulleted text sequentially by words, by letters, and by paragraph levels.
Explore the extra options available for text animations in PowerPoint 2010.
May 2, 2012
When Nancy sent me a copy of her book, Resonate that has been recreated for the iPad, I knew that what I was looking through on my iPad was more than just a presentation book. In fact, this was more than a book -– it was Nancy sharing her thoughts, her encounters, and her inspiration with everyone. The folks at Duarte did post about Resonate's new incarnation on their blog, and while I agree with them when they say "Resonate is the first interactive business book built using Apple’s iBooks Author ", I don't think that iBooks Author is the only nuance that sets this book apart.
May 2, 2012
You already learned how to play with all the different Crop options in PowerPoint 2011 -- all except the Mask to Shape option, which we explain in this tutorial. Mask to Shape can be immensely helpful if you want any picture to show contained within a shape. In other words, you start with a conventional, rectangular picture and end up a picture that's not contained within a non-rectangular shape.
Learn how to crop pictures using Mask to Shape option in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
May 1, 2012
Several issues ago, we discussed how silhouettes can be a great design idea. Let us explore some examples of why a silhouette can work better than typical pictures or even vector art. First of all, silhouettes are mainly neutral -- you cannot identify the race or nationality of a person based on their silhouettes. This makes silhouettes a very useable form of visuals for audiences that have a large international or racial representation. Silhouettes also do not call for attention, and can work as subtle graphics that complement and sync with the speaker or presenter rather than drawing attention. Imagine you use a picture of a very beautiful or an ugly person on your slide -- it is natural for the audience to look at that visual for a longer time at the expense of giving you attention!
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