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Page 108 of PowerPoint tutorials, presentation essentials, personality interviews, and PowerPoint news.
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Author: Geetesh Bajaj
Product/Version: PowerPoint
July 27, 2012
While working with Motion Paths, especially after drawing a Custom Motion Path to animate your slide object, you may feel that the path drawn is not very smooth. Or you may have used one of the preset Motion Paths to animate your slide object, and now you want to make some changes. Maybe you want to extend the path, or use smoother corners rather than the default pointed ones. Drawing with a mouse typically results in paths that look more segmented than curved!
Learn how you can edit Motion Paths using the Edit Points option in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
July 26, 2012
For the longest time, PowerPoint users have been asking Microsoft to provide lock and unlock options for slide objects so that some objects cannot be moved from their positions, resized, or even selected. We haven't been lucky yet, but looks like there's a third party vendor who's taken up this challenge to create an add-in that does all the locking and unlocking. Shape Locker is a PowerPoint add-in that allows you to lock several attributes so that slide objects are prevented from further modifications. These objects can be on slides, Master slides, and even Slide layouts.
Read the Indezine review of Shape Locker.
July 26, 2012
While working with Motion Paths, especially after drawing a Custom Motion Path to animate your slide object, you may feel that the path drawn is not very smooth. Or you may have used one of the preset Motion Paths to animate your slide object, and now you want to make some changes. Maybe you want to extend the path, or use smoother corners rather than the default pointed ones. Drawing with a mouse typically does result in paths that don't look too good!
Learn how to edit the motion paths with the help of Edit Points in PowerPoint 2010.
July 25, 2012
Now that Microsoft has released a publicly available customer preview of Office 2013, you can get your hands on this new version of Office (and PowerPoint) today, as we shall show you in the rest of this post.
July 25, 2012
Hong Nguyen is a software developer with 15 years of experience. He is currently based in Singapore. He started developing SlideGo as "hobby" software in 2009 due to his personal need to export PowerPoint animations to Flash.
SlideGo.com has now grown into a HTML5 slide builder and still continues to add more features daily. In this conversation, Hong discusses SlideGo.
July 25, 2012
Motion Path animations are movements that happen along a path. You can choose from several preset Motion Paths for simple animations -- these include lines, curves, stars, and several other paths. These paths may indicate an animation, but for all other practical reasons, they are essentially just ordinary lines (shapes) that have curves, points, etc. You can edit these Motion Paths in the same way as you can edit any other lines in PowerPoint. If you are familiar with the drawing tools in PowerPoint, or if you use a graphic illustration program like Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW, you know that paths can be either open or closed. A circle is a good example of a closed path, whereas a curve is an open path.
Learn about the open and closed Motion paths in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
July 24, 2012
Last week's most eventful happening was Microsoft announcing a public preview for Office 2013, the next version of Microsoft Office. Predictably, this means a new PowerPoint version. Expectations are very high for the upcoming PowerPoint 2013 -- and what you see in the public preview version is essentially what you will see in the final release. So for those of you who are expecting to send feedback to Microsoft based upon your opinion of PowerPoint 2013's public preview, be aware that no new features will be added based on your opinion at this time. A public preview is something that gets released to iron out bugs and make users aware of an upcoming version -- and nothing else!
If that sounded pessimistic, then it was not intended to. And that's because there is so much to like about PowerPoint 2013 -- in the next few weeks and months we will explore all nuances of PowerPoint 2013, and share them with you.
July 24, 2012
Once you add an audio track to your PowerPoint presentation, you can let the inserted audio span across all your slides from the first one to the last by selecting the Play across slides option. That's great if you need the same music playing on all your slides. But what if you want the music to play only across some successive slides? What if you want the music to play from slide 1 to 12, and let all slides thereafter play without any music? Or you may want to add another music clip for the next set of slides? Either way, it is possible to limit the number of slides that your music will play across.
Learn how to loop a sound clip across specific slides in PowerPoint 2010.
July 23, 2012
Joby Blume is Managing Consultant at BrightCarbon, a presentation agency operating from the UK and Singapore. Joby has been writing sales presentations for the last seven years, during which time he has helped clients to win billions of dollars of new business. BrightCarbon specializes in creating compelling and persuasive sales presentations and Visual Conversations®, training sales people to present effectively, and supporting clients with large pitches. BrightCarbon also delivers paid-for and free advanced PowerPoint training. In this interview, Joby discusses the need for PowerPoint training.
July 23, 2012
Now that you have learnt how easy it is to add motion paths using presets, and to draw your own custom motion paths, it is time to start getting more familiar with some tricks used with Motion Path animations. The simplest motion path trick is to reverse the direction of your motion path -- this option is very helpful if you want an object to animate using a motion path, and then animate the same object again from the end of the motion path back to the starting point.
Learn how to reverse a motion path's direction in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
July 21, 2012
Do you want a visual of businesspeople in a meeting environment? And do you want this visual to be neutral? Then you should explore these silhouettes -- when you are presenting to a multi-racial or an international audience, silhouettes are the best options to be used in the place of people's pictures. Silhouettes are essentially outlined graphics with fills and effects applied which makes them neutral. Here are some Business Meetings silhouettes ready to use within your PowerPoint slides. The sample PowerPoint presentation that you will download contains these silhouettes in both black and white colors, within two separate slides. We have also included few more variations with some pre applied fills, styles and effects to help you to start with. You can use PowerPoint’s fills, lines, and effects to make these Business Meetings silhouettes look coordinated with your slides.
Download and use these silhouettes in your presentation.
July 20, 2012
Sara Winge is VP of the O'Reilly Radar group. Since 1994, she's been crafting the O'Reilly story while in a variety of jobs in Communications. She's been involved in launching most of O'Reilly's new initiatives, and, with Tim O'Reilly, co-created Foo Camp in 2003. Her previous jobs, which include furniture refinishing, firefighting, and job counseling, prepared her for working at O'Reilly in non-obvious but crucial ways. In this conversation, Sara talks about Ignite, how it started, and how speakers can prepare to speak at an Ignite event.
Read this exclusive conversation about Ignite.
July 20, 2012
Do you want to add a video clip to your PowerPoint slide so that it continues to play across subsequent slides? This actually means that when you move from one slide to another, the video continues playing without any interruption. PowerPoint 2007, the version before PowerPoint 2010 provided you with the Play Across Slides option – but this has been removed in PowerPoint 2010 from within the interface -- however, we found a workaround to get back that option, as explained in this tutorial.
Learn how to play a video clip across slides in PowerPoint 2010.
July 19, 2012
Rick Altman is a presentation consultant based out of Pleasanton, CA. Rick has been hosting end-user conferences since 1989, and is well known as the host of the annual Presentation Summit conference. He has a strong sense of the needs of the presentation community. Rick has authored 15 books on presentations and graphics, including Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck. In this conversation, Rick discusses the tenth edition of his Presentation Summit conference.
July 19, 2012
Applying a Motion Path animation to any PowerPoint slide object is as simple as applying any other animation effect (Entrance, Emphasis, or Exit effects), especially if you choose a Motion Path animation from within the Basic or Complex categories within the Motion Paths drop down gallery. However, if none of the Motion Path animations in the Basic or Complex categories suit your needs, or if you find it difficult to edit them, you can always opt to draw your own Motion Path by choosing any of the four options available within the Custom category. In this tutorial, we'll show you the various Custom Motion Path animations available in PowerPoint 2011, and how you can use them to draw your own custom motion paths.
Learn how to draw a custom motion path in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
July 18, 2012
Do you want a random number generator for your PowerPoint slide? Do you want some numbers from a chosen sequence of numbers to pop up every time you click? Yes, you can do this in PowerPoint using some simple VBA code.
Steve Rindsberg of PowerPoint FAQ explains how.
July 18, 2012
Several times in my training sessions, I have been asked how one can create a flag in a PowerPoint slide? Of course, you can just use some clip art or, if you are good at Adobe Illustrator or some other similar graphic software, creating a flag is a piece of cake. However, the challenge is to how one can create a flag in PowerPoint – this is a very relevant question since most business users, who need stuff such as flags don’t have access to dedicated graphic programs.
Learn how to use default shapes in PowerPoint to draw a flag.
You May Also Like: The Brown Bag: A Lesson about Presentation Delivery and Perception | The Cognitive Load of PowerPoint: Interview with Richard E Mayer
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