Page 113 of PowerPoint tutorials, presentation essentials, personality interviews, and PowerPoint news.
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Product/Version: PowerPoint
September 14, 2012
Has this ever happened to you: you have been working on a presentation for hours and suddenly PowerPoint or even the computer crashes? This may happen due to a power outage, instability of the system, or even PowerPoint itself may crash. You realize that you had not saved the presentation for a long time and you may have lost most of your work! Although you can keep your programs updated, system secure, and even save your file often, these steps provide no guarantee that you will never see a crash again and lose all or some of your work. Fortunately, you can salvage most of your work if PowerPoint closes abnormally by enabling AutoRecover and AutoSave options. These options can be life savers as they help you prevent losing your precious work in two ways.
Learn how to enable AutoRecover and AutoSave options in PowerPoint 2010.
September 13, 2012
Ellen Finkelstein is a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP and author of several PowerPoint, Flash, and AutoCAD books -- she just announced the third series of her Outstanding Presentations Workshop, a webinar series that allows everyone to learn from renowned presentation experts. In this conversation, Ellen talks more about this new webinar series.
September 13, 2012
Each Theme contains several unique facets such as Theme Fonts, Theme Colors, and Theme Effects that set each Theme apart from other Themes. Note that all the slides differ in terms of colors, fonts, and effects applied. Yet the text content is still the same. When a different Theme is applied to your PowerPoint presentation, the fonts, colors, and effects applied to your slides change. Unless you override this on a per slide basis, these changes show up in all slides in the presentation. The resulting slides all look consistent.
Explore how you can change the active Theme Fonts set in PowerPoint 2008.
September 12, 2012
Jason Abraham is the founder of SlideCrafters, a company that he created with a mission to provide everyday presenters with tools to quickly create professional quality slide decks. Jason has authored reports and presentations for global organizations as a Management Consultant. Upon leaving consulting, Jason felt the need to share the same tools and enablers to help the average presenter create compelling stories with visual content. In this conversation, Jason discusses his company, SlideCrafters and shares some thoughts on creating better slides.
September 12, 2012
Imagine this scenario: you have created a presentation within PowerPoint 2010 and are ready to share it, but you are still unsure that your client with an earlier version of PowerPoint will be able to view and edit the presentation with the exact options that you have available. And if you save this presentation as a file compatible with an earlier version of PowerPoint, there are chances that you could lose the characteristics that were not available in previous version. Or worse, your editable content could just change to flat, non-editable pictures!
Learn how to check compatibility for your presentation in PowerPoint 2010.
September 11, 2012
In this issue of the newsletter, we start by exploring the new SlideShark app update that lets you access PowerPoint slides on the iPhone. There's an awesome post by Claudyne Wilder on how you should dress for your presentation. And you get more concept slides to download and use in your presentations: a five segment circle as well as a fourth series of people chain silhouettes. We also have tutorials on creating custom Theme Fonts using XML, and how you can inspect documents in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows. And an entire series on slide transitions in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
September 11, 2012
Dynamic Content transitions are new transitions effects introduced in PowerPoint 2011 on the Mac side -- they already existed within PowerPoint 2010 for Windows. When a Dynamic Content transition is applied to your slide, it will work on the entire slide content at a time, but not on the slide background. This makes the transition occur on your content that moves independently on and off the screen. PowerPoint 2011 provides seven effects for Dynamic Content transitions -- experiment with these effects for direction and timing to create some great looking presentations.
Learn about Dynamic Content Transitions in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
September 10, 2012
In 2007, Ryan Lizza, the Washington correspondent for New Yorker magazine, wrote a comprehensive profile of Barack Obama when he was an up and coming Illinois state legislator, called "Can Barack Obama Catch Hillary Clinton?" In 2008, Barack Obama caught Hillary Clinton and kept running—all the way to the Oval Office. In the August 6, 2012 issue of The New Yorker, Mr. Lizza wrote a comprehensive profile of up and coming Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan. Five days later, on August 11, 2012, Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for president, announced that Mr. Ryan was his choice for his vice-presidential candidate.
Yes, this article is about politics – but it is also about presenting!
Read more in this post by Jerry Weissman.
September 10, 2012
There's a new understanding that has evolved over the past few years about making all sorts of computer generated content accessible to people with disabilities. PowerPoint is no stranger to this accessibility concept, and has many options up its sleeve that help your slides be more relevant to those with accessibility impairments. Just like how PowerPoint's spell checker alerts you to potential spelling errors, the built-in Accessibility Checker highlights potential accessibility issues in your presentation so that you can fix these potential problems and make your content accessible to everyone. Note that fixing some issues might require that you change, reformat or otherwise update your content. In addition, the Accessibility Checker also lets you know about application features that you can use to make your content more accessible.
Learn how to check accessibility for your presentation in PowerPoint 2010.
September 8, 2012
Using pictures in your slides does not mean that you are limited to using photographs from stock photo houses. You can certainly use your own camera -- either a digital camera or even the camera built within your phone to source your own pictures. You can also look at some unconventional sources, such as a scanner. A scanner? Yes, that's a device that several of us have not used for many years now -- but if you have one of these devices attached to your computer, do consider it as a source of visual content.
Explore how a scanner can be put to good use to add interest to your slides.
September 7, 2012
This conceptual slide contains a circle with five segments you can use to illustrate any concept or entity comprising five components / elements. Try and use pictures that complement each other - or even strongly contrast with each other. The resulting slide should have a compelling impact on your audience - and should sync with the message of your presentation. The sample presentation that you download comprises five segment circles contained within two separate slides - one with a picture fill, and the other with just a solid color fill. Copy these slides to your PowerPoint presentation and change the fills and effects of individual segments as well as the thin donut shaped circle around the segment, using PowerPoint's fills, lines, and effects.
Download and use this concept slide in your presentation.
September 7, 2012
Once you apply slide transitions, you can tweak the actual transition effect aplenty. We have already explored how you can edit the duration and timing of any transition effect, and even add a transition sound that will play transition takes place. In addition, you can also play with some more options providing more control over the transition effect applied to the slide -- these are all placed in a single broad category called Effect Options. These Effect Options, as the very name indicates are related to the individual transition effects, and options may differ for each effect. Additionally, some transition effects such as Flash, Dissolve, and Honeycomb may be devoid of any Effect Options altogether.
Explore Effect Options for Slide Transitions in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
September 6, 2012
When you create a presentation that you are going to deliver yourself, it rarely matters if you have any content that is invisible to your audience -- such invisible content may include your slide notes, comments, document properties -- none of these are visible to your audience and you are free to add any information in these areas that will enable you to be better prepared to deliver your slides. However, if you need to share the same PowerPoint presentation with colleagues, or even publish it online, all unwritten rules about the invisible information change. Most users don't even think twice about all this information simply because of the lack of awareness -- but they should because most of this content may include hidden data or personal information that you may not be permitted to share by your company -- or even want to share.
Learn how to use PowerPoint 2010’s Inspect Document feature.
September 5, 2012
Andy Zimmerman is chief marketing officer for Brainshark, Inc. Brainshark's cloud-based software lets users create online and mobile video presentations -- using simple business tools like PowerPoint and the phone or computer microphone -- and share and track their content. Thousands of companies use Brainshark to improve the reach and results of their business communications, while dramatically reducing costs. In this conversation, Andy discusses the SlideShark iPad app Brainshark debuted last fall -- and today's launch of SlideShark for the iPhone.
September 5, 2012
In this series of tutorials on Slide Transition in PowerPoint 2011, you have already learned how to add Slide Transitions to your slides, and how you change the Transition Duration (speed). In this tutorial we'll show you how to change Transition Time. Remember that Transition Duration and Transition Time are not the same. Transition Time is the actual time for which the slide stays on the screen during a slide show before moving on to the next slide. Transition Duration is the amount of time taken to move between slides. Learn how to set the Slide Transition Time in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
Learn how to set the Slide Transition Time in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
September 4, 2012
In this issue of the newsletter, we explore the PowerPoint 2013 interface, and bring you a conversation with Art Holden of PresenterMedia about the use of their add-in to bring in visual content to your slides. We also bring you a compilation of keyboard shortcuts for PowerPoint 2011 for Mac. And you get more concept slides to download and use in your presentations: a two segment circle as well as a third series of people chain silhouettes. We also have tutorials on changing text case, sharing Theme Fonts, and media actions in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows, and the use of animations and transitions in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
September 4, 2012
PowerPoint 2007, 2010, and 2013 include several built-in Theme Fonts sets. Additionally, you can also create custom Theme Fonts sets from within PowerPoint -- however this provides limited abilities because you can only change the fonts used for the Latin script. If your organization uses multiple scripts, or if you want to explore extra options available within the Theme Fonts specifications, you can easily edit or create your own custom Theme Fonts by editing the actual files. Yes, all Theme Fonts sets comprise a few lines of code within an Open XML file. You can open any Theme Fonts file with the .XML extension, and then edit them within a text editor such as Notepad. Save this file with a new name in a designated folder and you actually end up creating your own custom Theme Fonts set!
Learn how to create custom Theme Fonts using XML in Windows.
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