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Page 103 of PowerPoint tutorials, presentation essentials, personality interviews, and PowerPoint news.
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Author: Geetesh Bajaj
Product/Version: PowerPoint
June 6, 2012
Arte Ranganathan owns the website Presentation-Process, along with her husband Ramgopal. Their mission is to help business presenters create more visual and creative presentations. The duo won the Presentation Horror Story Contest on SlideShare in 2010.
In this conversation, Arte discusses their Creative Diagram Contest.
Read this conversation about the Creative Diagram Contest.
June 6, 2012
Once you insert a video clip on your slide in PowerPoint 2010, you might find out that the clip is too dark or light in terms of appearance. This is similar to what you may see on your television, especially a new television where you have to make a few adjustments to get the picture just right. Similar corrections can be made in any of the video clips you insert within your PowerPoint slides. It's very important to understand that such adjustments may not only be necessary for the appearance of the video clips on your computer, but also for how they show when projected onto a screen or even on a connected TV. Projectors are typically not as bright as computer screens, and some adjustments may help. The other reason to make any video clip light or dark through corrections is so that it can compensate for problems with the original video clip.
Learn about the Correction adjustment options for videos in PowerPoint 2010.
June 5, 2012
We talked about philosophy in last week's issue of this newsletter -- and this week, let's discuss the improvements happening in presenting your PowerPoint content using a tablet, especially the iPad.
Apple's refusal to allow any sort of Flash to play on iOS devices, including the iPad has meant that none of the prevailing PowerPoint presenting technologies work on the iPad since most of these were created using Flash. This means that newer technologies need to be used to fill in the vacuum, and you can already see new updates and new products being announced.
June 5, 2012
Apart from selecting one of the twelve default slide Background Styles available in PowerPoint 2011, you can also change the default slide background to something else such as another solid color or gradient, a pattern or a texture, or, even a picture. In this tutorial, you will learn about these options, that can be accessed within the Format Background dialog box. All these options can be used to change the look of the slide background in PowerPoint.
Learn about different options available to format the slide background in PowerPoint 2011.
June 4, 2012
Cliff Atkinson is an acclaimed writer, popular keynote speaker, and an independent consultant to leading attorneys and Fortune 500 companies. He designed the presentations that helped persuade a jury to award a $253 million verdict to the plaintiff in the nation's first Vioxx trial in 2005, which Fortune magazine called "frighteningly powerful." Cliff's bestselling book Beyond Bullet Points (now in its 3rd edition) was named a Best Book of 2007 by the editors of Amazon.com, and it expands on a communications approach he has taught at many of the country's top law firms, government agencies, business schools and corporations. In this interview, Cliff discusses the Beyond Bullet Points 101 Online Course, a natural evolution to the book.
Read this conversation with Cliff Atkinson.
June 4, 2012
When you insert a video in your presentation, you might see that the placed video clip displays a blank or black screen on the slide, as shown in Figure 1 below. Until the clip actually starts playing in slide show view, your users will see this black rectangle, which doesn't look professional at all. With PowerPoint 2010's new Poster Frame feature, you can easily overcome this limitation, and change the black rectangle to an image by selecting a frame from the video itself, or even a picture from a different source. Also, the Poster Frame feature presents a good option for displaying a company logo or a picture of a speaker in the video. The Poster Frame that you add or insert to a video is a frame that appears first when you view the containing slide in a slide show.
Learn how to add a Poster Frame for your video clips in PowerPoint 2010.
June 1, 2012
Jay Wilder is director of product marketing at Brainshark, Inc. Brainshark's cloud-based software lets users create online and mobile video presentations -- using simple business tools like PowerPoint and the telephone -- and then share and track their content. Thousands of companies use Brainshark to improve the reach and results of their business communications, while also dramatically reducing costs. In this conversation, Jay discusses new features in Brainshark's free SlideShark app, which enables users to view and share PowerPoint presentations on the iPad.
June 1, 2012
Launch PowerPoint to create a new presentation, and you may typically see a single slide with a white background. Alternatively, if you open any of your existing presentations, the background of your slides may be in a different color depending upon the Theme that the presentation is based upon. You can always change this slide background to a picture, a solid color, a pattern, or even a gradient. However, considering all those options, explore the twelve background styles that PowerPoint offers for every presentation by default. These styles are all coordinated and also designed to work well as a set of complementary backgrounds.
Learn about different slide background styles available in PowerPoint 2011.
May 31, 2012
A Video Action in PowerPoint is something that causes an event for any inserted movie clip -- these are simple events such as Play, Pause, Resume, and Stop. Although PowerPoint classifies Movie Actions as an animation type, these are not strictly animations. However, since Movie Actions can be accessed through the Add Animation gallery, we have included this tutorial in our Animations section. Once you add these Media Actions to your video clips, PowerPoint will allow you to make these Actions interact with other animations, including Triggers.
Learn how you can create Media Actions for video clips in PowerPoint 2010.
May 30, 2012
When you are presenting to international audiences, using a picture that distinctly shows a human being of one race may not work too well. People silhouettes are the best options for such situations since they keep the entire look neutral. Here are some businessman silhouettes that are ready to use within your PowerPoint presentation slides. Within the downloaded presentation, you will see these silhouettes on two separate slides, in two color variations: black and white. You can edit these clip art silhouettes further as needed, using PowerPoint’s fills, lines, and effects.
Download and use this presentation.
May 30, 2012
Whenever a new shape is inserted on a slide in PowerPoint 2011 (or in any previous version), you will find that by default it is filled with a gradient fill, has an outline, and a shadow applied (or something else, depending upon the Theme your presentation is based on). For example, in a new blank presentation that we created, any new shape inserted is by default filled with a gradient fill, and has a thin dark blue outline. It also has a shadow. These default shape attributes can be changed very easily. But do remember that these changes are only limited to the presentation you are working on. If the presentation is not saved, you'll lose the changes.
Learn how to change the default shape attributes for a presentation in PowerPoint 2011.
May 29, 2012
How do events unfold in our lives? That's the larger picture, and this large picture contains several smaller pictures scattered all over - one of these smaller pictures poses a similar question -- about how do our audiences respond to our presentations? And although the larger and the smaller pictures may appear different in size, the questions they pose are essentially so similar!
Audiences respond to us as we respond to them -- and that's exactly how life behaves -- all events unfold exactly as we choose to look at them. In between all these nuances of life, we all encounter goof-ups, mistakes, and wonder if we could have presented better at last week's event? The answer to all these questions is again the same -- we just need to let go, and look forward to the next event, and the audience we will present to. The presenter and the audience is part of a single ecosystem -- and they all work to the success of any presentation. Let us strive to be part of this ecosystem and do our best, and let the audience contribute to this effort.
May 29, 2012
We have already explored how you can add an audio clip within a PowerPoint slide. Once you place an audio clip, you can associate this clip with several Media actions such as Play, Pause, Resume, and Stop. And although Media actions work the same way for both audio and video clips, there are some subtle differences. Due to these differences, we will explore both of them separately. In this tutorial, we will explore Media Actions for Audio in PowerPoint 2010 -- and thereafter we will explore the same options for video clips in a subsequent tutorial. Once you add these Media Actions to your audio clips, PowerPoint will allow you to make these Actions interact with other animations, including Triggers. Although Media Actions are not strictly animations, PowerPoint does place them within the Animation tab of the Ribbon.
Learn how you can create Media Actions for audio clips in PowerPoint 2010.
May 28, 2012
One of the early lessons we all learn in school is how to make an outline; how to create that waterfall of Roman numerals, capital letters, Arabic numerals, and lower case letters that cascade down to the bottom of the page, if not dozens of pages of interminable term papers. Thus we are forever programmed to arrange our ideas in a hierarchical order—in sharp contrast to what our brains do naturally: generate ideas in random order. To demonstrate: as I sit writing this blog, I glance at a ball point pen on my desk. The logo on the pen reminds me that I got it at as souvenir at a business conference. I remember that I met a man at the conference who told me about a book on presidential politics. This reminds me that I had been planning another blog on the same subject, and so I open a file with the notes on that subject and…. you see where this is going. I’m sure that if you were to track your own thought patterns, you would discover the same winding, random path. That’s the way every human mind works: unstructured.
Read this post by Jerry Weissman.
May 28, 2012
You can do any of the typical positioning tasks in PowerPoint for your pictures such as resizing, aligning, and grouping. In addition, you can also reorder the pictures on your slide. In fact, you can also reorder a bunch of pictures and other slide objects such as shapes quite easily using the various ordering options available within the program.
Learn how to reorder pictures and other slide objects in PowerPoint 2011.
May 25, 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 silhouette 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 25, 2012
PowerPoint's animation options allow users to create a plethora of movement effects, all the way from the amazing to the dizzying. However, most of these animation effects have events associated with them -- the three main events are On Click, With Previous, and After Previous. When you use the On Click animation event, PowerPoint offers an extra option so that your animated objects swings into movement when you click an entirely different object on your slide -- this extra option is called a Trigger animation -- you cause a click on one object to trigger an animation of another slide object. Also, you can you Trigger animations to cause media events as well, such as playing a sound or video clip. As mentioned earlier, we would like to paraphrase that Trigger animations work only with an On Click animation event applied to the animated object.
You May Also Like: How to Make an Artistic PowerPoint Background: Guest Post by Bruce Gabrielle | The Brown Bag: A Lesson about Presentation Delivery and Perception
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