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Page 131 of PowerPoint tutorials, presentation essentials, personality interviews, and PowerPoint news.
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Author: Geetesh Bajaj
Product/Version: PowerPoint
March 16, 2013
Shapes that look scribbled or doodled attract more attention from audiences these days - surely, audiences are so bored looking at all those straight lines that characterize perfect, geometrical shapes! Just like fashions change, so do contemporary tastes in slide design. You can easily achieve this hand drawn look with our Organic Shapes series. Diamonds are just one of the shapes that we doodled on paper - and then reproduced as native PowerPoint shapes for you to use. Including diamonds, our Organic Shapes collection contains 8 shape types - each type has 10 variants - so you end up with 80 hand-drawn shape options! These shapes will help break the monotony of text heavy slides, and assist you in explaining difficult concepts better to your audiences. Using these organic shapes also convinces your audiences that you care enough about them to make the slides look appealing and comprehensible. What's more, these shapes are also so much fun to use!
Buy and download these slides now.
March 15, 2013
These Seven Petals Circle graphics are part of our Petal Circles series that add stylized tips to your circle shapes. These two tip styles: Rounded and Pointed make your circles look different from conventional segmented circle graphics. They also break the monotony of text heavy slides, and help you explain concepts better to your audiences. Using these circle shapes also convinces your audiences that you care enough about them to make the slides look appealing and comprehensible. What's more, these shapes are also so much fun to use!
Buy and download these slides now.
March 15, 2013
Gradient fills are typically blended fills between two or more colors that graduate from one color to another. Text filled with a gradient can look great or gaudy depending upon the type of gradient you use for your text. There are some more guidelines that will help you create great looking gradient fills for your text: Gradient fills look great as text fills only when your text is fairly large sized. Also, using too many colors in the gradient fill may make your text distracting. Try to use the gradient colors which contrast well with the slide background. Also use gradient colors that are not too different so that you achieve a subtle merge of colors.
Learn how to add a gradient fill to selected text in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
March 14, 2013
Peter Watts helps sales people around the world to take to the stage with confidence, and with presentation content that makes the sale by directly addressing the needs of the audience. His weekly blog of ideas for presenters can be found at The Presenters' Blog. In this conversation, Peter discusses how slides, presenters, and audiences sync to each other.
March 14, 2013
When you insert an audio clip on your slide, PowerPoint represents the clip by a sound icon. You can change the sound icon to any other picture you want -- and you can also change the appearance of the sound icon or the other picture using options found in the Format tab, as explained in this tutorial.
Explore the Format tab for audio clips in PowerPoint 2010.
March 13, 2013
Sunil Chandna is the CEO of Stellar Information Systems Ltd. He heads the Sales and Marketing operations for Stellar, a company involved with data recovery software solutions and services business since 1993. Stellar develops data recovery software across different categories, such as hard disk recovery, database recovery, email recovery, password recovery, and Microsoft Office file recovery. In this conversation, Sunil discusses Stellar's Phoenix PowerPoint Repair product.
March 13, 2013
Text in PowerPoint is usually either black or white. Sometimes, it may sport another color depending upon the Theme applied to the presentation. While these defaults work very well most of the time, there may be instances when you want the text to convey a mood or express more than the words it contains. Yes, you can apply a WordArt Style to your text but even that option uses presets that you choose from -- and those same presets are available to anyone who uses PowerPoint! To stand apart, you can use PowerPoint's Text Fill options that provides you with plenty of choices that you customize -- these text fill options include solid colors, gradients, textures, and also pictures.
Learn about various fill options for text in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
March 12, 2013
In this issue, we showcase Star shapes from our Organic Shapes series. Carmen Taran of Rexi Media discusses how much of any given presentation the audience recollects -- she does have some counterintuitive findings! Claudyne Wilder delves into an important topic -- about properly answering questions from your audience. PowerPoint 2013 users should read our coverage on the new Resume Reading feature that lets you edit your presentation from the slide you edited last! We also have tutorials that show you how to trim audio in PowerPoint 2010, and on working with bullets and indents in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac. Finally, learn how you can tame notifications in Windows 8.
Read all this and more in Indezine News.
March 12, 2013
When you insert an audio clip into a PowerPoint slide, you can control its volume, set it to play looped, or even hide the audio icon. These are some of the advanced options available for any inserted audio clip in PowerPoint. Remember that these advanced options only exist so that you can use them when they are required, rather than using them just because they exist! Let us now explore all these options.
Explore the advanced audio options in PowerPoint 2010 for looping, playing, rewinding, etc.
March 11, 2013
In PowerPoint, WordArt is a very powerful tool that can make the text in your presentation look awesome or out-of-place, depending upon how you have used it. Before we proceed further, you must know that WordArt has nothing to do with Microsoft Word and is a totally independent feature in PowerPoint. Word Art is a collection of text styles that plays with text in a way similar to how PowerPoint's Shape Styles play with shapes. WordArt Styles, also known as Quick Styles, are a collection of some prebuilt text styles which you can instantly apply to your text. These WordArt Styles are all Theme-specific, so if the presentation's Theme is changed, any WordArt applied also reflects the changes accordingly. Follow these steps to learn how to apply Quick Styles to selected text.
Learn how to apply WordArt Styles in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
March 9, 2013
Stars are often associated with skies, or as ornaments hanging from a festive tree. Additionally, most stars we doodle with a pen or a marker tend to have five points. And of course there's something about hand drawn stars - they look warm, independent, and different -- just like these organic star shapes. Stars are just one of the 8 shape types we have included in this Organic Shapes collection - and each of these 8 shape types have 10 variants each - so you end up with 80 hand-drawn shape options! These shapes will help break the monotony of text heavy slides, and assist you in explaining difficult concepts better to your audiences. Using these organic shapes also convinces your audiences that you care enough about them to make the slides look appealing and comprehensible. What's more, these shapes are also so much fun to use!
Buy and download these slides now.
March 8, 2013
What happens to presenters who are nervous when it's time for questions? Often the presenter is simply too nervous to listen to the query, and just starts talking without providing a specific response. Or the presenter may not address the question at all, instead speaking about something else that is a "hot topic" and defending a particular position. Now the presenter is really in trouble: the questioner did not get an answer and a topic has been brought up that many people were hoping would not have to be discussed. How do you stop this behavior?
March 8, 2013
Windows 8 introduces a different type of notification compared to what you saw in previous versions of Windows -- you see a small rectangle pop up with a message. These messages may be from different applications you have installed, and you can set those permissions individually. However, all notifications use the same appearance style. While these notifications may be helpful in most scenarios, they can be irritating and even embarrassing when showing your PowerPoint slides to an audience. There is no way PowerPoint can automatically disable them while in slide show view. Fortunately, there is a way to disable them temporarily -- and you should remember to do so each time you need to show a presentation!
Learn how to turn off the notification in Windows 8.
March 7, 2013
To make your text look consistent and clear, indentation is a must -- especially if your text paragraphs comprise multiple bulleted levels. While the easiest way to play with indents is via the Indent Markers visible on the Ruler, this method does not let you precisely position the indentation since you just drag and pull the Indent Markers rather than setting them up via an exact numerical value. Fortunately, you can also set indentation using set numerical values -- for this you need to access the Format Text dialog.
Learn how to set text indentation using the numerical values in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
March 6, 2013
I have recently completed a research study on what makes PowerPoint presentations memorable. 1,540 people participated in the study and after 48 hours, they remembered an average of 4 slides out of 20 slides they viewed. This finding is perhaps expected: unless there is some repetition and enforcement, memory fades quickly. There were however a few observations that I found surprising and almost counter-intuitive to what we've been taught as communicators. So here are the surprises, along with some principles to consider before you design your next PowerPoint presentation.
March 6, 2013
Once you insert an audio clip into your presentation, you may find that it is too long, or there may be parts in the clip that you don't want the audiences to hear. Or maybe you just need a small bit to play -- like the sound of that trumpet blowing! Although you can scrub the clip using the Player Controls bar to ascertain where you want the clip to begin and end, that option may become monotonous and inaccurate -- and it also looks very unprofessional if you try scrubbing an audio clip right in front of your audience. Fortunately, PowerPoint's trim audio options can make this easy for you -- follow these steps to explore how you can trim an audio clip right inside PowerPoint 2010.
Learn how to trim audio clips in PowerPoint 2010.
You May Also Like: Learn PowerPoint 2010 for Windows: Compress Pictures | Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Picture Fill for Text
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