The PowerPoint® Blog

Amber and I spent the week in Chicago managing the presentations for 130 Doctors. Internal medicine has been revolutionized by micro video camera technology - unfortunately the same cannot be said for standard video CoDecs and videos working smooth in every presentation. Happy to report that with very few exceptions our work pre-flighting (great term from my print designer days) resulted in seamless presentations.

- Troy @ TLC

Just another show, array of computers and nice view of the action from 'front of house' tech table.

- Troy @ TLC

Adding slides from one presentation into another and hoping for a button that will automatically format the slides the way needed is just not a feature in PowerPoint. But, the almost magical "Destination vs. Source Formatting" button does exist. For this tutorial we are going to add slides from the 'Blue' presentation to the 'Purple' presentation and keep the Blue slides Blue (ie. opposite of the last tutorial where the slides updated to the Purple template).

Here is our 'Blue' presentation:

And here is our 'Purple' presentation:

Select the slides from Presentation #1 (Blue) and copy. Then paste them into Presentation #2 (Purple). To paste in the new slides, right-click and in the pop-up menu in the ‘Paste Options’ sections select ‘KEEP SOURCE FORMATTING':

With the KEEP SOURCE FORMATTING option the template for the new slides keeps the template that was used in Presentation #1. So the Blue slides stay Blue.

Behind the scenes what happens is a new Master Slide set is added to the presentation. So if you look in the slide layouts (HOME >> SLIDES section >> LAYOUTS) there are two master slide sets to choose from (Purple and Blue).

NOTE: if you paste in more slides from the Blue presentation in a new location and select KEEP SOURCE FORMATTING another Blue master slide set will be added (which is not optimal).

- Troy @ TLC

Adding slides from one presentation into another and hoping for a button that will automatically format the slides the way needed is just not a feature in PowerPoint. But, the almost magical "Destination vs. Source Formatting" button does exist. For this tutorial we are going to add slides from the 'Blue' presentation to the 'Purple' presentation and make all of the slides the same, so they are all Purple.

Here is our 'Blue' presentation:

And here is our 'Purple' presentation:

Select the slides from Presentation #1 (Blue) and copy. The paste them into Presentation #2 (Purple). To paste in the new slides, right-click and in the pop-up menu in the ‘Paste Options’ sections select ‘Use Destination Theme’:

With the USE DESTINATION THEME option the template for the new slides is assigned to the template used on the slide in front of the insert point. So now all of the Blue slides are changed to the Purple template.

*Note: there is no "magic" button and with this example the text boxes, background, colors used, etc. were all setup correctly using the template formatting (which also means it is a real template). When updating to the new (Purple) template all of the master slide formatting carries over just fine. But there are lots of times when things are not based on template formatting and need to be manually updated (ie. no magic format button).

- Troy @ TLC

Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat are all common applications we use for presentation projects. Adobe has (finally) announced the time frame for CS6 to be released AND is offering the largest free upgrade they have ever done!

Have you run into the issue of during the slide show an animated bullet list of text has the text shadow visible and then the full text animates on top of the shadow? It is a scenario that started with PPT 2007. The good news is, it is not a bug in the program and it is easy to 'fix'.

Scenario:
You have shadow effects on your text and a great on-click animation.

But when you view as a slide show, the shadow of the text is not animating!

To Fix:
1. Select the text box.

2. Go to FORMAT >> SHAPE EFFECTS >> SHADOW and change the selection to NO SHADOW.

3. With the text box still selected, go to FORMAT >> TEXT EFFECTS >> SHADOW and choose the shadow style needed.

4. Now when you run as a slide show everything appears when animated!

Why:
PowerPoint has always had two types of shadows; Shape and Text shadows. In PPT 2003 there really was no visual differece between them (at the code level the two shadow types were different). Starting with PPT 2007 the difference between the two shadows types made a difference in how things are displayed. The non-animating text shadow is the most common way this shows up.

- Troy @ TLC

Thanks Tony R. for the link to this great presentation.

- Troy @ TLC

I just found out about this (thanks Paul!) and thought others might be interested.

CreativeLIVE is offering an online workshop taught by Laura Shoe who a photographer and instructor from Seattle. Lightroom is Adobe's incredible digital photography toolbox. The course description says it covers the fundamentals of Lightroom; how to import, organize and edit your photos and videos, create, copy and share and an overview what's new Lightroom 4.

Get the full details here.

- Troy @ TLC

I have been experimenting with "CloudOn" for the IPad which launched just a month ago. The company description "Use the CloudOn workspace on the iPad to access your files and manage them. Edit, review and present docs in Microsoft Office" is a good summary of the offering.

Here are a few screen captures of designing slides on my ipad:

- This is the real PPT 2010, so the same ribbon interface and options (some features are disabled).

- The smaller ipad screen size was a factor in editing slides.

- I really like the keyboard CloudOn uses with all of the Function, CTR, ALT and other keys.

Basically you are accessing a remote version of Microsoft Office 2010, just like you can connect to your computer through your ipad using LogMeIn or other remote access apps. Of course the service means you must be online to work in PPT, so WiFi is good or your monthly bandwidth may get a lot more use. It is the real PPT 2010 interface, which is not touch sized (I tap on the wrong icon a lot) and has no gesture control.

For me, it is a fun novelty that does prove more valuable for presenting than designing slides.

- Troy @ TLC

For many live meetings a speaker timer, a countdown clock presenters on stage see to know how much longer they have in their alotted time, is very valuable. There are speaker timer units that use proprietary control unit and display, software to run on a computer and display on a monitor (my favorite is 'SpeakerTimer Pro' by the company that developed the Playback Pro system - it has the "Timewarp" feature to smoothly adjust the timer to be what you need, not what a real clock would say) and I also have a countdown slide deck (120 slides set to auto advance every 60 seconds).

But having a full computer inline for such a simple task is overkill. Here is a recent show where I loaded up my countdown presentation into Keynote on the ipad, connected the ipad to the monitor and saved a lot of desk space (and lightened my tech case by not needing to pack a computer for the task).

- Troy @ TLC