Blog2021-05-06T12:54:43-07:00

Mixkit – FREE and Professional Videos for Your Next Presentation

Mikkit a site by Envato has video footage that is free to download. No account or other log in is required, just search and download.

We found the collection is fairly small. Categories range from abstract and animation to transport and lifestyle.

All content is under the MixKit license. Our take on the licensing is it permits you to download, copy, modify, distribute, publicly perform and broadcast the Items. Rights are non-exclusive, worldwide, sub-licensable and attribution is not required (complete user terms are here).

Video files are: 1920×1080, .mp4 file format. 

[KGVID]https://thepowerpointblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/unnamed-file.mp4[/KGVID]

Troy @ TLC

By |July 10th, 2019|Software/Add-Ins|

The Presentation Summit is This October!

This October is the best opportunity for presentation experts to meet with Program Managers from Microsoft, be with the largest gathering of The Presentation Guild members, hear from leading presentation design and talk experts – and give me the opportunity to meet you!

Both Lori and Troy of TLC Creative Services will be presenting at the San Antonio for the 2019 Presentation Summit. I will also be recording several episodes of The Presentation Podcast throughout the week.

Presentation Summit website.

Troy @ TLC

By |July 8th, 2019|Resource/Misc|

How Long Will It Take to Say That?

When developing a presentation, factoring in the talk time is essential. Many of our presentation design projects are based on a talk script. We will run the script through an app that gives us an estimate of how long it will take for that amount of text to be spoken.

One free online tool for this is “Words to Time“. It has some great features to get a better talk time estimate;  number of words and reading speed.

It is very fast and easy to convert words to an estimated time. They offer a simple conversion chart for quick reference as well.

As an example, we converted Abraham Lincoln’ Getty Berg Address.

Lincoln’s speech was a small 267 words in total. Using the average reading speed (approx. 130 WMP) Words to Time estimated Lincoln’s speech to be about 2 minutes. According to the history, this is completely accurate! (Source: https://www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/civil/jb_civil_gettysbg_1.html)

Troy @ TLC

 

By |July 4th, 2019|Software/Add-Ins|

The Presentation Podcast Episode 81 – Grids, Guides and Gutters

A new episode of The Presentation Podcast with Troy, Nolan, and Sandy is available today! Episode, 81  – Grids, Guides and Gutters.  Listen in on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify and Soundcloud – just search for “The Presentation Podcast” – or go direct to the episode page here: https://thepresentationpodcast.com/podcast/81

By |July 2nd, 2019|Resource/Misc|

Welcome to July!

We all have our own jumble of “resources” we use for presentation design; customize PowerPoint and Keynote ribbon and QAT, favorite websites for images – video – ideas, apps for editing video – creating wordclouds – picking colors from the screen. This month the overall them is “Web Resources”. We (myself and the TLC Creative design team) are pointing out helpful websites we have found that help with design.

Troy @ TLC

By |July 1st, 2019|Personal|

Canva Presentation Animation Explained

Canva adds notices that if the account is upgraded to a “Pro” account, animation features are added. But the animation is not what you expect. Yes, the content on each slide has entrance effects applied. No, you cannot control the animation effects in any granularity. 

When logged in to your Canva account and have a presentation open, in the top right of the editable deck, there is a drop down button with ANIMATION as an option.

There are seven animation options; Fade, Pan, Block, Rise, Breathe, Slide, Instant. The critical thing to understand is the animation style chosen applies to EVERY object on EVERY slide. There is no granular control over what objects animate (everything does) and no selecting different animation styles, or no animation, for specific slides. There is also no customization of the animation duration/speed or ability to add on-click animations to elements on a slide. 

The best way I can describe Canva’s presentation animation is it is a combination transition effect that applies an auto entrance to all elements on a slide.

The other critical item to understand about Canva’s presentation animation is an animated presentation is only available when exported as a .mp4 (or .gif). If an edit is made to the presentation, it needs to be exported again to add the animation.

In exporting our sample presentation to view the various animation styling we found a bug that altered the content of our bar chart (if this was PowerPoint I would submit a bug report to the Dev Team). The axis in the presentation itself looks correct but when exported as an mp4 the X axis label text becomes stacked (leaving the data to be interpreted as wrong).

Here is the demo presentation used for testing animation:

FADE Animation

[KGVID]https://thepowerpointblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/unnamed-file-2.mp4[/KGVID]

BLOCK Animation

[KGVID]https://thepowerpointblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/unnamed-file.mp4[/KGVID]

RISE Animation

[KGVID]https://thepowerpointblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/unnamed-file-3.mp4[/KGVID]

Troy @ TLC

 

 

By |June 28th, 2019|Software/Add-Ins|

Canva Presentations by the TLC Creative Design Team

Today I am posting Canva presentations developed by several of the TLC Creative design team, along with their likes and dislikes of working with Canva. The key takeaway is Canva is a capable presentation creation platform and presentation design is not so much about the application used, but how visual design is applied to the content. The below presentations are all unique in visual styling despite everyone working from the same content outline. Reading through the likes & dislikes, the focus is on design limitations Canva currently has (compared to PowerPoint, which has 20 years of refining the application), which require more design time to manually format content to create the desired effect.

Presentations developed by the TLC Creative design team, all entirely in Canva Presentation:

Amber: 

Christie:

Jake: 

Sara:

The Good and Bad the TLC Creative design team noted while working on this project:

The Good:

1. Nice selection of ready-made templates

2. Good library of assets, making it easy to drag and drop for your presentation with a lot of free options

3. Web-based, can access designs from any web browser

4. User friendly for first-time use with an intuitive interface

5. Translates to a website seamlessly

6. Can share your slides as a template

7. Great, preset text styling options

8. Exports nearly perfectly to PowerPoint (no animations, poor backend Master Slide & Layouts, but slide level is very good)

9. Animation tool animates all elements on slide with one click (easy to use, nice visual effect, good for non-designers. Beyond the simple 1-click setup animation customization is a negative – not an option)

10. Free version is good enough to use, enough features to not have to go to premium

 

The Bad:

1. If there is no internet you can’t access and no offline app version

2. No table formatting options

3. Cannot animate individual elements

4. Cannot copy and paste elements from slide to slide in same position

5. The line width can’t be manually set 

6. No color picker/eye dropper tool

7. Template does not control font of added text boxes. Every new text box uses the Canva default font

8. Cannot change multiple text box font sizes or font color in one action, have to do each text box separately

9. Cannot have more than 1 font size per text box

10. Limited object grouping

11. No quick ribbon for tools

12. Cannot customize chart styling or separate actions for axis’s (chart styling and options are very limited!)

13. Cannot add text inside shape, must stack separate text box on top of a shape (ugh!)

14. Adding a new page, or changing a layout (which has problems too), does not open to that template, leaving the user to hunt through the template options to find the template (tip: remember the categorie and name of the template selected!)

15. Cannot customize animation per slide, or animation on a slide

16. Master layout place holders are skewed

17. Minimal set of formatting tools

18. Presentation features seem geared more to image/visual heavy presentations rather than data/copy oriented ones

19. Even with premium not all assets are included

20. No image/asset search filter to show just the images included with the plan (do not want to search through 1,000’s of pay images)

 

Troy @ TLC

By |June 26th, 2019|Software/Add-Ins|
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