Monthly Archives: May 2025

New Podcast Episode Available! “CreativePro Week: Where Design Enthusiasts Unite to Innovate and Inspire! With David Blatner & Chris Converse”

A new episode of The Presentation Podcast is out – listen to it now!

In this episode of The Presentation Podcast, hosts Troy Chollar, Sandy Johnson, and Nolan Haims – along with guests David Blatner of CreativePro, and freelance designer Chris Converse – talk about design. They talk about the ever-changing landscape of design tools, as well as the importance of community and collaboration during the design process. It turns into a lively discussion about the evolving capabilities of PowerPoint, and how it’s still a serious contender in the design world! Listen on your favorite podcast app, or at The Presentation Podcast site here.

By |2025-05-05T13:13:43-07:00May 7th, 2025|Resource/Misc|

Presentation Co-Authoring with Teams, umm, SharePoint – it is confusing, but works great!

Microsoft Teams has become a core element of the TLC Creative Services design studio. As example, this blog post was a collaboration doc in our Social Media Team for me (Troy) to write, a few of our design team to access and prep the images outlined and finally accessed by our Social Media manger to transfer all to this blog post. No emailing files. No syncing files to a server and being uncertain if you have the latest version. We use Teams chat to ask each other questions, connect on Teams calls (sometimes with a webcam on, but more often with a screen share), and access project work files and fill in our timesheets.

Focusing on files stored on Teams, the important thing to know if Microsoft Teams is SharePoint – or at least a new interface for SharePoint. Or maybe a better way to say that is, SharePoint files are now accessed through Teams.

This is a good thing because Microsoft has spent years building SharePoint with features like, security, file history, and collaboration. And the collaboration feature is what we cannot function without (collaboration meaning multiple people can access the exact same file, and edit it simultaneously).

Here is a common workflow for our design team at TLC Creative

  • The project is added to Teams as a new Channel within our “Projects” Team (the concept of Teams vs. Channels is one of the more difficult things to understand and work with!).
  • The presentation(s) is then copied to the Teams folder (as noted earlier, this is really putting the presentation on SharePoint, but without having to deal with SharePoint)
  • The design team working on the presentation open the presentation from Teams – and this is important! Open the presentation in DESKTOP PowerPoint. In Teams click the 3-dot menu next to the file name > Open > Open in Desktop.
  • A presentation can seamlessly have 1-2-5+ people reviewing, editing or presenting.
  • Note: Teams is easy to setup and have people within the same company access files. It gets more temperamental when adding external people, or you being the external person being added to another company’s Microsoft Team (more about our process and some tips in an upcoming post).

How do you know if a presentation is on your local hard drive or on Microsoft Teams?

  • Look at the file name in PowerPoint
  • Local files literally tell you they are local. After the file name is “Saved to this PC”
  • There is a drop-down menu for local files, but it is informational and really of no value.
  • And if it is a Teams file, after the file name is “Last Modified: (time stamp)” and a drop-down menu
  • That drop-down menu for Teams files has a lot of options
  • Rename the file. And the name will be updated on Teams and to anyone that has the file open!
  • Version History. Click the “Version History” at the bottom of the file drop-down for a right action pane to open and provide details on every major update, how made it, and ability to open earlier versions of the file to reference or revived content!

Presentation formatting, and presenting, now evolves around Microsoft Teams for us at TLC Creative. We are focusing Microsoft Teams this month on The PowerPoint Blog.

-Troy @ TLC

By |2025-05-05T07:14:48-07:00May 5th, 2025|Resource/Misc|

Low Res .SVG with Morph Animation

PowerPoint’s Morph transition is just about to turn 10! Ever since it was introduced back in 2016, the TLC Creative team has written dozens of posts on The PowerPoint Blog, and Troy has covered it in many speaking sessions and trainings. Go ahead – search “Morph” on our blog for several tutorials and demos of PowerPoint morph transition.

But the real post today is about one issue Morph has (and spoiler alert: it’s STILL not fixed). Content displays low-res when growing during the transition (ugh!)

Option 1 – Imported .SVG Graphics

Although your icon or shape might be vector, PowerPoint will substitute a pixelized .PNG during the tweening of the transition. This is why it looks a little fuzzy.

In the above example, notice how the icon starts crisp and ends with no quality loss when sized larger. However, during the morph, it goes a little fuzzy.

So why is this? An .SVG has a .PNG placeholder for display. The animation is animating the smaller .PNG image to the larger, and then updated to the actual .SVG again after the transition – hence a low res appearance of the small image growing to much larger.

Option 2 – PowerPoint Shapes

So, let’s try another technique. Create a shape directly from PowerPoint. In this case, the Not Allowed symbol.

We know these shapes are vector based and that they will resize larger with no distortion. However, the morph transition still does not like that. You’ll get the same distorted animation process going vector, to raster, and back to vector.

So, what else can we try?

Option 3 – Grow-Shrink Animation

This technique example will use one of PowerPoint pre-set animations – the Grow and Shrink.

Unfortunately, this result is even worse when applied. As you can see from the above example, even though it is a vector shape, the tweening and end result are very distorted. And stays that way! The Grow-Shrink animation does not convert the shape back into a vector when finished. You’re stuck with a fuzzy image.

Option 4 – Ungrouped .SVG Shapes

As we discovered, a solid .SVG file will distort when growing larger during a morph. What about breaking up, or ungrouping an .SVG that is made from several elements? In the example below, there are two ungrouped vector items. You’ll notice that the virus icon on the left morphs fairly smoothly. There is still distortion during the transition, but the shapes generally stay intact. The robot on the right is a different story. It’s not as symmetrical and contains some unique shapes. The head shape especially, and PowerPoint does not quite know how to convert it properly.

Overall, there really is not a perfect solution to avoid a fuzzy morph. When designing these types of transitions, just keep in mind you’re going to have some subtle distortion. Speeding up the timing of the transition will help visually, but in reality, it still doesn’t solve the overall issue.

-Troy and the TLC Creative design team

By |2025-05-01T21:16:32-07:00May 2nd, 2025|PowerPoint|
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