The PowerPoint® Blog

I work with PowerPoint on a daily basis and I am very honored to be a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP. We have a talented team of presentation designers at TLC Creative Services and ThePowerPointBlog is our area to highlight PowerPoint tips, tricks, examples and tutorials. Enjoy! Troy Chollar

Free Halloween PowerPoint Template!

Happy Halloween from the designers at TLC Creative Services, Inc!

Download this Halloween themed PowerPoint template from us, for free! Optimized for PowerPoint 2007-2013, 16×9 aspect ratio and all of the customizable options preset for a ready to use Halloween slide show!

Thanks to Christie, new to the design team, for her design efforts in developing this template.

Download here (900K).

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T10:10:29-07:00October 31st, 2013|Templates/Assets|

PowerPoint for Website Mockup

This year, TLC Creative Services finally updated its website (which is still in process). I am very happy with the new site and additional information it provides. When developing applications, and websites, PowerPoint can be a great tool in the initial stages.

For example, here is the TLC website mocked up in PowerPoint.

Each item is a separate, and editable, PowerPoint shape. The navigation labels can be revised, their order adjusted and the drop down menus revised.

Just another example of using the flexibility of PowerPoint to accomplish more than just “slides.”

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T10:10:49-07:00October 30th, 2013|Portfolio, PowerPoint, Resource/Misc|

NOLA and Lexus

This week has been a great show in New Orleans. Lexus group is a fantastic crew to be a part of, has fantastic staging and allows us to develop fantastic presentations (not a single bullet point in 300 slides!)!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T10:11:30-07:00October 23rd, 2013|Personal|

Lots of Screens in Orlando

I have been in Orlando this week on a good show. The General Sessions I ran had multiple stages with screens on either side to fill the entire Ballroom.

Thanks to Paul Chrisope for the pictures and for demo-ing the new GoPro camera super wide angle capabilities. And keeping things sane!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T10:12:03-07:00October 18th, 2013|Personal|

(Update to) PowerPoint Video Test Toolkit

Earlier this week, a post released a copy of our internal PowerPoint Video test slides. It was drawn to my attention that there were 2 errors in the slides (1. the .avi was not set to play automatic like all others, 2. the .mpg1 was a really badly rendered video). Thank you for the those that sent emails!

The original post’s download link has been updated with a revised version of the PowerPoint Video Test Toolkit and here is same link:
Download here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T10:12:22-07:00October 11th, 2013|Resource/Misc, Software/Add-Ins, Templates/Assets|

SnagIt OneClick – How to Disable

As a designer, SnagIt is one of my most valued go-to apps. But even the best software sometimes creates problems. In the latest version of SnagIt, a new feature, “OneClick,” (at least this is the first version I have noticed it) just gets in the way. The concept is to have an onscreen button to activate SnagIt vs. a keyboard command.

OneClick puts a small red button at the top of your screen.

Click the red button and a small menu drops down, allowing easy access to many of the SnagIt tools and settings.

The dilemma is that the button is ever present, sitting on top of everything: windows, apps, slide shows! This is not good and something that took a bit of investigating to figure out how to turn off. Half the effort is knowing the name of this unwelcome feature – OneClick.

To turn off, open SnagIt, click the VIEW menu and click SNAGIT ONECLICK. This is an on/off toggle, so it should now be removed from your screen. You may also see a TURN OFF ONECLICK option in the Quick Launch dialog in the left action pane.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T10:12:50-07:00October 9th, 2013|Personal, Software/Add-Ins, Tutorial|

PowerPoint Video Test Toolkit

For TLC Creative Services, I developed a slide deck that the 5 most common video formats. To test a computer’s setup, we just open this PowerPoint presentation, go to the video format we want to confirm the computer is configured to play and see what happens. If the video plays, we know the computer and PowerPoint are setup for that format and then can troubleshoot the client file with the knowledge that it is not the computer or PowerPoint.

Feel free to download our PowerPoint Video Test Toolkit and use as needed.
Download here (24 MB).

Also, check out the Sept 11 post of the video reference chart to know if a computer’s configuration is going to play a video format.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T10:13:10-07:00October 7th, 2013|Resource/Misc, Software/Add-Ins|

Desk with a View

Earlier this week, I was in Washington DC as the showsite Graphics Op/presentation designer. Great event (even with the government shutdown that cancelled a number of the scheduled presenters). There was a lot going on for presentations, videos, live camera and more. My “desk” requirement was room for 6 computers – here is my setup with 5 of those computers (one is an external monitor):

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T10:14:30-07:00October 5th, 2013|Personal, Resource/Misc|

Video of Animated Map From PowerPoint

Here is an amazing video showing a 1000 years of border history in Europe.

[original video no longer available from source]

Yes, you could fairly easily develop this video in PowerPoint. It would be what we internally call a “Flip Book” animation. One static slide per border change. Then set all slides to auto transition (with the CUT transition) and .01 to .05 seconds for the AFTER setting. When played, it will give the same effect as the above video – although sourcing the data and customizing the country shapes to each border would be a very large project! The video creation would be a simple as FILE>>EXPORT>>CREATE A VIDEO.

Here is a quick video I developed in PowerPoint using the Flip Book animation styling with a vector map of the United States (which was missing in the above video) and exported as a video.
[youtube src=”https://youtube.com/embed/Fpqd3v9gl7A?rel=0″]
57 slides, no animation, auto transitions, exported as video.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T10:15:18-07:00September 27th, 2013|PowerPoint, Resource/Misc|
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