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

Adobe – Which is Better, Subscription or Disc?

The Adobe Creative Suite is the industry standard for design applications: PhotoShop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, etc. Adobe now provides two purchases options, and determining which is best is based on your needs.

Option 1: Purchase Disc
– The traditional purchase is a serial number, either software download or install disc. This provides a fixed set of applications (depending on which suite is selected). It is OS specific (Windows or Mac) and can be installed on multipled computers (generally two).

TLC Creative has historically purchased the Design Premium suite for its design and show computers. This suite includes:
• Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, Acrobat Pro, Bridge, Media Encoder

Option 2: Subscription
Recently, Adobe has starting offering a new subscription option, called Adobe Creative Cloud. It is based on CS6, the newest version of all Adobe apps. It also has the advantage of being turned on and off. So if you need Adobe software for a short time, it can be paid for in monthly increments. It also has the advantage of getting additional tool features added with the automatic web-based updates (so the subscription install of Adobe CS6 Illustrator has a number of additional tools that the disc install does not).

The subscription option is like purchasing the most robust (ie. costly) creative suite, the Master Collectoin. When looking at the year long subscription rate, the subscription is considerably lower cost than purchasing the Master Collection. But not that far from purchasing one of the other CS options. Currently, the Creative Suite includes:
• Photoshop Extended
• Illustrator
• InDesign
• Dreamweaver
• Flash
• Fireworks
• Acrobat X Pro
• Acrobat XI Pro (Not included in any CS)
• Bridge
• Media Encoder
• Lightroom (Not included in any CS)
• Adobe Muse (Not included in any CS)
• Flash Builder
• Edge Tools & Services (Not included in any CS)
• Premiere Pro
• After Effects
• Audition
• SpeedGrade
• Prelude
• Encore

It also includes these services: (Not included with any CS)
• Device and PC Sync
• Cloud Storage
• Business Catalyst
• PhoneGap Build
• TypeKit
• Story Plus
• Digital Publishing Suite

For TLC Creative Services, a major advantage of the disc install version is our show computers can inherit the previous version. So all show computers are very capable computers, just not loaded with the “cutting edge” edition. With the subscription, there is no “old” software available for use on other computers. The subscription is more economical over the course of the year than a direct purchase and allows us to have access to many applications that have not been a part of our standard design process. So for us, it is a combination of Disc and Subscription.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T08:50:14-07:00January 9th, 2013|Resource/Misc|

It Takes A Lot to Develop A “Real” PowerPoint Template – This Is The Best Resource Available To Know How To Do It!

“Building PowerPoint Templates – step by step with the experts” is one of the best resources available for anyone that creates PowerPoint templates (based on PPT 2007/2010). Outside of a small group of professional designers, and some of the developers at Microsoft, it would be difficult to find this information condensed into a single place. The authors are good friends, Microsoft MVPs for PowerPoint and two designers that I trust to know the real how-to’s, and why, of developing PowerPoint templates.

It can be found here at Amazon.com.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T08:50:35-07:00January 7th, 2013|Resource/Misc|

What I Learned from “Present It So They Get It” – Book Review

I ended the year with some reading and “Present It So They Get It” is on my recommendation list! I was happy to spend some time with the author, Dave Paradi, earlier in the year at The Presentation Summit where he was also a presenter. I learned we have a lot of similar presentation design goals, but Dave is the first to admit he is not a presentation designer. What he brings is the audience perspective, the executive/presenter understanding, and works on crafting the message, both spoken and visual, into a professional package.

The books subtitle, “Create and Deliver Effective PowerPoint Presentations Your Audience Will Understand” reinforces all of this perfectly. Topics cover everything from explaining that PowerPoint (or any presentation software) is not the problem with boring presentations (chapter 1) to detailing what charts and graphs should contain to carry a message to the audience (chapter 14) and lots more.

Read more about it, and Dave Paradi, at his site here.
The book is also available at Amazon.com here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T08:51:09-07:00January 3rd, 2013|Resource/Misc|

Goodbye to 2012 and Christmas Lights

Final day of the year – and it has been a great year! For us here at TLC Creative Services, it has had an overload of projects, lots of new (and repeat) clients, a full year in the new (and larger) office and lots of travel!

Personal life has also been good – lots of family adventures and wonderful Christmas decorations to end the year.

See you in 2013!
– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T08:52:35-07:00December 31st, 2012|Personal|

Merry Christmas Eve with a Free Christmas PowerPoint Template!

At Christmas, the spirit of the season – and a lot of the fun, is giving. TLC Creative Services has this great Holiday themed template for everyone to have and use – FREE!!

Many thanks to TLC Creative Services designer Amber, who developed this template!

Template is developed in PPT 2010 and 16×9 (wide screen) aspect ratio. Download here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T08:53:10-07:00December 24th, 2012|Portfolio, Templates/Assets|

Tineye – Find Images Online (3)

TinEye has a web browser plug-in, so you can right click any image on a page and search the database directly. The free plug-in is available for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. To use, pick any online image.

1. For this image, we want to find a higher resolution version. Right-click the image and select “Search Image on TinEye.”

2. TinEye found 121 results, and using the Biggest Image sorter, there is a 800x635px version available*.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T08:53:28-07:00December 21st, 2012|Resource/Misc, Tutorial|

Tineye – Find Images Online (2)

TinEye, the reverse image search site can also be used for some detective work.

Let’s use TinEye to check if an image is being used by another website without permission. Here is a beautiful photo by my friend and incredibly talented photographer, Rikk Flohr, from his webpage.

1. To do a quick web search for non-permitted use of this photo, I loaded it into TinEye using the drag and drop feature.

2. TinEye’s search only found 1 result, which is actually Rikk’s Flickr account.

3. Of course, no search engine covers the entire internet. TinEye is constantly crawling webpages and updating the image database. And this image search proves it is possible other instances of an image exists online. The test image was found on Rikk’s Flickr account, but missed it on his actual webpage. I assume TinEye hasn’t yet crawled Rikk’s site or it is possible the site is already protected in which case TinEye can’t get the image information.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T08:53:47-07:00December 19th, 2012|Resource/Misc, Tutorial|

Tineye – Find Images Online (1)

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. It can be a great resource for presentation design.

TinEye lets you upload, or link to an online image, and see where it came from, find higher resolution versions, how/where it’s being used and if there are modified versions. It is the first image search engine to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. When you upload an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique digital signature for it, and then compares this signature to every other image in their index to find matches. In our tests, TinEye did not generally find similar images, but exact matches – including those that have been cropped, edited, or resized.

The free service allows 50 searches per day, up to 150 searches a week. There is a paid version of TinEye which allows for more searches.

TinEye is easy to use. Here is our sample image and the goal is to find a high res version.

1. On the TinEye webpage, click “Browse” to upload the image. The sample image is fairly small at 350×520 pixels.

2. TinEye search of its database for this image found 80 matches.

3. The default search result is set to Best Match.

4. Changing the sort by Biggest Image, I find a link to the same image that is 1600×1200 pixels!

Note: Most images found online are protected by copyright. If you would like to use any image found through TinEye for commercial purposes, you should confirm it is available under Creative Commons, or contact the image owner for permission.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T08:54:05-07:00December 17th, 2012|Resource/Misc, Tutorial|
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