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

Big Numbers Are the Key Concept

One of the greatest things I hear is something like this “Just make the slides have the key concepts I am talking about.” To me, that means the presenter:
– Knows their talk
– Is a confident presenter
– Will not be reading the slide to the audience
– And has given me freedom to design visual slides (yeah!)

This is a sample slide from a recent presentation TLC Creative Services developed (Note: Corporate template and much of the content adjusted for the sample slide). This minimal content slide reinforced the presenters point, did not distract the audience from the presenter and provided much more memorable speaker support than a list of bulleted text with all the details (that the presenter provided during the talk).

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T09:51:45-07:00October 5th, 2011|Personal, Portfolio|

Review: PowerPoint To Go Free Templates

PowerPoint To Go (PPT-to-go.de) is a company based in Germany and offers a collection of PowerPoint templates that are free. The main categories are maps and nice looking 3D shapes in colorful layouts.

Unfortunately, we were not too impressed with the site. To access the free templates you must go through a registration process – for 1 template per month. While registering, the site timed out twice with a fatal error on the server being reported. It took four log in attempts before successfully accessing the downloads page. So the online experience was far from smooth.

The template downloaded is a .ppt (PPT 2003) and on our systems it opened with a corrupt file warning.

The thumbnail image on the download page was very different (and visually better) than the actual slide:

I had expected to see a full PowerPoint template with all of the master slide formatting preset. There is minimal template formatting in place and it is actually more jumbled than the MS default (and uses the German language dictionary).

Many of the thumbnails look great and I would recommend using just the content (map, 3D pyramid, etc.) by importing into your template and not using the PowerPoint to Go file as a template.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T09:53:03-07:00September 30th, 2011|Personal, Resource/Misc, Templates/Assets|

How Do I Get an Embedded Audio File From a Presentation?

Another question I receive a lot goes directly with the previous post (about finding video files): “Where are audio/music files that are embedded inside the .pptx file?”

Here is one process for getting to the actual audio/music files that are embedded in a PPT 2010 file.

1. Locate the presentation file in Windows Explorer and make a duplicate of it (we are going to “break” it).

2. Change the file name from .pptx to .zip

3. When you change the file extension you will get this warning dialog – click “Yes.”

4. Double click to open the new .zip file.

5. Go into the “PPT” folder.

6. Go into the “Media” folder.

7. Copy any of the video files (.mp3, .wav, etc.) from here to a folder on your computer.

8. Done!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T09:53:27-07:00September 28th, 2011|Tutorial|

How Do I Get An Embedded Video Out of a Presentation?

PowerPoint 2010 has increased the multimedia capabilities in many great ways. One question I receive a lot is where is the video (it is embedded inside the .pptx file) and how can it be accessed as a stand alone file?

Here is one process for getting to the actual video files that are embedded in a PPT 2010 file.

1. Locate the presentation file in Windows Explorer and make a duplicate of it (we are going to “break” it).

2. Change the file name from .pptx to .zip

3. When you change the file extension you will get this warning dialog – click “Yes.”

4. Double click to open the new .zip file.

5. Go into the “PPT” folder.

6. Go into the “Media” folder.

7. Copy any of the video files (.wmv, .avi. .mov, etc.) from here to a folder on your computer.

8. Done!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T09:54:03-07:00September 26th, 2011|Tutorial|

“You Cannot Teach…” A Great Quote As I End My Time at The Presentation Summit

“You cannot teach people everything they need to know. The best you can do is position them where they can find what they need to know when they need to know it.”
– Seymour Papert

Seymour was a noted MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and educator. He was also considered one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, which has nothing to do with developing a great presentation, but everything to do with being a good presentation designer.

Here are some of the “teachers” I spent the week with (.., Betsy (TechSmith), Dave Paridi, Lori, Julie Terberg, me (center), John Wilson, Sandy Johnson, Glenna Shaw, Echo Swinford, Ric Britschneider, Steve Rindsberg).

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T09:54:39-07:00September 22nd, 2011|Personal|

Greeting from Austin, TX and The Presentation Summit!

I am very excited to be in Austin, Texas for the 2011 Presentation Summit! I have already met with several other PowerPoint MVPs, Microsoft developers and managers and many event attendees.

Tomorrow, I present “In the Trenches with PowerPoint Add-Ins” which will be full of examples and lots of fun. Tuesday, I present more of a specialty topic “High-Def: Designing for wide screens and large impacts.“

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T09:54:58-07:00September 18th, 2011|Personal|

Microsoft’s Office.com has Free PowerPoint Video Templates (Designed by Me!)

Microsoft’s Office.com has launched a really great new download option for PowerPoint video templates and slides. For TLC Creative Services, it is especially exciting as I was able to work with the Office.com team to create the first set of video templates! The 34 templates available were all created right here and available to everyone for free – visit the Microsoft Office Video Templates page here.

The goal of these templates (note – most are single slide examples, not true presentation templates) is to “showcase the great video features of PowerPoint 2010. …these video templates provide customers with detailed instructions for how to reproduce the creative effects on the slide. Customers may then use the templates to customize with their own videos.” I definitely expect to see this resource continue to grow, so keep it bookmarked.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T09:55:22-07:00September 16th, 2011|Personal, Portfolio, Templates/Assets|

New Look to iStockphoto Website

Last week iStockphoto was updated with a redesigned site for faster and easier access to content with an updated navigation scheme. There is now a static toolbar to access things like credit balance, shopping cart and lightboxes.

There are now separate landing pages for photography, illustrations, video, audio and Flash files for faster, more focused searches.

Designing presentations can use lots of images, so searching made easier is a good thing for all presentations!

Tip: If purchasing iStockphoto credits, first do a web search for “istockphoto discount code” as 10-20% discount codes are plentiful.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T09:55:39-07:00September 15th, 2011|Personal, Templates/Assets|

Arrghh – the frustration of moving to new technologies

“Hello, Tech Support. Yes, I have a problem, my blog is now offline!”

Well as you may have noticed, ThePowerPointBlog went offline for over a week. I moved TLC Creative Services to the new Microsoft Office 365 for the exchange email, SharePoint and Lync features. The first few days down accounted for the time needed to figure out how to change over the DNS settings to maintain the TLCCreative.com website at the same hosting (eg. I did not want to use the Microsoft website design option, just the backoffice features). After that was resolved, it was only then that I discovered sub-domains are not supported by Office 365 (at least on the plan subscribed to). So now ThePowerPointBlog is on its own dedicated domain and no longer a sub-domain of tlccreative.com.

What does this mean to everyone? For general reading and searching for old posts, nothing, it is all the same. But if you have bookmarked or linked to any specfic post over the past 6 years, those links will no longer work… I am incredibly sorry for that inconvienence. The only difference is the URL to access things:
Old = https://pptblog.tlccreative.com/bloglink
New = https://thepowerpointblog.com/bloglink

Now, on to updating the blog posts to catch up!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T09:56:12-07:00September 14th, 2011|Personal|
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