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

YouTube Video In PowerPoint (Part 1)

So you have found the perfect video for you analogy – on Youtube. The question I get a lot, is how to play that video in a presentation.

There are a few issues that make this a bit complex. In this post I’ll overview the issues and in the next post show my process for making it all work.

Issue 1:
– YouTube (Google, Soapbox, Metacafe, and almost all other online video sites) is an online video, not on your computer.

Issue 2:
– If you download the video, it is an .flv (Flash Video), which a format PowerPoint does not support.

Issue 3:
– Nearly all online video sites automatically run a compression filter to make the file size smaller (they are storing ALL of these videos on their servers, so the smaller the file the more they can store and the less bandwidth needed to playback). Highly compressed videos mean lower playback quality.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:12:45-07:00December 26th, 2008|Tutorial|

Free Christmas Template

Merry Christmas to everyone (a day early)!! As a small gift to everyone who visits ThePowerPointBlog.com here is a custom PowerPoint template for your use.

This is a full featured template with all master slide elements (text box position, text style – color – size, line spacing, slide transitions, default color scheme, etc.) pre-formatted. Template was setup in PPT 2003, the theme is ‘white christmas’ and it will hopefully find many wonderful uses. Click here to download.

Note: you can search ‘christmas’ to find templates from previous years too.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:13:07-07:00December 24th, 2008|Portfolio, Templates/Assets|

All 8 FREE PPT 2007 Effects “Templates”

In all Office Online has 8 incredible example templates – each with step-by-step instructions on how to recreate each effect!
– Static Text Effects
– Static Picture Effects
– Animated Text Effects
– Animated Picture Effects
– Combined Picture and Text Effects
– Animated Hierarchy and Process Graphics
– Backgrounds
– 3D Shapes and Objects

Click here to access them all (note: downloads from Microsofts Office Online site must be done with Internet Explorer). All are the work of fellow PPT MVP Julie Terberg of Terberg Design.

(Note: I am grabbing this image from Ric B’s PPT Team Blog)

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:13:33-07:00December 22nd, 2008|Resource/Misc, Software/Add-Ins|

PPT 2007 “Text Animations” Template Deck

Animation is one of my strong points and this template presentation has some great ones!

The Text Animations deck on Office Online has 20 slides of text animations – each with step-by-step instructions on how to recreate these great effects.

It is also good to note that most of the animation effects can also be applied to other objects such as autoshapes or inserted images!

Click here to go to the MS Office Online page to download.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:14:41-07:00December 17th, 2008|Resource/Misc, Software/Add-Ins|

PPT 2007 “Picture Effects” Template Deck

Click here to go to the Office Online page with the download link for this great, and free, PPT 2007 presentation that has 15 picture effects. All effects are created entirely in PPT 2007 and the speaker notes have detailed step-by-step instructions on how to recreate the effects in your presentaitons.

Here are a few samples of the picture effects in this deck:

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:15:24-07:00December 16th, 2008|Resource/Misc, Software/Add-Ins|

PPT 2007 Visual Themes FREE

Sometimes it is difficult to keep a secret – this is one of those items I was excited about when I previewed them (yeah!) and then was told not to talk about them until Microsoft posted them (ohhh…). Well this week Microsoft Office Online has officially posted a series of PPT 2007 visual elements templates.

These really great ‘presentations’ are a series of incredible visual elements, animations and layouts – all created with PPT 2007 tools. As example one of the template decks shows how to make this graphic entirely within PowerPoint 2007!

Julie Terberg is the designer responsible for all of these effects (also a MS PowerPoint MVP). Check back as each day next week I highlight a different template deck (there are 8 in total).

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:15:44-07:00December 13th, 2008|Resource/Misc, Software/Add-Ins|

Making a Visual (Scoreboard)

Working on a recent project I thought this was a good example of the progression of a slide. The original speaker notes called for a slide that basically said they are ahead of the competition. Here is the slide they came up with:

During a slide review we moved to making this in to a visual that the speaker could use for an analogy. A football scoreboard was the solution. Here is what they came up with (‘they’ being the clients internal staff).

When I received the presentation to go through and clean up all slides here is the visual developed:

– All of numbers on the scoreboard were PPT WordArt (using PPT 2003) overlaid, so client can easily change to match analogy.
– Top of scoreboard was branded with client name (here I branded with TLC Creative)
– Hard to see here, but even the mascott is branded with the company initials on his hat (with TLC here)

The final slide ended up being animated with the numbers on the scoreboard (quater, score, time remaining until new product launch, etc.) changing as a quick history/timeline was presented!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:16:06-07:00December 11th, 2008|Portfolio|

Snapsound.com for FREE sound fx

If you need some sound effect (fx) for a presentation, a great, FREE, online resource is soundsnap.com. You do need to register and then 5 downloads per month are free.

There are a lot of sound fx here and the collection seems to be continuously growing. All are free to download and royalty free for use. One of the best features is you can download almost any audio file in either .mp3 or .wav format (I prefer .wav as it can be embedded into PowerPoint).

Visit the site by clicking here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:16:23-07:00December 9th, 2008|Software/Add-Ins|
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