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

PowerPoint For Peace

We often forget as individuals we can do a lot to make this world a better place and spend time waiting for the change to happen. Here is an initiative to prove it to ourselves that we can do as much as anyone to promote peace.

Glenna Shaw and Geetesh Bajaj, both PowerPoint MVPs have started a unique initiative “PowerPoint for Peace”, a Global Community Project. The project just last week and is building a universal presentation that recognizes the contributions and commitments of people from around the World to improve the planet and the lives of our fellow inhabitants.

authorSTREAM.com is being used as a platform and participating is very easy. Just create a single slide that depicts a contribution that helps make the World a better place to live in (must contain your name/group/company and be uploaded using the authorSTREAM link).

See it and participate here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:46:59-07:00August 4th, 2008|PowerPoint, Resource/Misc|

XOBNI is Great!

If you are an Outlook user like me for email (my 12 year old daughter has no use for email that is not web-based on accessible from any connection or phone). I think this is a must have tool, and I am in good company as Mr. Bill Gates recently extolled its usefullness!

Xobni is “inbox” spelled backwards. It runs along side Outlook, without touching any of its files (very important to me) and is viewed in a new column. It adds information about who is emailing you, how to contact them, who you have mutually emailed, threaded conversations and more.

By far my favorite feature is the ‘Files Exchanged’ area that shows all of the attachments that person has sent me – which means no more hunting through old emails for that logo!

It is FREE and works! Look at it here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:47:35-07:00August 1st, 2008|Software/Add-Ins|

Day At Disney (Offices)

I am working on a multimedia CDROM for a division of Disney and had to spend the day at their corporate offices on one of their internal computers to get the needed screen captures for an interactive tutorial. Kind of a fun place to work with signage like this everywhere:

And much to my daughters dismay I was not able to get in to the sound stage in the next building where they are filming High School Musical 3…

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:48:08-07:00July 30th, 2008|Personal|

Bad Error Message From Motorola

So, if your cell phone displays this error message:

It is time for a new phone! Last week while traveling my phone ‘turned on’ with this message and there was nothing I could do to get it to function. Of course my cell phone is also my modem while traveling so no internet access!

Back at the office Friday I did a bit of online research (was going through internet access withdrawls) and quickly found out I am not the only Motorola user to have this error message and that in 100% cases the phone is dead. New phone arrives tomorrow – just in time for my next trip.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:48:35-07:00July 28th, 2008|Personal|

Microsoft’s New Fonts

With Vista Microsoft released some new font, each designed to replace an existing font. The new fonts are designed for onscreen legibility and scaling. Here is what they are and what they replace:

Cambria = Georga and Times New Roman

Calibri = Arial

Candara = Trebuchet MS and Helvetica

Consolas = Lucidia Console and Courier New

Constantia = Georga and Palatino

Corbel = Verdana

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:48:56-07:00July 18th, 2008|Tutorial|

Some Presentations Should Come with Warning Signs

While vacationing with my family recently we spent the day at Sea World. They have added a number of Sesame Street themed attractions which were very fun. The Elmo 4D movie was great!

Now Sesame Street is obviously geared to young children. So the first line of this warning seemed a bit out of place:

Wouldn’t it be great if presentations came with a warning sign that told you the content may not be what you think it is…. just a thought.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:49:17-07:00July 16th, 2008|Personal|

A Little R&R!

Too many projects can make any designer a bit overwhelmed. Just to show I do have fun, here are a few photos of my recent 2 weeks out of the office as we enjoyed some much needed family and fun time!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:49:52-07:00July 14th, 2008|Personal|

More Show Photos

Here are photos from another show last month. This one was a bit more eleborate staging – and yes the logo on the left is in French. Left screen was French content, Center screen images, Right screen English content.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:50:13-07:00July 11th, 2008|Personal, Portfolio|

Recent Show

The past few months have been busy with lots of travel to shows. Here are a few quick photos from 1 of the 5 meetings/shows I handled the PowerPoint graphics for last month.


– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:50:36-07:00July 9th, 2008|Personal, Portfolio|

iSpringPro FREE Today!

It is not often that I have 2 posts in a day – but this offer is time sensitive as it expires today! The website “Giveaway of the Day” has an offer to download and install a full function version of iSpring Pro for free regularly $199.

iSpring is a PPT-to-Flash conversion add-in. It adds a tool bar to PPT and from my initial tests does a good job of capturing animations and visual effects (note: I have not fully tested the iSpring software, but it has been on my radar for awhile. I actually downloaded demo version of software last month, but did not have time to run through my standard series of test files to really evaluate it).

So if you are interested, you can have it for free. NOTE: it must be downloaded AND installed before the Giveaway of the Day deal ends today (approx. 15hrs from this post). Click here to go to download page.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:51:19-07:00July 9th, 2008|Software/Add-Ins|
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