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

Animated Timer

On a recent show I was asked (minutes before needed onscreen) to display a timer for some group interaction. Of course the answer was ‘no problem’… and I got to work. Here is the result:

New Transitions Sample

Making this visual timer is easy.

1. Here is my sample slide, using PPT 2007’s Civic template.

2. Next I created 2 cirlces of identical size. For the “timer” cirlce I made it red and applied some Shape Styling.

3. Using the alignment tools both circles are set to stack and then positioned on slide.

4. Apply an entrance animation to the top/red circle:
– Wheel
– 1 Spoke

5. Customize the time (of the entrance animation) to anything up to 99 minutes.

6. Run the show!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:04:42-07:00January 29th, 2010|Tutorial|

PowerPoint 2010 Pricing

It is still a few months out, but here is the pricing I found:

– Office Professional
– $499 boxed / $349 Product Key Card

– Office Home and Student
– $149 boxed / $119 Product Key Card

– Office Professional Academic (students and teachers)
– $99 boxed

The Product Key Card is an electronic distribution (eg. no packaging or disc). Basically it is full function trialware, either pre-loaded on new computers or downloaded, that is unlocked and purchased with the Product Key Card.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:05:05-07:00January 27th, 2010|Resource/Misc|

Real Presentations From Your SmartPhone

RIM (Research In Motion / Blackberry cell phones) announced at CES their new “Blackberry Presenter”. This small standalone box connects to the projector via VGA or TV via s-video and your Blackberry connects to it by Blue Tooth.

So this is not a mini projector, but a graphics card to connect to a real projector for real meetings.

– Supports PPT 2003 and PPT 2007
– Supports almost all animations and transitions (no multimedia)
– 1024×768 resolution (no High Def shows yet)
– AND is open to third party developers to work with other phones

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:05:35-07:00January 25th, 2010|Resource/Misc|

Working on Maui

Winter season is here, so the corporate meetings head to warmer climates. In the past 30 days I have been in Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Florida, Hawaii and Arizona. To pick a favorite skiing with my girls in Colorado was #1, but working in Maui with the Oakley (ie. sunglasses) group was a lot of fun!

That is Paul Chrisope (show producer and video playback) and Gary Meeker (audio, VOG and music mix-master).

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:06:04-07:00January 23rd, 2010|Personal, PowerPoint|

Sponsor An Event The Easy Way

This is from a real presentation, but it was a demo of marketing options (and not a Microsoft project). So the real work was in PhotoShop and then used the final image as one of many in the presentation.

Original image:

And with a bit of PhotoShop time – a new sponsor!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:06:41-07:00January 21st, 2010|Portfolio|

Adjusting Bad Line Breaks

Here is a graphic from a recent client presentation (as sent to me – but with some text ‘removed’).

A simpe line break, soft-return (shift-return) grouped the topic/cities onto a single line which is much easier for the audience to interpret quickly.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T08:54:39-07:00January 13th, 2010|Tutorial|

PowerPoint has been used for only 3 Billion Minutes…

At CES this weekend Neowin.net shared some statistics it obtained about Office 2010 beta and Office 2007 use (saying data was created from a Dec ’09 beta survey and from Office’s anonymous reporting).

o 41 billion minutes in Outlook
o 31 billion minutes in Word
o 18 billion minutes in Excel
o 3 billion minutes in PowerPoint
o In October 2009, US online PC users spent more time in PowerPoint than in Halo 2 on the PC

Not sure how to quantify the numbers, but they are interesting and amusing. There are some more listed here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:07:46-07:00January 11th, 2010|PowerPoint|

RIP Office 2003

Over the weekend Microsoft officially pulled the plug on sales (and downloads) of Office 2003.

The lawsuit against Microsoft about the use of some XML code in Word has ended distribution of it. Bcause Word cannot be distributed and the Office suite has Word – cannot be distributed (only Word is the program in question). Here is a good summary article about the lawsuit.

Like a good movie trailer for a bad movie, the title is more appealing than the full show. Office 2003 is not really gone, just the current version. An alternate version with the questionable code removed will be in circulation, which should be identical to even the most knowledgeable Word users.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:08:17-07:00January 10th, 2010|PowerPoint|

Trump Did Not Say “You’re Fired!” (Yeah)

One of the Trump University groups needed a new template to consolidate their presentations onto for a consistent and professional look. The entire project went great, although I kept hearing the famous ‘You’re Fired’ running through my head…

The final template that was approved focused on rich-elegant-professional look. Here is the Title and Content slide layouts from the template:

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:08:56-07:00January 7th, 2010|Portfolio, Templates/Assets|
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