The PowerPoint® Blog Archives - Page 170 of 238

Picturing The Past 10 Years (as Icons)

Thanks to Suan Ramlet and Echo Swinford for discovering this very cool infographic. It is interesting for several reasons:
– It wraps up the past decade into 12 topics and 120 icons
– It is humorous and also amazing that some things seem like just yesterday, but are actually many years old
– It is a good study in icons, which can be found in lots and lots of presentations

See it here.

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T09:12:08-07:00December 31st, 2009|Resource/Misc|

ThunderCats – The Template!

Always fun to work on projects that allow me to creative license to create something super dynamic. One such project was a PowerPoint template for the upcoming ThunderCats movie.

My first stop was lots of research to familiarize myself with this cartoon series I overlooked in the 80’s. I also watched the trailer for the upcoming movie and reviewed lots of the movie release info. From all this I identified the primary characters – logo – color pallet – and theme. Then I pulled in a number of images and started developing the basis for the template backgrounds in Photoshop. After a number of revisions and input from client the background art was imported into PowerPoint 2007 and all template options set. Here is the final result.

1. Opening Theme Graphic Slide
2. Title Slide
3. Content Slide

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T09:12:35-07:00December 29th, 2009|Templates/Assets|

PPT 2007 vs. Imported PPT 2003 Tables (part 2)

Working from this slide the goal is to give both an identical look/style (file can be downloaded from previous post).

The template has a few options for tables preset that the imported tables to not automatically have turned on. Until these are manually activated the Table Styles Options will produce different visuals for the charts.

As example, for the sample file the ‘Header’ and ‘Banded Rows’ is active for all new tables by default. But the inserted PPT 2003 tables do not have these options active.

Select the (PPT 2003) table, activate these options and the 2 tables can easily be updated to look identical for a consistent presentation.

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T09:13:03-07:00December 24th, 2009|PowerPoint|

PPT 2007 vs. Imported PPT 2003 Tables (part 1)

Here is a problem. You have a presentation where a number of tables are created and the Table Styles (Table Tools >> Design >> Table Styles) are used to make them look consistent and professional.

I often hear (and was one of people complaining too) that the styles are different for the PPT 2007 vs. the PPT 2003 table.

I have created a sample slide with these 2 tables on it:

Here is a link to download that slide (80K). See if you can make the two tables have an identical style/look using PPT 2007’s very helpful Table Styles. Feel free to use the post comment option to to tell us if you were successful, unsuccessful, or steps to accomplish.

Next post I will show what I check and do to accomplish this.

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T09:13:25-07:00December 22nd, 2009|Tutorial|

WOW – 76 MB Per Second!

Last week I posted about SpeedTest.net (Dec. 12 Post). I was just on a project in Las Vegas at the Mirage (coordinating presentations for 50 physicians) and checked my internet connection. First test was 76 megabytes per second! I ran the test again later in the day (eg. not 6am when no one was on the network) and still came up with an impressive 62 MB connection. Even more impressive (but less used) was the 30+ MB upload connection.

Needless to say, pushing 8 GB files across the network to various ballrooms, listening to Pandora and IM’ing was no problem!

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T09:14:03-07:00December 20th, 2009|Resource/Misc|

20,000 Online Games at Y8.com

This week I have been enjoying a fantastic time skiing with my wife and kids in Colorado (snow is a novelty for us being from San Diego). Each evening as the hot cocoa is ready, all the laptops come out (it’s a vacation, but still lots of projects) and my kids have been playing games on Y8.com.

Pretty impressive website with literally thousands of free Flash games. Enough to entertain for a full week of snowy nights.

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T09:14:33-07:00December 18th, 2009|Personal, Resource/Misc|

Says Here Steve Jobs Uses PowerPoint…

This is a good (news) article from this week on The Wall Street Journal Blogs entitled “Should Start-Up Founders Forget About Business Plans?” Check out item #1 in the to do list.

1) A PowerPoint presentation – “Ten slides long, that’s it, really simple,” Halligan said. “If you want to learn how to build a great PowerPoint, watch Steve Jobs’ PowerPoint presentations. He builds very simple, elegant PowerPoint slides.”

The concept is great – strive for a simple and elegant presentation.

The hard part is the 10 slides rule, which I do not believe in. Actually I do not prescribe to a presentation being a set number of slides, but rather a set amount of time. Following this rule, someone is going to cram 5 slides of content onto 1 slide to maintain the magical 10 slide allotment.

And the funny part is saying Mr. Jobs uses PowerPoint, where I am sure he uses his companies presentation software ‘Keynote’. Maybe I could fact check their presentation related stories….

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T09:14:56-07:00December 16th, 2009|Resource/Misc|

GenNext Media Video

Although I mostly highlight PowerPoint related projects, I do a number of video projects each month. Here is one that was fun and an interesting topic (Social Media). Plus it is easy to highlight as the video is posted online (vs. being used at a meeting or distributed on DVD).

Here is the GenNext Media homepage, which highlights the introduction video I storyboarded from website content and eBooks (used PPT for storyboard phase) and then developed in a video editor (I use Vegas Pro).

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T09:15:19-07:00December 14th, 2009|Portfolio|

Check Your Internet Connection with SpeedTest.net

This is a newly discovered website for me that is pretty nifty – speedtest.net

Here is the full webpage:

The first thing it does is check your IP address and pin point you on the U.S. map. Then it locates a close server in its network to run a speed test. Here it shows me in San Diego (my office):

Click the ‘Begin Test’ button at the top and see what your connection speed is – both download and upload. Here I am pretty close to what my service is (20/5):

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T09:15:47-07:00December 12th, 2009|Resource/Misc|

More Options in Format Shape Dialog (for PPT 2010)

I had a few emails from the Nov. 30 post “#13 Gradients” about the additional items now in the Format Shape dialog. Yep, the options available in this dialog has increased! There are literally dozens of improvements that I did not cover in my top 15 and I look forward to spending the 2nd half of 2010 (after Office 2010 is released to retail) with in-depth posts.

Here is the dialog from the previous post:

When you open the Format Shape dialog some of the currently available features get a full details pane like Reflection and Glow & Soft Edges.

Some features have more options available. “Picture” from PPT 2007 gets expanded to Picture Corrections and Picture Color.

And there are new dialogs such as Crop (see Nov. ## post), Artistic Effects (very cool stuff that probably should have been in my Top 15 list) and more with Size, Position, etc.

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T09:16:08-07:00December 10th, 2009|Tutorial|