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

Customizing SmartArt – Shadows

SmartArt is a great solution for converting text to visual elements. For a recent project I modified a simple timeline SmartArt (Closed Chevron Process) with customized drop shadows to add some visual interest to the slide.

All was accomplished by adjusting the shadow distance for each of the 3 elements.

Download the slide here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:10:42-07:00January 5th, 2010|Portfolio, Tutorial|

Mesa Aquatics Web Banner

One of the things that definitely keeps presentation work fresh is a diversity of projects. My daughters are on a swim team together and the president of the swim club asked if I could help with updating some of the website elements, starting with the webpage banner at mesaaquatics.com.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:11:15-07:00January 3rd, 2010|Portfolio|

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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |2016-09-16T09:14:56-07:00December 16th, 2009|Resource/Misc|
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