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

Oh My Eyes – Bad Diagram

Here is a slide from a recent show that just made me cringe (presentation was supplied, so I had no editing or design input).

It does show all of the important information. But it does not have a balanced/aligned layout. It is difficult to figure out the message, text is small, and it did not animate to help show the flow. And it was a background slide for over 5 minutes…

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T10:21:24-07:00May 17th, 2009|PowerPoint, Resource/Misc|

Office 2010 in 2010

Well it’s official. Steve Balmer commented earlier this week that the next version of Office will not be available there year, but next.

“Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Visio 2010, and Microsoft Project 2010 are scheduled to enter technical preview in the third quarter of 2009 and become available in the first half of 2010.”

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T10:22:35-07:00May 15th, 2009|Resource/Misc|

Zero-Day Exploit Patch for PowerPoint

Tuesday Microsoft closed a critical PowerPoint hole that that has been under attack since last month, which seems to have been directed at corporate computers to gain access to data. It did not affect PowerPoint 2007, but the patch is for PowerPoint 2000, XP, 2003, 2007, the PowerPoint Viewer, Office Compatibility Pack and Works. No Mac patch yet.

How big a deal was this? It was only the fourth time in the past 4 years that Microsoft has released just one security bulletin. To patch your computer, Run Windows Update (or you can wait for it to be part of an upcoming Automatic Update).

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T10:22:57-07:00May 13th, 2009|PowerPoint|

Alternative to Bullets

Here is an example from a recent project that shows an alternative to a list of bulleted text. The overall presentation we images and key words only. This part of the script was a quick recap of these sound bites – to quick for visuals, but a bulleted list was not a good option because it was just not dynamic enough.

Here would be the ‘standard’ slide:

Here was my layout:

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T10:23:45-07:00May 11th, 2009|Portfolio|

Oversize Slide For Notes

Hollywood is all about ‘smoke and mirrors’ – making things appear much more than they are. With corporate events the staging, custom lighting, multiple computers and projectors all allow me to do more than the standard presentation.

This project was a very widescreen aspect ratio (2:55 to 1), which meant custom projection screens. I took advantage of this with an oversize slide with the live content letterboxed top/bottom.

I then used the extra black area at the bottom for my notes. This was important because if you look at the images above, the left screen was in French and the right Screen was in English. The notes on the bottom allowed me to quickly identify
(1) the proper language template was being used
(2) what script line was being referenced with the slide
(3) what slide I was on (this was setup with the auto page number)

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T10:27:45-07:00May 1st, 2009|Portfolio, Tutorial|
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