The PowerPoint® Blog Archives - Page 180 of 238

What Service Pack 2 (SP2) Brings To PowerPoint

I have had a lot of email and talking with people/clients about the recently released Service Pack 2 for Office 2007. I believe it is critical for PowerPoint users as it fixes, and adds, a number of key design features.

I pulled this list from Microsoft’s (Knowledge Base) KB article 953195.. It covers all Office applications, but these are the PowerPoint specific items – which I have reworded a few to make them easier to understand.

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Better Edit Points: Freeform shapes have usable Edit Points, plus increased interoperability with Office 2003.

Ungroup SmartArt Objects: Officially it says “A new XML-based representation of each SmartArt graphic in a document is saved with the file to optimize interoperability.” Which I believe is referencing the HUGE improvement that you can now ungroup any smartart object!

Faster File Save: Smarter picture compression in PowerPoint’s XML file format (.PPTX) now saves up to 90% faster than before when the presentation contains a lot of pictures.

Steadier Zoom While Editing: “Some commands, such as deleting the selected object when zoomed in would cause the slide view to snap to the center of the slide. Now the zoomed-in slide view does not move on its own.” This means less scrolling around while zoomed in and editing!

Adjust Lines without Extending to Infinity: Officially stated as “Fixes several issues that involve the object model. These fixes let you better achieve parity with Office 2003 when the object model works with graphical objects.” Which for me means I can resize a line while constraining with the Shift key and actually resize it (not have it zoom off into infinity).

Text Overlaps: Some third-party printer drivers could provide bad information, causing PowerPoint to misalign text. It now detect this situation and uses alternate settings that preserve the proper text spacing.

Vista Preview: PowerPoint is now compatible with the Vista file preview commands.

Image Exports: Images exported from PowerPoint could be corrupt or cropped. This is now fixed and the setting produces a good bitmap.

Slide Thumbnail Highlighting: Colors and effects used to indicate when the mouse was over a slide thumbnail, and when the thumbnail was actually selected could occasionally become confused and might indicate a slide was selected when it was not. These are now clearly defined and update properly.

Saving to .PPT with Styled Title Text: Some of the new text formatting in PPT 2007 has to be represented as a picture when saved to the older .PPT format. Sometimes this would cause both a picture and styled text to be saved when it appeared in a title placeholder, giving the text a jumbled or blurred look. It now detects and displays one element.

Built-in Save As PDF/XPS: Users no longer have to download the add-in separately to have the PDF/XPS option in the Save As menu, it is built into SP2 for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

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– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T10:11:49-07:00June 13th, 2009|Resource/Misc|

Add ‘dummy’ Text to a Slide fast

Here is a nifty programming trick that can be helpful when you are demoing PowerPoint (as I have been with a number of specialty training programs).

In any text box, in either PPT 2003 or 2007, type this: =rand()
Then Enter/Return.
It will automatically be filled with a few paragraphs of “The quick brown fox…”!

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T10:12:09-07:00June 11th, 2009|Tutorial|

Ungroup SmartArt!!

With Office 2007’s SP2 installed SmartArt has become a lot more usable/smarter. Now you can use the great diagram templates in SmartArt and ungroup them if needed. Why ungroup? For fine tuning, modifying to meet the slides exact needs, or animating would be a few of my top reasons.

1. Insert SmartArt

2. Ungroup

3. Result is a single box of grouped autoshapes (and the smartart programming for updating text is removed)

4. Ungroup one more time and you have all individual elements

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T10:12:29-07:00June 9th, 2009|PowerPoint, Tutorial|

“Create A Spark” PPT Contest

The folks over at Microsoft Office Online are hosting a PowerPoint contest!

“Create a Spark” is for PPT 2007 entries of short presentations (10 slides max). Submissions due by June 26 and win global fame on the internet!

Find all the details here.

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T10:13:05-07:00June 7th, 2009|Resource/Misc|

Check Out the PowerPoint “Office Intervention” Episode

I do not know the full background on the ‘Office Intervention’ clips, but they are well done and entertaining. Courtney is a real person who really is a law student with a real report (so the show premise is real). My friend Julie Terberg, a PowerPoint MVP, was called in as the expert for this episode.

Here is the link to the episode on Channel 10.

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T10:14:09-07:00June 5th, 2009|PowerPoint, Resource/Misc|

Even Easier -How Do You Know If SP2 Is Installed?

This is a follow-up to Monday’s post, which is one of the comments submitted to that post (thanks Adam!). We can eliminate 1 step and get the answer to what Service Pack is installed even faster!

1. Office Button >> PowerPoint Options

2. Resources >> About

I overlooked it, but the answer is right here in the About window – even easier!

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T10:14:30-07:00June 3rd, 2009|Tutorial|

Bing!

Microsoft unvieled it’s new search engine that has received some high praise within the industry. And yesterday it was released to the world early!

Bing has a lot of new features and technology for a search engine. Two of my favorites are type in a company name and it gives all the standard results, but also a customer service phone number. The other is great thing is ThePowerPointBlog remaining #1 when searching “powerpoint blog”! (actually 1st result is an ad for MS Office, it is MS’s search engine…)

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T10:15:48-07:00June 2nd, 2009|Resource/Misc|

How Do You Know If SP2 Is Installed?

Service Pack 2 (SP2) was released for MS Office just a short while ago. For PowerPoint it definitely fixes a number of design annoyances. But I am getting the question how to know if it is installed. Here is the process:

1. Office Button >> PowerPoint Options

2. Resources >> About

3. Top line, near end

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T10:16:12-07:00June 1st, 2009|Tutorial|

Category Upgrades to ThePowerPointBlog

You may have noticed the search options have been updated with new categories. With over 3 years of PowerPoint related posts even I was finding it difficult to find things – and I wrote them all. Now searches can either be done by key word(s) in the Search bar, or with the expanded category list.

All posts, all the way back to January 2006 have been tagged with the new categories. Hopefully this will make ThePowerPointBlog a better resource for you. Try doing a category search for templates to find downloadable TEMPLATES and get ideas, or search for TUTORIALS to see all the tips and tricks in one long list of posts.

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T10:16:54-07:00May 31st, 2009|Resource/Misc|

Any Ideas on Creating a Quiz Like This in PowerPoint?

So this is a bit different – I figure with 3-5k views a day I am asking you for advice. A recent project seemed simple enough, develop a kiosk quiz with 4 questions and showed the results, then reset for the next person. No need to capture data or integrate with a data base. I figured easy, I will just develop a set of slides and use one of the conversion apps. Turns out the simple quiz is quite difficult – but if I want to capture data, integrate with a LMS, etc. all is a part of the pre-packaged solutions.

Well I spent a few days researching options and finally coded the project in Flash. Client was happy, end result looked and functioned great, I was just a bit surprised I could not find a PowerPoint solution.

So here is the storyboard of what was needed (created in PPT 2007). Anyone have suggestions on software (add-in or stand alone) that could accomplish this?

– Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2016-09-16T10:17:48-07:00May 29th, 2009|PowerPoint|