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

Open PowerPoint in Safe Mode

This is one of those – I hope you don’t need to do this – actions. But recently one of the computers here suddenly decided it did not want to have fonts work (line spacing was all messed up). So after troubleshooting everyway possible, verifying files opened fine on other computers, etc. I had the faint memory of being able to start any office application in Safe Mode.

After a quick search on the PPTFAQ (thanks Steve!) I restarted PowerPoint in Safe Mode by holding down the CTRL key.

Not sure what the solution was (not opening with AutoCorrect or Recent Documents…. ?), but the file opened and displayed text as designed. Closed PowerPoint, launched again and all was fine from there.

So when all else fails, starting PowerPoint with no extended features using Safe Mode can be your best friend.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:37:52-08:00September 12th, 2008|Tutorial|

PowerPoint eConvention

So what is an “eConvention”? Well, Shawn Toh of PowerPoint Heaven, also a PowerPoint MVP based in Singapore has created an online convention specifically for PowerPoint designers.

September 1-26 (now) is open for anyone to review the entries and vote. Categories are Animation, Artwork, Game and Broadcast. Some are downloadable presentations, some are viewable on YouTube movies – all are very impressive!

Then on Sept. 27 the eConvention comes to a close with all of the award winners posted.

Check out the entries, and how to submit your own entry, here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:39:57-08:00September 10th, 2008|PowerPoint, Resource/Misc|

Point, Click & WOW!

The third edition of “Point, Click & WOW!” is a great resource if you do deliver presentations to an audience of any size. Claudyne Wilder has written a number of excellent books on PowerPoint and presenting, all excellent and provide great insight, support and information that everyone can make use of. And if you happen to be in Boston Thursday, September 18 you can hear Claudyne speak and do a book signing!

Check out the details on her website here (or check out Amazon by searching for the title).

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:40:23-08:00September 8th, 2008|Resource/Misc|

Blue Lens Template Download

The Blue Lens template I have used as an example was one of the concepts I created for a client. Obviously I ‘debranded’ it by removing any reference to a company or event, but now you can download the full template to review or use!

Download the template (saved as .ppt, not a .pot) here. Enjoy!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:41:51-08:00September 5th, 2008|Portfolio, Templates/Assets|

Setup of a Template

With the background elements developed in Photoshop and saved out as .jpg images the rest of the work happens in PowerPoint. Most of the work in setting up a template happens on the Master Slides. So the first thing for me is to set the background of each slide layout with the background artwork.

The Blue Lens template has a Content slide and a Title slide.

Next is to position the text boxes to fit the background, set the font size-color-line spacing and custom bullets:

I also set default slide transitions for each slide layout (in this case both use a FADE SMOOTHLY), format the header/footer text boxes, etc.

One of the things I think a lot of people overlook is customizing the color scheme. I always include a sample chart that shows all of the default colors I have setup.

Now everything is ready to build a slide show!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:42:12-08:00September 3rd, 2008|Portfolio, Templates/Assets, Tutorial|

Template Background Design

When creating a custom PowerPoint template the first step is developing the custom artwork for backgrounds. I am going to break down a template recently designed. In PhotoShop I pull in all of the visual assets and stylize an appropriate to the theme canvas for the PowerPoint slides. Here is the content slide design for the “Blue Lens” template.

There are a lot of layers to create the desired effect. Here is the PhotoShop layers for this template (shows both the Content and Title slide background layers). Fortunately this was a fairly light template in terms of layered elements so we can show them all in one easy screenshot.


This is a pet peeve, but I really hate receiving Photoshop files with none of layers named – it’s is a huge waste of my time to go hunting for a needed layer by turning on and off layers. So, as seen, I always label all layers in PhotoShop so modifications are easy because the layers can be quickly identified.

I save out each of the backgrounds as a .jpg with a compression level of 10. From there it is all PowerPoint!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:42:56-08:00September 1st, 2008|Portfolio, Tutorial|

I’ll Be Back!

I have 4 blog post series almost done(PPTPlex, Illustrator-to-PowerPoint, Animation, and more), but I am in the midst of several LARGE projects overlapping right now that have every moment at the computer stylizing presentations. So check back this next Monday for things to be back on track with a lot of great posts rolling out one after another!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:43:37-08:00August 26th, 2008|Personal|

PPTPlex – A New View of Presentations!

Okay, this is some pretty cool stuff! Microsoft Labs (kind of an R-&-D group that releases software that MS makes no guarantees about or support for) has made a PPT 2007 add-in that changes the way you think about slide navigation.

Imagine one slide having a dozen very very small thumbnail images of other slides and then those slides having even smaller thumbnail images of more slides. View the first slide, click on a thumbnail and zoom into it. Go through the slides in order or zoom back out to go to a different topic/section!

This one is easier to see explained, so click here for movie overview. I will be experimenting with PPTPlex this week and should have a few samples posted.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:43:59-08:00August 20th, 2008|Software/Add-Ins|

indisain.com – Images for Presentations

In searching for images for a current project I stumbled on indisain, a royalty free site that offers all images free of charge.

You do need to register in order to login and download images (without a watermark). I found the variety good, but the image size varied from usable (1280px wide) to unusable (100px wide). Images are categorized, but limited search capabilities with categories. And some categories had more images than others, such as the landscapes category with 72 pages of images.

If you need another image resource, you can check out indisain here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:44:29-08:00August 18th, 2008|Software/Add-Ins|
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