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

What is it; Macromedia or Adobe Flash?

Mergers and acquisitions even effect the most seemly stable companies. So the question came up that a client could not find the Macromedia Flash Player, would the Adobe Flash Player work?

Both are the same thing. The Flash format was developed by Macromedia, hence – Macromedia Flash (player). Recently Macromedia was purchased by Adobe and now the Macromedia Flash products have been rebranded Adobe Flash.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:25:10-08:00September 10th, 2007|Software/Add-Ins|

Animation Contest Showcase

Received an email from PowerPoint MVP, Tohlz (Shawn)of PPTHeaven about a PowerPoint Animation Contest held by Korea’s PowerPoint Expert Club.

Shawn has posted the 1st and 2nd place presentations on his site. These are worth the effort to download and look at – lots of great animation effects!

Click here to download and view the winning entry by Coolguy7.

(Note: image shows all of the animations on slide)

Click here to download and view the 2nd place entry by Zzagdol.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:24:27-08:00September 7th, 2007|PowerPoint|

Put PPT 2003 buttons and menus back in PPT 2007

Okay, the time has finally arrived. I am doing a major project in PowerPoint 2007! It is not that I have a problem with PPT 2007, I just have not had a client request. So up until now I have actually used PPT 2007 more when it was in Beta that after its release. Well, like many I am finding it somewhat tedious to learn where everything is in the new interface. I am also working under some tight timelines, so I do not have the luxury of learning at a leisurely pace. So for me a short term solution has been to add back some of the familiar PPT 2003 tool buttons.

This is a limited interface – it does not give you all of your customized layout from PPT 2003 (I wish!), but it does give a familiar look and feel to things. This is a free add-in that can be downloaded from here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:23:35-08:00September 3rd, 2007|Software/Add-Ins, Tutorial|

Organize and Enhance Movies in Presentation (3)

To add a professional touch to the aesthetics I create a feathered edge rectangle in Photoshop and save it as a .png with a transparent background.

I make sure it is sized just slightly larger than the movie image/placeholder and then send it BEHIND them. This provides a great aesthetic to the slide by adding some depth to the movie and making it float a bit off the background.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:23:15-08:00August 31st, 2007|Portfolio, Tutorial|

Organize and Enhance Movies in Presentation (2)

How does the person reviewing a printout of the slides know which movie is to be played, or even if it is a movie? When a movie is inserted on a slide it adds an image of the first frame of the movie. Sometimes this provides enough information to identify it. Other times it is something abstract or even black.

For all of my projects I take advantage of the fact that a movie will always play on top of all other content. I create a rectangle autoshape that is the same size as the movie image and place it ON TOP of the movie. I then add descriptive text.

Now anyone reviewing the slides in PowerPoint or from a printout knows exactly what is going to happen on this slide. Another benefit of this is that is does hide that first frame image of the movie that PowerPoint created – we’ve all seen the awkward image of the person with their mouth open – eyes closed – and out of focus, it’s a good thing to hide it!


Again, the movie is UNDER the autoshape, but during show mode it will “pop” to the front and hide the autoshape.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:22:56-08:00August 29th, 2007|Tutorial|

Organize and Enhance Movies in Presentation (1)

Do you think of the aesthetics of the slide when adding a movie? Are you satisfied with the fact that the slide is now “high-tech” because it has a movie? Well, that must be the thinking of lots of presentations I receive, as there is often no thought of the overall slide layout and aesthetics.

(1) If there is no other content on the slide, center it.

(2) Respect the template background elements and position the movie within these boundaries (ie. don’t have it overlap the title bar or other framing elements of the background design).

Sounds simple but I see dozens of presentations where movie placement is an after thought.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:22:33-08:00August 27th, 2007|Tutorial|

PPT and Vista/Wacom Bug Fixed!

Once again I have good news and one less reason to reformat my computer! Wacom has recently released a new set of drivers for its tablets – which I use. If you look back to the May 13, 2007 post I mentioned an annoyance with objects jumping around when selected.

Well I narrowed it down to either the Logitech or Wacom drivers, but had no solution. Over the weekend I installed the newly released Wacom driver and PowerPoint behaves once again!

If you a Wacom tablet on a Vista machine, go here and get the latest drivers.

Okay, one more reason to keep Vista installed.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:22:09-08:00August 22nd, 2007|Software/Add-Ins|

Vista Display Driver Updated!

So I have been tempted to reformat my primary computer, which is running Vista Ultimate, and go back to XP (on many occasions). What keeps me from this drastic action? Really it is a lack of time – if I am in front of a computer I am busy working on a project (which almost 24/7 lately) and the thought of taking time to deal with the nusances of Vista just does not make my priority list right now.

One of the major issues has been this fantastic 512MB graphics card having the features of a 10 year old model. In other words, it had no advanced features – Such as Flat Panel Scaling.

Well NVidia has finely come through provided a robust update to its control panel and now I can actually use this computer to run a show if needed (which I generally don’t do – this is my production computer, I have a small fleet of ‘show’ computers for that task). Of course my thought has been that by next year all of the Vista issues I am experiences will be resolved as software catchs up. But for now – one annoyance resolved!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:21:48-08:00August 20th, 2007|Software/Add-Ins|

Giuliani’s PowerPoint Presentation

Former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani recently made the news with a link to an PowerPoint presentation used to show the statistics and other information about the current positioning of the political race. If you are interested, click here to read the article (only if you are politically interested in such info).

But the real treat was looking at a ‘professional’ presentation!

Click here to view the presntation.

Now I’m not a big fan of stock templates, but even those would have been a huge help to the aesthetics of this presentation. If anyone knows people in the Giuliani office, feel free to pass along a link to ThePowerPointBlog so they can pick up some design and layout tips.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:21:17-08:00August 15th, 2007|PowerPoint|
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