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

Designer Look for Tables

Tables contain lots of data – but often they do not blend with a presentations overall color scheme or design cues. Here is one example from a recent project that incorporated both the color scheme and design elements.

Color Scheme:
I filled the header bar with same color used for the bullets, bold text, and slide title area. The body of the table is filled with the presentation secondary color that was used throughout on several elements.

Design Cues:
The upper-left and lower-right feature rounded corners. Circles and rounded corners where a major design element throughout the presentation.


Up Next: How the rounded corners where created.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:09:13-08:00June 26th, 2007|Portfolio, Tutorial|

Article on PPT and Sales Presentations

Ran across this well written article about PowerPoint and sales presentations. The content really applies to any speaker support presentation.

I have never heard of Reliable Planet, but they definitely allowed one of their writers to hit the mark with an accurate and well written piece. Worth reading and bookmarking.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:08:51-08:00June 24th, 2007|Resource/Misc|

Caution: Quicktime Pro and Vista’s Ready Boost

Last week while developing an OFX based awards presentation (OfficeFX is a 3D****) I needed to convert provided Quicktime movies to a supported format. No problem, open each movie in Quicktime Pro and Export to an .avi. WRONG – export errored out. I then spent the next several hours troubleshooting by installing, uninstalling, hacking option settings and registry entries – nothing worked.

A few days later I figured out the problem. I have been taking advantage of Vista’s ReadyBoost technology (using a USB memory stick as an extended memory cache). Turns out Quicktime’s export feature is not compatible with ReadyBoost. Remove the USB memory stick – export movies from Quicktime Pro. Now you know too.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:08:28-08:00June 22nd, 2007|Software/Add-Ins|

PPT and Vista’s Active Thumbnails

I often run PowerPoint with an extended desktop setup with PowerPoint in the design or slide sorter view on the local monitor and presentation/slideshow on the external monitor. One of the downsides of this setup is that if I cannot see the external monitor/projector I do have an indicator of what slide I am actually on.

Windows Vista has some neat features, and some frustrations. Everyone has seen how Vista provides live thumbnails of all open applications and windows. Here is one example:

I can also use these active thumbnails to show me exactly what slide is active on an external monitor! By rolling over the ‘Slide Show’ tab it pops up a live thumbnail of the current slide. What’s even more hip is that the thumbnail will also show the animations in real time.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:08:05-08:00June 20th, 2007|Resource/Misc, Software/Add-Ins|

PPT Overlays To Graphics (4)

The final element was to create a placeholder for the financial information. I added another custom fill autoshape, this time a rectangle. After sized it was ‘sent to back’ and the appropriate text was added.

If you would like to download this slide, click here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:07:33-08:00June 18th, 2007|Portfolio, Tutorial|

PPT Overlays To Graphics (3)

Because the globe is an animated .gif, not a Flash or movie file we are able to overlay elements (Flash and all movie formats always play on top of all PowerPoint content). The green semi-transparent circle overlay is the first layer. The next layer was each division logo – in this case I have added the TLC Creative logo.

The Problem here is that the logo is a bit flat and the black text is lost. Again, the solution was using a PPT autoshape. This time I created a glow, which was simply a white circle with a custom fill from center. Here is one done in blue (so it can be seen on this white background).

The result is a nice highlight spot that not only makes the logo text legible, but adds a 3D element to the overall globe.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:06:35-08:00June 16th, 2007|Tutorial|

Google and PowerPoint

This week Google made an integrated PowerPoint viewer option to its online tools. Basically if you receive a PowerPoint presentation in a gmail account, there are a few options for the attachment; view as HTML, view as Slideshow, and download. Of course the key new option is VIEW AS SLIDESHOW.

Clicking View as Slideshow opens a new window and the presentation is displayed in a Flash based application. It does not handle everything perfect (I tested with an animation heavy presentation) and it is only a viewer. So there are no editing capabilities – yet. In reading others news feeds I noted that Google said edit & create slideshow tools would come by this summer…

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:06:10-08:00June 14th, 2007|Software/Add-Ins|

PPT Overlays To Graphics (2)

Because the globe is a circle, the solution to making it tie in with the template color scheme was to use a semi-transparent autoshape. I added a circle, sized it to the globe, then gave it a subtle 2-color fill.

This altered the “blue” globe to a “green” globe – without affecting the animated .gif

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:05:20-08:00June 10th, 2007|Tutorial|

PPT Overlays To Graphics (1)

This was a nice effect I worked on for a recent presentation. The goal was to use an animated globe to visually bring in a “global” element while discussing a corporations global sales.

The problem was the blue earth did not tie in with the template color scheme.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T16:04:59-08:00June 8th, 2007|Tutorial|
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