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

Visio is Nifty, But Not Pretty

MS Visio is a great tool for putting complex processes into a visual layout. But, like most business applications, it does not have a lot of visual aesthetics. Here is a slide from a recent project:

The best thing about this slide (to me), is the client was able to quickly create something that showed me exactly what they wanted.

My job was to inject some visual dynamics to the presentation. So a few hours of working in PhotoShop and PowerPoint the same information now looks like this:

Same information – just a slightly enhanced presentation of it!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T14:10:25-08:00August 8th, 2006|Portfolio|

Ugly Hyperlinks in Your Presentation?

For reference you add a URL to a slide. But the text changes color, an underline is added, and in general is ugly!

You have options to bring back the aesthetics of your slide – here is the easiest. Select the text box and right click on the hyperlink and choose REMOVE HYPERLINK.

This strips out the active link programming and changes the URL into plain text. It will not be able to be clicked as an active link after this. The result is happy, beautiful, text once again!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T14:09:45-08:00August 6th, 2006|Tutorial|

Use “Blank” for Your Browser Home Page

My preference when it comes to a browser Home Page is to have the browser open with nothing (zip, nada, white space). It takes time to load a page, which is usually not the one I want to see. Here is how to setup Internet Explorer:

(1) Go to TOOLS >> INTERNET OPTIONS

(2) On the General tab, click USE BLANK button.

-Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T14:09:25-08:00August 4th, 2006|Tutorial|

Set Home Page in Internet Explorer FAST

Thanks to Brad Hagen, owner of Video Resources, for showing me this nifty shortcut! On a recent project I was responsible for setting up an event’s internet cafe. Set up a wireless network, configure the dozen computers and set up with custom wallpaper, set the browser homepage, etc.

Here is how to set the browser homepage in three easy steps:

(1) Browse to URL you want to be the home page
Set TLCCreative.com as your homepage!

(2) Click-and-drag the webpage icon in the address bar

and drag on top of the “Home” icon

(3) Click “Yes” to the dialog. Done!

-Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T14:09:01-08:00August 2nd, 2006|Software/Add-Ins, Tutorial|

Download Office 2007 today (or pay)

In an interesting move, Microsoft will begin charging a $1.50 to download Beta 2 of Office 2007.

“We are thrilled with the incredible excitement around the upcoming 2007 Microsoft Office system as evident by more than 3 million people using the beta 2 since its release two months ago. Having exceeded our beta 2 participation goals by 500%, we have had to make the business decision to implement a cost recovery measure for future downloads of beta 2 beginning 2 August, 2006.” (source: The Register.com)

By |2016-11-17T14:08:40-08:00August 1st, 2006|Software/Add-Ins|

New Ribbon UI Movie

Microsoft’s Jensen Harris recently posted this movie showing how the new Ribbon can be minimized and still used. While not a big fan when I first viewed the ribbon in the pre-beta, there has been A LOT of good work going on at Microsoft and my expectations are looking better! Check this 38 second movie here (or high-bandwidth version here).

-Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T14:08:12-08:00July 28th, 2006|Software/Add-Ins, Tutorial|

Line Spacing and the Magic of F4

Here is our sample text.

To help visually cluster the information by the primary bullets we position the cursor on the second bullet and add additional spacing BEFORE PARAGRAPH of 0.5

Now to do the same for the third bullet we can either position the cursor on the third bullet line, open the Line Spacing dialog and enter the new distance OR we position the cursor on the third bullet line and click the F4 button!

F4 is a keyboard shortcut in PowerPoint that repeats whatever the last action was. In this case it automatically changes the BEFORE PARAGRAPH line spacing from 0.2 to 0.5, matching the bullet above!

-Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T14:07:36-08:00July 24th, 2006|Tutorial|

What Does Line Spacing Do?

Here is a sample three lines of text and the default line spacing dialog.

If I select the entire text box and change the LINE SPACING all of the lines move further apart as you can see here.

If I place the cursor in line 2 and add BEFORE PARAGRAPH space, the distance between line 2 and line 1 increases. The distance between line 2 and 3 remains the same.

If instead I place the cursor on line 2 and add AFTER PARAGRAPH space, the distance between line 2 and 3 increases. While the distance between line 1 and 2 remains the same.

-Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T14:07:17-08:00July 22nd, 2006|Tutorial|

Access Line Spacing Dialog

With your cursor positioned at the line to be adjusted, or with the entire text box selected (will globally change all lines in text box), go to FORMAT LINE SPACING.

This brings up the Line Spacing Dialog which has three settings that can be adjusted.

(1) Adjusts the distance between the lines of a paragraph.
(2) Adjusts the distance between the start of this paragraph and the one above it (separated by a hard return).
(3) Adjusts the distance between the last line of this paragraph and the one below it (separated by a hard return).

-Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T14:06:58-08:00July 20th, 2006|Tutorial|
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