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
The Winter Olympics are here and all the excitement has begun. Google has a cool collection of all the highlight videos. Check it out daily here.
Troy @ TLC
Everyone has a workplace, mine just happens to move to a different hotel/convention center/conference room nearly every week. Part of the “Fun” is moving in all my computers, patching in everything and teching everything to assure it is doing what it needs to do.
I took a series of photos of a recent event, stitched them together in PhotoShop and then experimented with SnagIt’s very easy to use hotspot feature. To see the big image click here.
Troy @ TLC
Life just got a bit better! While I am not a coffee connoisseur, I enjoy good flavor and something nice and hot while working backstage. Of course being backstage does not afford many opportunities to find a good coffee drink. But now a hot latte is always in my bag! Enter Wolfgang Pucks’ self heating can.
Pull the lid off the bottom – push in the tab to release the heating chemical reaction – wait 5 minutes – open the top and enjoy a hot Mocha or Carmel Latte!
And if you’re really curious, here’s a review with photos of the can in action.
Troy @ TLC
Plain text floating under a photo. A diagram that uses lots of bland color boxes. A solid color callout on a chart. All are things that generally make a slide boring and look standard/’off the shelf.’
To create a polished look I create virtually all of these placeholder elements in PhotoShop (with bevels, glows, highlights, drop shadows, etc.) and import into the presentation. But aesthetic placeholders can be created in PowerPoint with a bit of creativity with custom fills, bold lines and layered shapes.
Download a quick 1 slide sample here.
Troy @ TLC
https://www.tlccreative.co…ials/movies.htm
Frustration is getting things working perfect on your computer and then discovering they do not work on another computer. This is a very common tech support call I get when it comes to movies playing in PowerPoint.
Knowing some of the behind the scenes workings of PowerPoint and multimedia. I added a page that covers the big points and offers a few solutions that I have had good results with. To see it click here.
I have just added a project write-up and movie that was ‘authored’ in PowerPoint. It is a good example of how PowerPoint is moving beyond PowerPoint and evolving into much more than slides for a presentation. Check it out here.
Troy @ TLC
We all have some perks from our profession. For me one recently occurred. I was asked to clean up the presentations for a corporate event and optimize the 40+ movie files so they would actually play when needed. All the work went great, but the producer called and requested I be there one evening to pick up some additional files – a bit of an inconvenience, but I agreed. When I arrived I was treated to a very cool, very candid Lance Armstrong speaking to a small group – A VERY COOL PERK!
Troy @ TLC
It can be a slow process to select custom colors for text or for an object’s fill, line, drop shadow. I have made good use of PPTXtreme’s Color Picker add-in to make custom color fills fast and easy! This is the first in a series of online demos planned. Click HERE to see the demonstration video of this add-in in action.
Troy @ TLC
I have been fortunate to have behind-the-scenes interaction with Microsoft’s PowerPoint development team. And I am admitting that the new “Ribbon” toolbar has some incredible ideas, innovation and research. But I also have a few reservations, so I am anxious to see what the final version ends up with customization capabilities (the developers at MS are revising it nearly daily).
If you are curious about the new ribbon and want some behind-the-scenes info and sneak peaks, visit Microsoft’s Jensen Harris’ Blog. I have been checking it for the past several weeks and some of the items I personally had concerns about have been covered (and resolved!). Check it out here.
Troy @ TLC
For your presentation you want to show how the world views a country, city or anything. Makes sense that the WORLD Wide Web could provide a world consensus on how something is viewed – right… While I am not going to recommend this for your next presentation, it does prove interesting (and I am sure a bit skewed).
Here is the resulting ‘Prejudice Map‘ that is subtitled “According to Google, people in the world are known for…” that Google Blogoscoped created.
Here is an example google search that was used to create the ‘German’ stereotype.
Troy @ TLC