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

Troy & Lori on The Presentation Podcast!

This episode is Troy and Lori Chollar. Microsoft Teams enables all PowerPoint files to be a collaboration file with dozens of people reviewing and editing the same file, at the same time. Troy and Lori of TLC Creative Services talk about how they have integrated Teams into the company presentation design workflow, how Teams files are key to their slide review process, and how Teams files are often a part of the backend setup for live meetings.

Listen here.

By |2023-03-20T23:25:46-07:00March 21st, 2023|PowerPoint, Resource/Misc|

Christie’s Card #1

Christie followed up her card 39, Speaker Notes, by converting the same book page of text on “The Poison Garden of Alnwick Castle” into a simple, quick to follow, Better Deck Deck card #1 – Basic Chunking.

By |2023-03-22T08:47:12-07:00March 15th, 2023|Portfolio, PowerPoint|

Christie’s Card #39

Christie has been with TLC Creative for almost a decade (wow!) and is an amazingly talented designer. She drew card 39 – Speaker Notes. To paraphrase, the idea is to take a slide with too much text and create a simple visual to talk to. Christie embraced that with moving the paragraphs of bulleted text to the Speaker Notes and developing a beautiful slide in both imagery and typography for a presenter to tell the story of “The poison garden of Alnwick Castle” (it’s a real place!).

By |2023-03-22T08:47:06-07:00March 13th, 2023|Portfolio, PowerPoint|

Lori’s Card #1

Starting things off is Lori Chollar, CEO of TLC Creative Services, who drew card #1 – Basic Chunking (I am admittedly biased, but this is a great slide design, and why Lori is always in demand for presentation design!).

By |2023-02-24T22:38:46-08:00March 6th, 2023|Portfolio, PowerPoint|

Bulletless Design – An Internal Project

Nolan Haims created “The Better Deck Deck”, which is a great example of modern presentation communication. The product tagline is “52 Alternatives to Bullet Points” which is an obvious clue that The Better Deck Deck has 52 cards, each with a design example of ways to visually communicate.

As an internal design project among the TLC Creative Services team, I created a fun (at least I thought it was fun) project for everyone to create a series of slides using some of The Better Deck Deck’s slide layout options. Before sharing some of the (amazing) slide designs, let me share the design team instructions:

  1. Google “random number generator”. Set the max at 52. Generate.
  2. That is your first Better Deck Deck style to use.
  3. Go to https://www.mentalfloss.com/amazingfactgenerator (okay to refresh until there is a stat you like)
  4. Create a boring/standard bullet point list slide based on the amazing fact.
  5. Create a bulletless design slide, using The Better Deck Deck card style that was randomly assigned to you in step #1.

Troy @ TLC

By |2023-02-24T22:35:56-08:00March 2nd, 2023|PowerPoint, Resource/Misc|

Brightslide Selection Pane Shortcut

This is the final day of the shortest month of the year. A short month kind of means shorter number of work hours for projects. After working on complex slides for the past few days, I am indebted to the Brightslide team! These 2 buttons have literally saved me 3 hours this past week!

When I first played with these tools on the Brightslide toolbar a few years ago, I was dubious of them. They seem too simple. Select an object on a slide, click the left icon and it activates the Selection Pane view to turn off, or hide that object. The right icon is the Selection Pane, show all – e.g. show everything that was hidden or turned off.

Eventually both of these buttons made there way to spots on my QAT, which is the core of my formatting workflow in PowerPoint. This past week working on complex, layered content slides (think vector maps where each state or country is a selectable object with overlays to animate on to have the map follow the talk, and then overlays of “map pins” to further support the talk). The ability to not need the Selection Pane open, scroll up and down it to find the object to hide has saved hours of my production time – just in the past week!

Kudos, and thank you to the Brightslide PowerPoint add-in dev team!

Troy @ TLC

By |2023-02-28T00:27:52-08:00February 28th, 2023|Personal, PowerPoint, Software/Add-Ins|
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