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

Office has a new default font – Aptos!

PowerPoint, Word, Excel and Outlook officially have a new default font.

Note: As of today I am not seeing the new font used when I open a blank presentation, on both desktop app and PowerPoint online, but it is coming! The Aptos font family is available in the font list, but not used as the default font when opening new, blank documents. Because the Aptos font has officially been announced and released, I think it will be rolled out to everyone within the next few weeks – assuming they are on a Microsoft 365 subscription.

Quick history of the default font in Microsoft Office apps:

  • Times New Roman – default font until 2007
  • Calibri – 2007 to 2023
  • Aptos – 2023 to ??

From Si Daniels, a principal program manager at Microsoft, “Aptos is a part of a broader wave of features coming to Microsoft 365. We’re pushing to make the software more expressive and inclusive,” explains Daniels. “There’s a newly designed font picker experience, along with new themes, colors, and backgrounds.” More on these over the next few posts!

Other notable information about Aptos:

  • It has 24 font types
  • It is designed to work equally well for high-resolution display and print, from very small to very large
  • It is designed for global use, supporting all major languages
  • The process began several years ago when Microsoft started the replacement to Calibri by adding five new fonts in 2021; Tenorite, Bierstadt, Skeena, Seaford, and Grandview
  • Bierstadt and Aptos are the same font. In 2023 the Bierstadt font was renamed to Aptos, but the font in both names remains available

I am excited by this font. The variety of font weights and sizes means a single font can be used throughout a presentation or document and provide visual variety, hierarchy and creativity.

-Troy @ TLC

 

By |2023-08-01T10:28:23-07:00August 8th, 2023|PowerPoint|

NXPowerlite Update – v10

NXPowerLite is one of those PowerPoint add-ins the TLC Creative Services design team relies on and uses continuously (no paid endorsement, this truly is software we use!).

If you are not familiar, NXPoweriLte from Neuxpower, is a file compression add-in. We use NXPowerLite  for PowerPoint, but it also handles Word, Excel, PDF, and JPG images.

I have a custom set of optimize profiles. We have the same set of profiles on all of the TLC Creative team so we are literally doing the same thing. In version 10 of NXPowerlite, there is an improved set of default profiles that should make the compression options easier and better when used right-out-of-the box. Note: currently v10 is only available for Windows OS. It can be run as a standalone app (drag and drop PPTX files onto the app), or activated from within PowerPoint and it will optimize the file that is currently open.

The big improvement I am most excited about is NXPowerLite now being better and overcoming issues that stop a file from being compressed. e.g. the compression process fails. It still does not identify the issue (generally an image in a file format that errors out), but there is a host of really good online info and a direct integration with 7-zip to open the PowerPoint file and deal with the problem image directly. I think many “power-users” will find this a faster process to what they were already doing (we have 7-zip installed on all computers here at TLC Creative and all of the design team has been trained on how to open a .pptx file, locate the problem file, edit and replace).

Lots of other improvements too. One that I am excited to see – because it has created problems many times for me – is maintaining the EXIF orientation data in compressed images. This should eliminate a conflict where a cropped image is compressed and then displays in the wrong orientation and squeezed into the image container size after running NXPowerLite.

More details on the v10 updates can be read about on the Neuxpower website here. The NXPowerLite product page, including download of free trial to test, is here.

-Troy @ TLC

By |2023-07-28T11:02:26-07:00August 3rd, 2023|Software/Add-Ins|

Now returning to our regularly scheduled program

I hope everyone had a great summer! It has been busy here at TLC Creative Services, and the PowerPoint blog summer hiatus enabled me to focus on some specialty projects.

My original thought when setting up the summer break was “how much can happen in PowerPoint, the presentation industry, and at TLC Creative over the summer?” Well, turns out it was a busy summer and there has been a lot of change and news! One planning update is The PowerPoint Blog will have fresh presentation and PowerPoint posts every Tuesday and Thursday, starting today.

-Troy @ TLC

 

By |2023-08-01T14:57:02-07:00August 1st, 2023|Personal|

Summer Hiatus

The PowerPoint Blog is going to pause through the summer and resume in August (of this year!). At TLC Creative Services we are happily busy. And we are busy with finalizing a major roll out of a new virtual meeting service and Meeting Planner tools, which is a big time commitment on my part. I have a list of blog posts to write up, but not enough time to get to them right now. So I am doing an official pause on blog posts through the summer months (June and July).

Have a great summer! See you in the Fall!

Troy @ TLC

By |2023-06-04T16:24:02-07:00May 25th, 2023|Personal|

The Presentation Podcast – episode 174!

The PowerPoint app available today has gotten better and better over the years. It is an amazing application with features and uses. BUT that is not to say PowerPoint is perfect – or that there are features that are asked for – or there are existing features that need fixing. There are. And this episode, Troy, Nolan and Sandy talk about those missing and not complete features, knowing there is no expectation that anything beyond having a great conversation is the end result.

Listen here.

By |2023-05-15T17:05:36-07:00May 16th, 2023|Resource/Misc|
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