PowerPoint

If you are reading this post, I hope you’ve already read the previous post, “What is the PowerPoint Media Bar?”!

At TLC Creative Services, we leverage PowerPoint’s embedded media capabilities for many projects. So with that experience in mind, we have several audio/video tips and tricks for you! Here are a few of our favorite power user tips for PowerPoint’s playback media bar:  

1. Volume 

a. PowerPoint sets the volume at 80% when inserting videos or audio files. Click the speaker icon to adjust the preset volume (eg., make it quieter for videos that will be spoken over, make it louder for the presentation intro!) – or mute the volume if no audio is needed for that video. Save the presentation, and the volume setting will also be saved. 

2. Presenter View

a. The slide preview is active for the playback media bar. Move the mouse over the Presenter View slide and video, and the playback media bar displays and becomes interactive (eg., you can pause, play, scrub, etc.). 

b. BEWARE, the playback media bar also (unfortunately) is seen by the audience too! They just don’t see your mouse!

3. Turn Off the Media Bar 

If you don’t want to have the media bar popup while presenting, PowerPoint has an option to turn off the media bar!

a. Go to the SLIDESHOW tab 

b. In the SETUP section 

c. Uncheck the SHOW MEDIA CONTROLS 

NOTE: This (unfortunately) affects all media in the presentation, and cannot be set to only disable the playback media bar for specific videos ☹️ 

 Troy @ TLC Creative Services

After a conversation with a PowerPoint user, I was looking at this past blog post from March 2016, Use The PowerPoint Video Playback Bar. While all of the info there is still accurate, it’s time for a refresher and a few updated tips!

Every video and audio file embedded on a slide has a pop-up media playback bar seen while editing the slide, and when presenting. 

Where the media bar displays depends on where it is viewed; either slide edit view or presenting. When editing a slide, clicking on the video (or audio speaker icon) displays the playback media bar BELOW the video. In this view, the media playback bar is opaque (covering any slide content under it).

When presenting and moving the mouse over the video, the playback media bar displays OVER the bottom of the video. In this view, the media playback bar is semitransparent, allowing the video under it to still be seen. 

The playback media bar has 3 playback control options: 

1. Play / Pause the video (or audio) 

2. See the playback progress, plus click anywhere on the timeline to jump to that position, or click-and-drag to “scrub” through the video forward or back

3. Volume Control 

One of the really exciting updates to PowerPoint since the 2016 blog post is that we can interact with media in Presenter View, without the audience seeing our mouse onscreen! As example, this animated GIF shows a sample presentation’s Presenter View. Moving the mouse over the video, on the Presenter View screen – not the audience slide screen, the media playback bar displays and the presenter can interact with it in any way needed (NOTE: while the mouse is not seen by the audience, the media bar is seen on the slideshow – which is a disappointment to me).  

Check back for the next post, where I am covering some “Power Tips for PowerPoint’s Playback Media Bar”!

Troy @ TLC Creative Services

This short tutorial walks through the design process our presentation design team uses to create these fun “video arrows” in PowerPoint. The end result will be a series of arrow shapes on a slide… but their background is a dynamic video! 

To start, add 3 PowerPoint arrows to a fresh slide (these can be the default PowerPoint arrows, or a more stylized .svg arrow from PowerPoint’s Stock Images, or a resource like TheNounProject. For this example, we used 3 ascending PowerPoint arrows:

With the static arrow layout set, we can move on to create the video version. Find a video that is larger than the area the 3 arrows occupy. 

• For the best visual effect, a seamlessly looping video is best. 

• PowerPoint has a good selection of videos by going to INSERT > VIDEOS > STOCK VIDEOS. 

• Or use your website of choice (our team used Adobe Stock for our video selection). 

Embed the video onto a separate, new slide. 

On the arrows slide, select the arrows and MERGE so they are a single shape: 

1-3: Select all 3 arrows 

4: Go to the “Shape Format” tab  

5: Select “Union” from the Merge Shapes dropdown menu   

This will combine the arrows into a single vector shape – this is a crucial step for the next part. 

Next, copy the new single shape of 3 arrows and paste it onto the video slide. 

TIP: Hide the original 3-arrow slide to keep it for later use, because in the next step, we are going to “destroy” the arrows, so they are no longer arrow shapes.   

On your video slide, select the video FIRST. Then shift + click to select the arrow’s shape.

NOTE: The order of this selection is very important.  

Go to the MERGE SHAPES again (select > Shape Format tab > Merge Shapes> Union). This time, select the INTERSECT tool.  

This crops the video into the arrow shape! The result is a video that plays inside a custom video shape – all created in PowerPoint!! The standard PowerPoint video playback functions are still used to set the video to play and loop, AND you can use PowerPoint’s crop function to size and position the video within the arrow shape. Talk about cool presentation design!

Now, you can copy and paste these custom video shapes into any presentation!

Jake @ TLC Creative Services 

Presentation designers have their own language. I did a fun thing of having Copilot review several of our presentation review meetings (Teams meetings captured by Copilot) and make a list of industry-specific terms. The results were interesting – and a lot (with a lot of results not really what I was looking for)!

Then, during a TLC Creative Services weekly team meeting, I posed the same question: “What are presentation-specific words that would not make sense to someone outside our presentation world?” It was a fun conversation!

Here, we present the 18 key words that overlapped between the Copilot review of presentation-specific meetings and our design team’s real-world look at the presentation industry’s words and phrases. Enjoy our “Presentation Jargon” – designed and animated in PowerPoint of course!

-Troy @ TLC Creative

Before diving into Presenter View’s display of Presenter Notes, let’s first look at PowerPoint’s Notes Master.

This is where the slide and Presenter Notes are merged for print. But, really, it’s another “hidden” function within PowerPoint that few know about, and even fewer consider customizing. 

Each Master Slide in a PowerPoint file has a Notes layout, which is used for printing slide notes pages. The Microsoft default layout has a fairly large image, or thumbnail, of the slide, and a text box below it for the Presenter Notes using the same font as the master slide text and sized at 12 point. Along with the Header, Footer, date, and page number placeholders in the 4 corners of the page.  

[image of default notes layout showing the placeholders] 

To access the Notes Master, go to the VIEW tab > MASTER VIEWS section > and click the NOTES MASTER icon. 

Note: To close the Notes Master and return to the slides, go to the HANDOUT MASTER tab > CLOSE section > click the CLOSE icon. 

For TLC Creative, we have our own version of Notes Master layout that we like, and it is included on all PowerPoint templates we create. 

• Smaller and positioned higher slide image 

• Larger text box 

• Preset bullets, font sizes, line & paragraph spacing 

• Date moved to the lower left 

• Footer centered at the bottom of the page 

• Header and page number placeholders stay in their respective corners 

A special note is that if a presentation has multiple master slides, each master slide has its own Notes Master. This is important for slide deck printouts where formatting of each Notes Master needs to be reviewed to ensure the Notes View printout is consistent. 

So… how does this relate to using Presenter View when presenting? We will address that in the next post! 

Troy @ TLC Creative

…

The TLC Creative Services design team receives presentation slides continuously as part of design projects, presentation makeover projects, and to run for live corporate event projects. This is a nice graphic that was core to a recent event (eg. I received the presentation at an event and had nothing to do with the presentation design).

THE ASK, THE PROBLEM

– First was an ask to animate the graphic, which was not possible as it was inserted into the presentation as a flat raster image (e.g. a JPG image). Inserting as a vector .svg would have been great!

– Second, and only because I was asked to work with the graphic did I take a closer look, and then discovered (and called out) the problem… do you see it?

Note: by the time I was working with this graphic, it had already been used in presentations, other attendee collateral, and a website… I am certain it was reviewed and vetted by multiple people, all of whom were asked to approve the graphic.

There is an important, real-world lesson here. Even with multiple layers of reviewing and proofing, typos happen!

Time’s up! Did you spot the typo? “DRVIEN”

I am guessing the typo would’ve been caught had it been the only graphic on the slide. However, in this case, the word “DRIVEN” is just one element in a busy graphic – and I was looking at it on a busy slide with several other text boxes. And all that ‘other’ text pulled attention away from this circle graphic.

THE EMERGENCY FIX

Having this graphic as an .SVG on the slide would have solved many problems. It could have been ungrouped and animated, which was the original request. It also could have been ungrouped and then modified to fix the typo.

Since the source art was not going to be available in time for that day’s meeting, I did some Photoshop work and produced a “fixed” version of the graphic – at least the graphic used in the presentation I was running was fixed!

-Troy @ TLC Creative

This is directly from The Presentation Podcast episode 244 conversation (listen here) where the podcast hosts, Troy – Nolan – Sandy, talked about bullet points, specifically when they are not needed on a slide. The conversation was envisioned after Troy received this slide from a client recently:

• Note: client content has been stripped from the slide, and master.
• The conversation focused not only about the bullet list text boxes not being aligned (which was very obvious when the slide was on a 30′ wide screen!), but also that the icon + bullet + key word does not make an effective slide.
• Listen to the podcast for a full conversation about this slide’s bullets and many other bullet point talking points. 😂 (The Presentation Podcast, episode 244)

In preparing for the podcast I sent the example slide to Nolan and Sandy, and some of the TLC Creative design team. Today I get to share the slide makeovers!

(Troy)

(Sandy)

(Nolan)

(this version from Nolan was set up as a multi-slide animation)

(Lori – and this slide was a full animation sequence! Static 1st frame shown here)

(Amber)