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.
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!).
Jake’s Card #48
Jake drew The Better Deck Deck card 48 – Timeline. This is a great before (standard bullet list) to after (visual timeline of content)!
Karen’s Card #49
Karen is one of the newer designers on the TLC Creative team (okay, she has been with TLC Creative for a year) and she drew card 49 – Path. 
New Presentation Podcast Episode (Talking about Bulletless Design)!
New podcast episode releases today! Join Troy, Nolan and Sandy as they critique Better Deck Deck inspired slide designs!
Troy @ TLC
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!).
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:
- Google “random number generator”. Set the max at 52. Generate.
- That is your first Better Deck Deck style to use.
- Go to https://www.mentalfloss.com/amazingfactgenerator (okay to refresh until there is a stat you like)
- Create a boring/standard bullet point list slide based on the amazing fact.
- Create a bulletless design slide, using The Better Deck Deck card style that was randomly assigned to you in step #1.
Troy @ TLC
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
Switch Teams Tenants within PowerPoint
Thanks to Sandy Johnson who gave this as her Pro & Tech Tip on episode 168 of The Presentation Podcast! This applies to everyone that has multiple accounts, or tenants, on Microsoft teams.
Within Microsoft Teams, if there are multiple accounts, click on your name and available accounts are shown in the dropdown.
Microsoft Office now has the option to choose what account, or tenant, Office is using (no more signing out of one account to sign into another, it is now a dynamic selection!). Within PowerPoint, if there are multiple accounts, click on your name and available accounts are shown in the dropdown.
Troy @ TLC
The Presentation Podcast Episode Releases Today!
There is a new PowerPoint centric book, and this conversation is Troy, Sandy and Nolan talking with Chantal Bosse about her just released book, ” Microsoft PowerPoint Best Practices, Tips, and Techniques”. Listen in on a great conversation and book that everyone who aspires to use PowerPoint’s tools and features will want to add to their library. Listen here.