PowerPoint

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)

“Something’s in the wind” or “change is in the wind” are phrases that means a transformation is imminent. Over the many years of presentation design projects and upgrades to PowerPoint and Keynote, one observation has been that Apple tends to move forward with software improvements… even when it means that older versions of the software will not be able to have those improvements. Whereas Microsoft has admirably lived by the mantra that legacy versions must be supported – above all, even if it means the newer version becomes bloated or performance impacted.

I can admire, and not admire, the long standing Microsoft position of wanting to assure legacy software versions of PowerPoint, Word, Excel, etc. always work with files from newer versions of the app. BUT, as the saying goes, “change is in the wind”. For the first time I have seen, the Microsoft Suite is officially moving forward – and not bringing along legacy versions of its software (and by legacy, we could be talking about support for PowerPoint 2000!).

-Troy @ TLC Creative

At TLC Creative Services Inc, we spend every day inside PowerPoint, and most of the time, our muscle memory serves us well. We know the keyboard shortcuts, the menus, the add-ins and, of course, how to manipulate and format objects. But there is one specific UI inconsistency that creates chaos with our workflow, and it’s when we switch between the Desktop and Web versions of PowerPoint. This is not a missing feature; it’s literally how you select objects.  

Let’s start outside PowerPoint, in Adobe Illustrator. First, Illustrator is a much (much) more robust vector image app vs. PowerPoint (but PowerPoint does have a lot of vector image editing and creation features!). The most basic feature is selecting elements or objects. Illustrator has a few variables based on the tool being used, but we are keeping this very simple – and Illustrator’s process is very simple. When drawing a selection marque in Illustrator, if ANY pixel of an object is within the selection, that object is included in the selection. 

Okay, that is how most graphic designers learn how object selection works. But the rules change in PowerPoint – and they change based on which PowerPoint app version is being used! Desktop or Web. 

If you’ve been using Desktop PowerPoint for years, you are used to the strict selection rule (which is completely different from Illustrator). To select an object or a group of objects by dragging your mouse, you must fully enclose all objects. If you draw a selection box around a group of items, but miss even just one corner by a pixel, that object is ignored and isn’t included in the selection.  

PowerPoint forces you to be deliberate. You must draw a massive box to ensure the entire object is “roped” in. Miss just one pixel, and that object is not part of the selection. This can be used to the advantage of the designer, or it can become a tedious part of the object selection process!  

But take the same slide and the same objects to PowerPoint for Web, and the rules change completely! PowerPoint for Web behaves much more like Adobe Illustrator. Draw a selection marque, and if the selection box touches even just one pixel of an object, it’s included in the selection. So yes, you can enjoy Adobe Illustrator-like selections in PowerPoint…for Web. 

It seems like a small detail, but when you’re moving fast, the inconsistency in selection methods between Adobe Illustrator and PowerPoint, and between Desktop PowerPoint and PowerPoint for Web, can easily throw off muscle memory workflows!  

Our ask of the PowerPoint Dev team – please add a preference setting in the future to both Desktop and Web versions of PowerPoint to toggle this behavior! Until then, you simply must remember which “mode” your brain needs to be in when you’re designing in the worlds of Adobe and Microsoft.  

Talk about a difference in user interface design! Which selection do you prefer, the precision of Desktop or the speed of Web?

-Jake and the TLC Creative Services Design Team 

After using PowerPoint daily for years, one starts to have a handle on everything the app is capable of. It becomes rare to stumble across a new shortcut that genuinely surprises you, let alone an extremely useful one. Recently, I discovered a keyboard combo that solves an annoying part of slide formatting: fixing capitalization.  

I’m sure this has happened to some of you out there: you paste a list of bullet points from an email, and the text is all lowercase. Or you frustratingly leave Caps Lock on while typing a long title. Usually, the fix would involve deleting and retyping or hunting down the feature on PowerPoint’s ribbon.  

It turns out that there is a keyboard shortcut that does it instantly: Shift + F3.  

Shift + F3 is a universal “Text Case Cycler” for all Microsoft Office apps. It works in PowerPoint, Word, Outlook, etc. This keyboard shortcut cycles through 3 these capitalization options: 

NOTE: This is one of Windows’ shortcut keys, meaning it’s the same shortcut in the web version of PowerPoint. For MAC users, the shortcut is Shift + fn + F3. 

When trying to correct capitalization, basically, there are different ways to fix it: 

1. Retype everything. Sometimes it’s just a couple of words or a name that needs to be fixed, in which case simply retyping is quick and painless. Of course, anything more than a couple of words, and it turns into a slower process.  
2. Users more familiar with PowerPoint can use PowerPoint’s Change Case feature. Go to the Home tab > click the dropdown menu found under the font size.  

         3. And finally, the ultimate keyboard shortcut: highlighting the text or clicking the text box and using the Shift + F3 keys. Do this one time for sentence case, two times for all caps, and three times for small caps (unfortunately, Capitalize Each Word is not included): 

The best keyboard shortcuts aren’t the complex ones that launch macros; they are the simple ones that fix daily annoyances. Shift + F3 turns a five-second frustration into a split-second fix. It’s a tiny trick, but once you start using this hotkey, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it. 

-Jake @ TLC Creative Services, Inc.

We’ve all been there. You’re building a PowerPoint deck, and you find a GREAT image to complement the talking point… but it’s not quite perfect. Maybe there’s a random stranger walking through the background of your team photo. Or perhaps the image could use a touch-up to make it pop more. In the past, stopping for edits like this meant pausing your workflow entirely to head over to your photo editing app of choice.  

If you have Adobe Creative Cloud, this means launching Photoshop and opening the same image separately and then proceeding with the editing yourself. Time-consuming tasks such as removing a background or adjusting the brightness, contrast, etc., are certainly a friction point that forces you out of your presentation mindset.  

But with this new update, Microsoft has just changed that workflow! Powerful AI photo editor tools are now baked directly into PowerPoint’s ribbon. You get decent editing capabilities without ever having to leave the PowerPoint application.  

Here is a high-level look at the new “Edit Picture” interface and what these tools can do. And before you read any further, no, the new Edit Picture tool does not have the ability to expand the background of a photo. ☹️

Accessing the new editor is in a slightly different spot on the Picture Format tab. Once you insert a photo (for this example, we just used Microsoft’s stock library), click the Picture Format tab and then select “Edit Picture” way over there on the left: 

This will open up the new interface as PowerPoint shifts into a focused photo editor mode, with a dedicated AI toolbar at the top. 

We’ll walk through a few of the editing options starting with Add Text: This will add custom text with a variety of different effects.  

Erase: You can use a quick selection or manually brush an area of the photo you’d like to erase. This isn’t the best example of a photo to use for this tool, but here’s a look: 

Move: This feature allows you to select a part of the image using the same auto selection or brush tool and then move that to another part of the image area (great for adding space for copy!) 

Upscale: Using this feature requires a fairly low-resolution image (most stock images, including the library within PowerPoint, are already very high resolution). For the sake of this walkthrough, I’ve downsized the resolution of our sample image here so that the upscale feature can be used. The photo editor will use AI to upscale the image to a higher resolution with no pixelation. You’ll notice it shows you a “before and after” slider so that you can see the changes: 

Remove Background: This will auto-select the background and remove it, like the old Remove Background feature that’s been in PowerPoint for quite some time, but AI-powered (and a lot less clunky).  

Auto Enhance: Using this will do an automatic photo touch-up. However, for better or worse, there are no customization settings, just one click, and it’ll enhance the image. This feature also uses the before and after slider so that you can see what was changed.  

Effects: These are special effects that we’ll be going into more detail in a future blog post.  

Now you might be thinking this is all powered by Microsoft’s flagship AI, Copilot. Technically, it’s not. While Copilot acts more as a “Project Manager” within the Office ecosystem, the Edit Picture feature is actually a two-part system: 

1. Computer Vision: To “see” the image and separate the subject from the background – this is part of the larger Microsoft Azure toolbox.  
2. Generative AI (DALL-E 3): To draw new pixels when you erase or move objects.  

Ultimately, this update isn’t just about cool AI photo editing tricks. You can think of it more as maintaining your workflow momentum. Every time you must minimize PowerPoint to open another app, it can make you lose focus. By bringing these image editor tools directly into the ribbon makes it easier to stay in the flow. Of course, these tools won’t replace the touch of a professional graphic designer, but for quick image fixes and touch-ups, they can really help keep you in the zone. 

-The TLC Creative Services design team