PowerPoint

Have a presentation? We’ll Travel

Travel 1

For January, The PowerPoint Blog is focusing on 2015 Portfolio Highlights. Looking at the 2015 project calendar, it was a busy year. Along with the number of presentation shows we get to support, comes lots of travel. It’s great to experience new parts of the world and build new memories.

Here are a few of the memorable destinations that took place in 2015:

  • Istanbul, Turkey
  • New Orleans, Louisiana (multiple times)
  • Bermuda
  • New York, New York
  • Orlando, Florida (multiple times)
  • Los Angeles, California (many, many times)
  • Singapore
  • Seattle, Washington
  • Many other ballrooms in cities across the U.S. and Canada

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T08:48:20-07:00January 4th, 2016|Personal, PowerPoint|

PowerPoint 2016 and the QAT (it doesn’t fit!)

I have been moving TLC Creative Services to Windows 10 and Office 2016 in small groups. The new OS and updated version of Office are stable and provide a great work environment (with a lot of customization of settings to be what I want!). One item I have not been able to figure out a solution for is how PowerPoint 2016 displays the QAT.

Here is my QAT with Office 2013 (captured last month) with PowerPoint full screen on a 1920×1080 resolution. There are 37 quick access buttons to make my design time more efficient. Note: The last button is close to the middle of the PowerPoint ribbon.

2016_QAT_3

Now here is the exact same QAT, on the exact same resolution monitor and full screen app. The only change is a move to PowerPoint 2016. Note: The last button on my QAT is not visible, the QAT buttons are incredibly spread apart and now span the entire ribbon width – and the last few buttons do not even fit, they are cut off!

2016_QAT_1

I do not have a solution (yet). I did think of the Touch Mode that adjusts the interface, but it does not affect the QAT, just the ribbon buttons. I will report back if (when) I find a QAT display solution.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T08:51:16-07:00October 16th, 2015|PowerPoint, Resource/Misc|

The Pyramid Pie Chart

A few weeks ago, at The Presentation Summit in New Orleans, I was happily a part of the audience listening to Nigel Holmes give the opening General Session talk. Nigel is British, funny (in a British way), memorable (especially the vibrant blue rimmed glasses) and amazingly observant. In talking with Nigel later, he made it very clear that he is not claiming the below pie chart graphic as his, but I am giving him all the credit for weaving it into his talk since it was the first time I have seen it.

Nigel_Holmes

One of the TLC Creative designers recreated this amazing 3D perspective pie chart (from a photo I took of Nigel’s presentation) and it still makes me smile!

Pyramid_PieChart

Feel free to download the TLC Creative version of this slide Here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T08:51:42-07:00October 14th, 2015|Personal, PowerPoint|

The PowerPoint QAT – A Designer’s Best Tool

The Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) is one of the best options for making your design work faster, if setup properly. The PowerPoint QAT is basically a collection of the top used “buttons” always accessible without having to change tabs on the ribbon.

PowerPoint QAT 3

Setting up the QAT is fairly easy, but tedious. But Microsoft has made it very easy to leverage someone else’s effort. In this case, my effort, think of it as my gift to everyone that reads this post, and instantly setup your QAT with 37 buttons to speed up design.

Download the QAT file HERE (unzip and “PowerPoint Customizations.exportedUI”).

In PowerPoint, go to FILE > OPTIONS > QUICK ACCESS TOOLBAR > IMPORT/EXPORT > IMPORT > select the downloaded file > say YES to the dialog > done.

PowerPoint QAT 2

– Troy @ TLC

 

By |2016-08-10T08:54:31-07:00September 28th, 2015|PowerPoint, Resource/Misc, Software/Add-Ins|

Something New On My QAT

The QAT is the #1 customization and way to speed up design work. Recently, I was using another designer’s computer and discovered an amazing button for the QAT, and it is unbelievable that it was not one of the first items I added when first customizing it!

QAT-Animation Pane 1

This button opens the Custom Animation Pane. I predict that this button will save me 10 hours of design time in 2016! The animation pane is something I access continuously, and going to the Animations tab and then the Animation Button takes a lot of mouse movement and, ultimately, time. Now, if I need to review the animation on a slide (not necessarily add animation, just see what is on a slide and adjust timing in the Animation Pane), I click this button no matter what tab I am on and the animation information needed is there.

To add, go to FILE > OPTIONS > QUICK ACCESS TOOLBAR. In the POPULAR COMMANDS list, the 6th item down is ANIMATION PANE. Select it and click the add button to place it on your QAT.

QAT Animation Pane 2

Hopefully everyone has discovered this wonderful button and already have it on your QAT (and are now seriously wondering how good I really am at that PowerPoint program). Just sharing my experience and hopefully helping others not feel left out by not having the Animation Pane button on their QAT.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T08:55:49-07:00September 24th, 2015|PowerPoint|

PowerPoint 2016 For Windows Available Today!

The cadence for updates at Microsoft is definitely much faster – today Office 2016 (for Windows, not to be confused with Office 2016 for Mac which was released earlier this year) is available.

Office16_banner

How Often Is Microsoft Releasing Updates:

  • From the information I have seen, Microsoft is releasing (for Office 365 subscription use) updates now 3 releases per year: February, June, October
  • In addition, there are monthly minor updates, which are mostly security updates and feature fixes/updates
  • The Sept 22 release, which is a new version release, is actually the October cycle release (I guess we can look at it as being released early!)

What is New in PowerPoint 2016:

  • To be honest – not much, at least from a design and feature perspective. So far to me, this release is about adding new back-end features and functionality. Check out this list from the Microsoft site that highlights the big Office initiatives, here.
  • For PowerPoint design specifically, I like the improved Dark theme, the new chart styles are welcome and the ability to export a presentation at full 1080p is great! End of list for me…

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T08:56:42-07:00September 22nd, 2015|PowerPoint|

PowerPoint for Print Poster Design

“PowerPoint Documents” is our internal term for using PowerPoint as the design tool for print/PDF documents. These do not use slide transitions, animations, or other “presentation” features. This example is a part of previous post project (sync’ing narration to animated slides), where in addition to the presentation design we developed a 24″x36″ poster that visually coordinated with the presentation design.

SofnetPosterImage_1 SofnetPosterImage_2

Note: Typically we would design this in Adobe InDesign for assure print quality, full bleed design, etc.

The request was to develop in a PowerPoint so edits could be completed by the client for each talk. We setup with a custom page size, optimized the graphics for the larger slide size, added the requested content. The end deliverable was the 2 posters, 2 slides in a PowerPoint document. The client was able to revise content, create PDFs to send out or print (and we included print quality specifications regarding PDF from PowerPoint resolution).

– Troy @ TLC

 

By |2016-08-10T09:05:34-07:00July 8th, 2015|Portfolio, PowerPoint|

Talk Narration in the Presentation

With audio being so easy to embed into PowerPoint, we are having many clients request we create a version of the presentation with their talk embedded into the slides.

PowerPoint does have audio recording features, but we opt for pre-recorded audio that is recorded distraction free of the slides, higher audio quality and we can edit in an audio editing program. We also develop 1 audio file per slide (if a client provides one audio file for the entire presentation we chop it into multiple files using Adobe Audition, or directly in PowerPoint by trimming the file to each slide needs).

Sofnet_1

For this specific project, we were provided individual audio clips for each slide. We sync’d the animations to the audio narration, which is a great end result, but a tedious process of listening and re-listening to the entire audio file while adjusting the animation timing to get everything perfect (an animation timeline feature I would really like to see the Microsoft PowerPoint team update!). Slide transitions and all animations were set to automatic.

Sofnet_2

We provided 3 deliverables for this project:

1. Editable PowerPoint, with on-click animation and transitions.

2. Editable PowerPoint presentation with audio narration embedded and animations & transitions set to auto.

3. A video version of the presentation (exported direct from PowerPoint).

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T09:06:05-07:00July 6th, 2015|PowerPoint|

Design Idea – Group Text Into A Visual Layout

Slide design is usually thought of as making the content professional and visual – which it is. It is also about understanding the message and purpose of the presentation and each slide – something TLC Creative Services enjoys working with clients to uncover. For this slide from a recent project our design team developed a new layout that grouped the paragraphs of text into information chunks, and created a visual styling that coordinates with the clients overall visual branding.

Text-to-visual

This slide is a handout provided to everyone in the training, so large font size was not a primary need. The ability to identify sections of text within the 3 paragraphs was important for the group discussion. Working with the client we identified 5 topics and added subheads to each, then the full text from the provided paragraph. The end result is a slide that would not be ideal if just presented on a screen (too much small text), but a slide that works as a handout and aids the trainers group discussion.

 

– Troy @ TLC

 

By |2016-08-10T09:08:54-07:00February 23rd, 2015|Portfolio, PowerPoint|

Diabetes Before-and-After Slide

Continuing this month’s theme of Slide Design ideas, this is a before-and-after slide from a project we completed.

Diabetes-before-after

The before is a common slide: title and bullet list as provided by Microsoft’s default template. Our design team reviewed the presentation message and made the recommendation that this list be converted into a 3 column visual layout. The idea is to help the audience group the content to be able to quickly identify the message and focus on the presenter. Ideally, we would like to help the audience further by reducing the amount of text on slide, but for this one the request was to maintain the provided content. The end result, even with the same amount of content, is a much more lively slide designed for the audience.

 

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T09:10:19-07:00February 11th, 2015|Portfolio, PowerPoint|
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