Software/Add-Ins

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

By |2023-02-28T00:27:52-07:00February 28th, 2023|Personal, PowerPoint, Software/Add-Ins|

Windows 11 Default Video Editor is Now ClipChamp

Discovered a new (to me) update in Windows 11. I needed to do a quick trim of a large video, so I opened the video file in the Windows Media Player to edit and save new version.

It took me a few minutes to realize the edit tools are no longer available in the Media Player app and there is now a “Edit with Clipchamp” option. This opens the video file in the Clipchamp app for editing and rendering a new version (a bit slower process than the old Media Player trim and save as).

Troy @ TLC

By |2023-02-07T07:47:08-07:00February 9th, 2023|Software/Add-Ins|

Make the Windows 11 Start Menu Better

I have moved to Windows 11, on my main design computer. So I have been spending lots of time tweaking the interface to be more familiar and work better for my workflow. The Start Menu is a big change from Windows 10, but I found a small feature set that is making it better – adding these shortcut icons!

To add these time saving shortcuts to your Windows 11 Start Menu, go to SETTINGS > PERSONIZATION > START > and then the part that is not intuitive (to me) is calling these shortcuts “folders”. Click on the arrow icon to see the options.

From the Folders menu, turn on all (I did not turn on PERSONAL FOLDERS for my workflow).

Done! The Windows 11 Start Menu has all of the shortcuts I was using in Windows 10, just in a different location (I prefer the Windows 11 location).

-Troy @ TLC

By |2022-09-16T05:19:16-07:00September 16th, 2022|Software/Add-Ins|

Slidewise’s Font Management is My Favorite Feature!

Neuxpower’s Slidewise PowerPoint add-in has many fantastic tools. When initially testing it, the font audit and management functionality instantly won me over and quickly was installed on all computers at TLC Creative Services!

Working with my same demo deck, which has now been consolidated to 2 Master Slides, the Slidewise Font Audit shows there are 5 fonts used in presentation.

Doing a review of the content master slide shows Arial is the font that should be used throughout the presentation (note: this master slide’s placeholder text boxes have customized text by the TLC Creative design team, not all files have this easy of reference).

With this information, I can use Slidewise to quickly consolidate the fonts in the presentation. To update all instances of Calibri to Arial, click the 3-dot menu and REPLACE FONTS.

From the REPLACE FONTS dialog, choose the REPLACE WITH font (Arial in this deck) and REPLACE FONTS button. Note: the presentation will close, process and then reopen to the same slide. This is a bit unsettling (to have your work file close), but know it is part of the process 😊

For Century Gothic, I wanted to see where it is used to determine if it should remain or go. Click any slide in the Slidewise list and PowerPoint jumps to that slide and the text box of that font selected (which is amazing!). Clicking through the Century Gothic instances, all are slide content that should use the theme font, Arial. An easy and quick update using the Replace Fonts dialog.

Investigating the Tw Cen MT font, it is the Master Handout text boxes. First, this is a detail level that would virtually never be identified without the Slidewise Font Audit. These fonts can also be updated to the theme font, Arial.

In a short time I was able to see every font used in the presentation, where fonts were used, and if needed update to the desired font. The end result on this deck is consolidating all to a single font – Arial.

Get more info about Slidewise here.

Troy @ TLC

By |2022-07-23T09:07:21-07:00July 29th, 2022|Software/Add-Ins|

Slidewise’s Slide Master Function

Slidewise has updated the Master Layout feature, and it can save soooo much time cleaning up a presentation (all that behind the scenes formatting clients do not see, or generally appreciate).

Here is the audit of my sample slide deck – 5 master slides in the presentation.

But the distributed template had 2 master slides, which is what I want to update the client version too.

I am going to focus on the “1_Custom Design” master slide for this example. There are 5 slides using this Master, and there is also 1 unused Master Layout.

The typical workflow (for me) would be to view the slide masters, mouse over each layout to see what slides use that master layout, close the master view, find each noted slide, and change the layout to the correct Master Slide version of the layout. Lots of manual work that can take a lot of time!

With Slidewise I can shorten the workflow to a single process. All 5 slides using the “Custom Design” master are Title and Content layouts. Click the 3-dot menu and REASSIGN SLIDES.

The Reassign Slides dialog is where all the magic happens! The slides to reassign are automatically populated. Then select which SLIDE MASTER to use, and what LAYOUT to use. Click REASSIGN SLIDES and done!

The Custom Design layout is still in the deck because it is Preserved (eg. even if there are no active slides, the Master Slide remains in the list of Master Slides available). Slidewise makes it easy to delete the unused master slide, and remove the Master Slide from the deck.

Repeat for the other Master Slides to remove; use the Slidewise Masters pane to reassign all layouts, delete master if preserved and in a fraction of the time needed for manual identify and change process, the deck has the desired 2 master slides!

Get more info about Slidewise here.

Troy @ TLC

By |2022-07-23T09:07:56-07:00July 27th, 2022|Software/Add-Ins|

SlideWise’s New Transition Audit!

Slidewise, v1.8, has a new amazing feature – a slide transition audit! The dev team at Neuxpower was super responsive when I suggested a slide transition audit. And the final release is better than my simple description and request! Here is a quick look at the feature:

Open a presentation (that is a local file, no support for Teams/network files – yet). If running version 1.8 or higher, a new icon is available in the nav bar.

The Transitions tab shows an audit of the presentation showing what transition is set for each slide, the duration of the transition, and if an auto advance has been set. On this example presentation I can within moments identify:

  1. a slide with no transition
  2. a slide with a different/longer transition duration
  3. a slide using a different transition than the others (TIP: I always inspect Morph transition slides to assure the content is set for Morph – eg. there is content on the previous slide connected to content on the Morph transition slide. If not, the Morph transition is just a long fade transition).

The default view is displaying in slide order. But the information can be filtered to sort by transition type (eg. see all of the FADESMOOTHLY transitions grouped, the MORPH transitions grouped, etc.), duration or auto transition.

But wait there is more!! This is not just a super helpful, consolidated list of all slide transitions. Click any specific slide (highlighted in green in below image), that slide is selected and updates to that slide can be made on the Transitions tab.

The Slidewise add-in website is here.

Troy @ TLC

By |2022-07-22T12:30:45-07:00July 25th, 2022|PowerPoint, Software/Add-Ins|

Clipchamp – Creating a Dynamic Presentation Title Slide

Clipchamp is a video editing app purchased by Microsoft that TLC will be using in the future to do quick, simple video editing for our PowerPoint presentations. In this post, we will be creating a speaker intro video “slide.” We will be exporting a template background from PowerPoint and use it as a video to show a seamless integration.

Export your PPT background to upload to Clipchamp or if you already have the file, you do not need to export it from PPT but make sure it’s the same crop & size. Here I’m saving out a headshot image.

 

Create a new video from your Clipchamp dashboard.

Upload your media. Here I’m using an exported headshot from my PPT slide. When your files are done uploading, drag your media onto the timeline.

Add text by clicking on the Text tab from the left-hand side of the menu.

Select your desired text effect and drag it to the timeline. Edit text, font, colors, and more in the top bar menu when your text is selected.

 

When you’re done, export your video at the highest resolution possible.

A new screen will render your video and you can save it to your computer.

Open up PowerPoint and insert your new video.

Size the video to take up the entire width & height of your slide. Send your video to back so you can add more text or images if needed.

Here is an example of our slide in action:

By |2022-06-22T12:24:46-07:00July 14th, 2022|Software/Add-Ins|

Clipchamp – Is It Free?

Clipchamp is confusing – at least right now. It has a free plan. It has levels of paid plans. For this blog series, everything has been created using the free plan. The paid plan does not look to add more capabilities, but additional resources; video, audio, images and cloud storage.

 

The pricing page of the website lists 4 levels of pricing and plans, each monthly and yearly billing available.

I believe the free plan has the video editing options needed for presentation needs.

Troy @ TLC

By |2022-06-22T12:25:08-07:00July 12th, 2022|Software/Add-Ins|

Clipchamp EXTRA

To add text, click on the text tab on the left-hand side. Here I’ve selected the text animation “Quick Peek”. You can move it’s placement on the screen by selecting it, and a teal outline will appear.

A new window will appear. This is where you will edit your video. You can start from scratch or choose one of Clipchamp’s templates.

Don’t forget to name your file!

Import your media. Here I’ve imported a video to use as a background and our TLC logos.

Drag your media and place it on the timeline.

To add a transition effect, click on the transitions tab on the left-hand side. Choose a transition and drag it in-between two videos or images.

Here I’ll add a transition to the two logos. Our TLC logo will first appear white, then transition into color.

To add music, click on the Music & SFX tab. There is free music included in the free plan. You can type in “Free” to narrow down the free music available. Find a tune you like and drag it into the timeline or click on the teal plus sign button in the corner.

Click on volume or fade to adjust some of the music’s settings.

The graphics tab lets you add some extra content and features to your video. See more options by scrolling over the last square. Graphics will appear in your timeline at the top as a pink bar. You can change the length by pulling on the side of this bar.

Backgrounds- You can add a colored background to your timeline.

Overlays- You can add animated overlay effects and change the color of them. Add a filter to the color, adjust it’s exposure, saturation, temperature and contrast, and add a fade in/out effect.

GIPHY – Add a GIF to your video.

Stickers – Add a sticker to your video.

When you’re done editing your video, click export to choose your output resolution. A new screen will appear while your video is rendering.

When it’s done you’ll have the option to save it to your computer or upload it to a social media or cloud site.

 

Here is what our final video looks like:

 

 

 

By |2022-06-27T10:57:06-07:00July 8th, 2022|Software/Add-Ins|
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