MS PowerToys – Image Resizer
MS PowerToys – File Explorer Image Preview (super powers!)
Window file explorer, while I prefer it over the Mac OS Finder, it has a lot of missing options. PowerToys adds a few!
MS PowerToys – Color Picker
PowerPoint has a built-in Color Picker tool, which is great. But I need a color picker not only for presentation design, but web projects, social media media and more. I am using the PowerToys color picker more and more as my go to tool.
Microsoft PowerToys – Cross Hair Target
This is another nifty tool that works for presentations, demos and training videos. Similar to the Find My Mouse highlight, or spotlight, this one adds a full screen target cross hair where the mouse is located.
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
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
MS Teams Previews Photoshop Files!
This is a recent discovery I made – not certain when this feature was added. In Microsoft Teams, opening a Photoshop .psd file now displays a preview of the image (yay!).
Troy @ TLC
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
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
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