Microsoft Office apps continue to evolve. I mentioned this on The Presentation Podcast episode that was released this week – Outlook has a new “emoji” reply option.
So instead of replying with an email message we can now make our replies like a text message and “like-heart-smiley” them…
If you give an emoji reply, Outlook replies with an email like this:
Troy @ TLC
NXPowerLite is one of those PowerPoint add-ins the TLC Creative Services design team relies on and uses continuously (no paid endorsement, this truly is software we use!).
If you are not familiar, NXPoweriLte from Neuxpower, is a file compression add-in. We use NXPowerLite for PowerPoint, but it also handles Word, Excel, PDF, and JPG images.
I have a custom set of optimize profiles. We have the same set of profiles on all of the TLC Creative team so we are literally doing the same thing. In version 10 of NXPowerlite, there is an improved set of default profiles that should make the compression options easier and better when used right-out-of-the box. Note: currently v10 is only available for Windows OS. It can be run as a standalone app (drag and drop PPTX files onto the app), or activated from within PowerPoint and it will optimize the file that is currently open.
The big improvement I am most excited about is NXPowerLite now being better and overcoming issues that stop a file from being compressed. e.g. the compression process fails. It still does not identify the issue (generally an image in a file format that errors out), but there is a host of really good online info and a direct integration with 7-zip to open the PowerPoint file and deal with the problem image directly. I think many “power-users” will find this a faster process to what they were already doing (we have 7-zip installed on all computers here at TLC Creative and all of the design team has been trained on how to open a .pptx file, locate the problem file, edit and replace).
Lots of other improvements too. One that I am excited to see – because it has created problems many times for me – is maintaining the EXIF orientation data in compressed images. This should eliminate a conflict where a cropped image is compressed and then displays in the wrong orientation and squeezed into the image container size after running NXPowerLite.
More details on the v10 updates can be read about on the Neuxpower website here. The NXPowerLite product page, including download of free trial to test, is here.
-Troy @ TLC
Window file explorer, while I prefer it over the Mac OS Finder, it has a lot of missing options. PowerToys adds a few!
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
