PowerPoint 2013 has updated itself to use widescreen presentations as its default (which I believe is good). And the PAGE SETUP has changed as well. The aspect ratio is the same (16:9). My friend, and Microsoft PowerPoint MVP, Echo Swinford has a great description of the page setup change here.
– Troy @ TLC
If you did not download the FREE 16×9 St. Patrick’s themed widescreen PowerPoint template on Friday, you missed the great Leprechaun flipping a coin animated title slide!
Here is Amber’s description and tutorial on creating the animation:
The animation is the leprechaun coming onto the slide and flipping a coin into the pot of gold. The elements used to create the effect are:
– Leprechaun with no hand on left
– Hand of leprechaun
– Gold coin
– Sparkle
– Pot of gold
– Grass and shamrocks for scenery
1. It’s always helpful to name your pictures in the selection pane before animating. (HOME tab > ARRANGE > Selection Pane). The names carry through to the animation pane, which is super helpful in knowing which picture you’re adding animation to. I’ve arranged my elements to have the grass on top, and the leprechaun in between the pot of gold and shamrocks.
2. Select the leprechaun, his hand, and the coin. Arrange them on the slide, I have him so he is peeking out right next to the pot of gold.
3. In the animation pane, apply ENTRANCE > FLY IN > FROM RIGHT > WITH PREVIOUS > .50 second duration.
4. Now that the leprechaun flies in, next we need to make his hand move in a flipping motion. The animation we are going to apply is spin, which spins from the middle of the picture. This won’t work with the bounding box the way it is currently. We need the hand to swivel from the base, not the middle of his fingers. Select the hand, and go to FORMAT > CROP. Pull the cropping edge down so the middle of the image will be the base of the hand. Now the bounding box is extended, filled with empty pixels in our PNG image.
5. With the hand selected, apply the EMPHASIS > SPIN > AFTER PREVIOUS > .25 second duration.
6. Right click on the animation in the animation pane and open the Effect Options. We want the spin to be a small angle, and come back to original position. Under amount, enter custom 19° Counterclockwise and check the Auto-reverse box. Now the hand is making a coin flip motion.
7. For the coin flip, we need to add a motion path. Select the coin, click the ADD ANIMATION button and apply CUSTOM PATH under the Motion Path section in the animation pane. WITH PREVIOUS > 1.25 sec duration > .10 second delay. Draw a loopy sort of path that goes up and end ends at the top of the pot of gold. You can always make fine adjustments by selecting the path, right click, edit points.
8. Coins spin when they flip, so we need to select the coin, hit ADD ANIMATION > EMPHASIS EFFECTS > SPIN > WITH PREVIOUS > 1.0 sec duration > .40 sec delay.
9. Right click the SPIN animation and click EFFECT OPTIONS. Under amount select TWO SPINS. Make sure this animation ends at the same time the custom motion path animation ends. We don’t want the coin to continue spinning once it lands in the pot of gold.
10. Now the leprechaun comes in and flips the coin into the bucket. The last element is the sparkle. Position the sparkle so it will be on the coin once it is in the bucket. Under animation pane apply ENTRANCE EFFECTS > ZOOM > OBJECT CENTER > AFTER PREVIOUS > .50 sec duration.
11. Your animation is complete! Here is what the animation pane should look like:
Download the PowerPoint template, which has this animation on the Title Master Layout here 1.8MB
– Troy, and Amber, @ TLC
PowerPoint 2013 is now available, and multimedia has gotten even better with it, which I will cover in future posts. But one video feature that has been with PowerPoint at least since PPT 2000 is “Play Full Screen.”
When a video is inserted, one of the options is to make the video scale to fill the screen (VIDEO TOOLS >> PLAYBACK tab >> VIDEO OPTIONS section >> PLAY FULL SCREEN).
I do not recommend using this feature for a number of reasons:
– The video “pops” to full screen, which is not in line with today’s presentations full of smooth animations.
– Low resolution videos will look even lower resolution when stretched to full screen.
– If there is content on top of the video (z order is possible in PPT 2010 and above), the content is covered by the video.
– The video scales to the maximum height or width and use black bars on the top or sides (letterbox or pillar box) if video is not same aspect ratio as the screen aspect ratio (not a bad thing, but may not be desired).
– If the presentation is distributed, it is a very confusing option and may result in unexpected issues (ie. person adds text below the video, but when played it is covered).
– I have experienced this feature cause playback/animation issues.
– Last, I do not see it accomplish anything that cannot be done while developing slides or through animation.
– Troy @ TLC
PowerPoint has a feature to run videos direct from YouTube. The feature works well, but it requires an internet connection, enough bandwidth, having the presentation computer online, and a number of other potential issues.
To minmize potential issues, running all videos direct from the computer and as embedded elements is a good best practice. YouTube Downloader HD is a free tool to download videos from YouTube and save to your computer. It enables you to download high quality, high definition, and full HD videos from YouTube. The software is available with an installer or as a standalone exe file.
Downloading is easy. Go to the video you wish to download on YouTube. Copy the address of the video.
Open the YouTube Downloader HD software, and paste the video’s address into the Video URL field. In the Download dropdown menu, select the type and quality of the video.
Then select the best format and size for the presentation. TLC Creative Services opts for .mp4 and the largest size (1080p or 720p).
Then click download.
– Troy @ TLC
TinEye has a web browser plug-in, so you can right click any image on a page and search the database directly. The free plug-in is available for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. To use, pick any online image.
1. For this image, we want to find a higher resolution version. Right-click the image and select “Search Image on TinEye.”
2. TinEye found 121 results, and using the Biggest Image sorter, there is a 800x635px version available*.
– Troy @ TLC
TinEye, the reverse image search site can also be used for some detective work.
Let’s use TinEye to check if an image is being used by another website without permission. Here is a beautiful photo by my friend and incredibly talented photographer, Rikk Flohr, from his webpage.
1. To do a quick web search for non-permitted use of this photo, I loaded it into TinEye using the drag and drop feature.
2. TinEye’s search only found 1 result, which is actually Rikk’s Flickr account.
3. Of course, no search engine covers the entire internet. TinEye is constantly crawling webpages and updating the image database. And this image search proves it is possible other instances of an image exists online. The test image was found on Rikk’s Flickr account, but missed it on his actual webpage. I assume TinEye hasn’t yet crawled Rikk’s site or it is possible the site is already protected in which case TinEye can’t get the image information.
– Troy @ TLC
TinEye is a reverse image search engine. It can be a great resource for presentation design.
TinEye lets you upload, or link to an online image, and see where it came from, find higher resolution versions, how/where it’s being used and if there are modified versions. It is the first image search engine to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. When you upload an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique digital signature for it, and then compares this signature to every other image in their index to find matches. In our tests, TinEye did not generally find similar images, but exact matches – including those that have been cropped, edited, or resized.
The free service allows 50 searches per day, up to 150 searches a week. There is a paid version of TinEye which allows for more searches.
TinEye is easy to use. Here is our sample image and the goal is to find a high res version.
1. On the TinEye webpage, click “Browse” to upload the image. The sample image is fairly small at 350×520 pixels.
2. TinEye search of its database for this image found 80 matches.
3. The default search result is set to Best Match.
4. Changing the sort by Biggest Image, I find a link to the same image that is 1600×1200 pixels!
Note: Most images found online are protected by copyright. If you would like to use any image found through TinEye for commercial purposes, you should confirm it is available under Creative Commons, or contact the image owner for permission.
– Troy @ TLC
I was contacted by another presentation designer yesterday about a really bad presentation issue he experienced after installing Microsoft updates (thanks Don!). Then, a number of other users started posting their issues on MS Answers.com. This is a big deal for many presentation designers!
ISSUE: After installing Microsoft Security Update KB2753842, PowerPoint is unable to display certain fonts.
FONTS AFFECTED: OTF, Open Type Fonts. Microsoft ships TT (True Type) fonts, so all standard Microsoft fonts are unaffected.
WHAT HAPPENS: PowerPoint behaves normal and in edit view, all fonts display fine. When run as a slide show, all Open Type Fonts (OTF) do not display.
FIX:
– Remove Microsoft Security Update KB2753842
– To Remove: Start >> Control Panel >> Unistall a Program >> View Installed Updates(link on left) >> scroll to Microsoft Windows section >> search for “Security Update for Microsoft Windows (KB2753842)” >> right click >> select Uninstall >> say “Yes” to confirmation >> restart computer
Update 12/20/12: MS has confirmed “An updated security patch has been released at 10:00am today, fully tested this week by Office teams.” So PPT is once again safe to use.
Update 12/17/12: Earlier note that the update has been pulled is not completely accurate. The update has been ‘pulled’ from the auto install status, but still shows up in the optional installs. If you see it in the optional installs, see note below on how to hide update.
Update 12/16/12: This issue is much larger than only affecting OTF fonts. In PowerPoint and Word (2010), several TTF fonts (you can test with Myriad Pro) will also disappear is any formatting (shadow, outline, bevel, etc.) is applied. This text will actually disappear in the edit view, as well as in slide show. Plus the KB update creates similiar issues in several other applications (Flash, Corel Draw, etc.).
Update 12/15/12: Microsoft has a KB information article on the issues caused by installing KB2753842 here.
Update 12/14/12: Microsoft has confirmed that it has pulled the update and working on a fix. So if you have not installed, it should not show up. If you uninstall, it will not be an option to install again. And if you are in an enterprise environment with automatic group policy updates, it will not reinstall again the next day.
Update 12/14/12: If the update KB2753842 has not installed, but is pending (ie. downloaded automatically, but not automatically installed), it will not show up in the above Uninstall a Program instructions. Launch WINDOWS UPDATE >> view available updates >> if KB2753842 is listed >> Right-click >> select HIDE UPDATE.
– Troy @ TLC
Web Fonts have been a big topic recently and several companies are offering them. TLC staff designer, Amber, spent some time researching them for us and put together a good overview and example of their use with the Google Web Fonts.
– Troy @ TLC
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Web Fonts are a font format with a specific license that permits web designers to use real typography online without losing the benefits of live text (dynamic, searchable, and accessible content). Until recently, type on the web was very limited. Most sites could only display the small selection of system fonts installed on user’s computers. Designers who wanted to integrate individuality to their pages would need to create jpeg images (which don’t get read for Google search results) or use Flash or JavaScript to render their fonts, even though not all end-users had started using that software.
Now, there is a CSS declaration called @font-face that web designers can use to specify a font. The font file will either be saved on your server like images are, or it can be hosted by a third party.
The issue that is still being debated is achieving an approximate consensus on how the producers of fonts could continue to control and therefore profit from their work.
Click here for a list of commercial font foundries which allow @font-face embedding.
Cick here for a list of fonts available for embedding.
Google offers a library of web fonts with no restrictions here.
Plus, all of the Google Web Fonts are offered under the Open Font License which means you can use them even in commercial projects without having to worry about licensing issues.
You can utilize Google’s Web Fonts in your PowerPoint presentations too. Although I am not using it as a true “web” font, but really adding it to my computer as a custom font, here are the steps for use:
1. In the Google Web Font library, select the font you would like to use in your presentation, and select “Add to Collection.”
2. Once you’re done adding fonts to your collection, click the “Download your Collection” link at the top right of the page.
3. A window will pop up letting you know that you don’t need to download the font to use on the web – however, we do need to download to use in PowerPoint, so click the link to download the font collection as a zip file.
4. Once you’ve downloaded and extracted the font file from the zipped folder, you can install the Web Font on your system and use in your PowerPoint presentation. (Note: If you are planning on sharing your presentation, you will need to also provide the font or risk having the font default to a generic font when PowerPoint can’t find the file installed on others’ computers).
“What is the aspect ratio?” It has become one of the first questions for presentation and video projects. It is still a very confusing concept for many people. We use a simple video of each aspect ratio for clients to see the difference. It is the same video footage, which makes it easier to see the 4×3 aspect ratio is taller and the 16×9 aspect ratio is wider.
4×3 aspect ratio
[youtube src=”https://youtube.com/embed/gQaXbSPQoDQ?rel=0″]
16×9 aspect ratio
[youtube src=”https://youtube.com/embed/NTRV8ISqE1A?rel=0″]
– Troy @ TLC