Tutorial

If you’ve ever inserted a bar chart into PowerPoint and thought that the bars look too thin and awkwardly spaced — you’re not alone. The styling solution is available within PowerPoint, let’s walk through adjusting the bar thickness, and reducing that gap between bars.

1: Select Your Chart

Click on the chart to make sure it’s selected. Once it is, you’ll see the Chart Tools menu pop up at the top with two tabs: Design and Format. Along with the Format Data Series option, these are your go-to tabs for making all the visual adjustments you need.

2: Format the Data Series

To start adjusting your chart, right-click on one of the bars and select Format Data Series from the dropdown menu. This will bring up a panel on the right side of your screen, where you’ll find various options for fine-tuning your chart.

3: Adjust the Gap Width

Within the Format Data Series panel, navigate to Series Options. Here, you’ll find the Gap Width slider, which controls the width or height or your bars. Reducing the Gap Width will make the bars skinny. Increasing the Gap fattens them up. This step will also reduce (or increase) the gap between each of the series bars. In the two examples shown, notice the gap in the between the Black Cars and Green Cars. Play with the slider and adjust it based on your preferences.

4: Adjust the Overlap

If you’re working with a clustered bar chart, you might also want to tweak the Series Overlap setting, located just below the Gap Width slider. Increasing the overlap percentage will cause the bars to slightly overlap, while decreasing it will add more separation. A range of 0% to 20% usually works well, but adjust as needed for your design.

5: Fine-Tune and Customize

Once your bars are spaced to your liking, it’s time to add those finishing touches. Experiment with colors, add data labels, or remove gridlines for a cleaner look. You can do all of this from the Chart Elements button or through the Chart Design tab. Little tweaks like these can make a big difference in how professional and polished your chart looks.

Bonus Tip

If your bars still aren’t quite right, try resizing the chart by dragging its edges. Sometimes a wider or taller chart gives those bars the breathing room they need to stand out. Adjusting the size can be an easy fix for better proportions.

And that’s it! Now your bars should look bold, clear, and way more polished. It’s all about finding that sweet spot with the gap width and overlap.

There is a secret when it comes to PowerPoint charts (bar charts, line charts, pie charts, etc.) The secret is: charts have two elements for sizing; the overall chart element bounding box (or frame), and inside that the chart bounding box.

Keep the chart’s overall size as is, which can be helpful for alignment on a slide, or when multiple charts are on a slide. Click the chart, then click the data to make the inner bounding box active. Resize and position as needed – within the outer bounding box of course!

The same goes for chart and axis titles and legends. Each is resizable and moveable within the overall chart bounding box.

TIP: use the legend preset location options; top, bottom, left, right to adjust all chart elements positions, then fine tune the legend size and position).

The functionality is there. It is finnicky. And now it is no longer a secret, hidden formatting option!

-The TLC Creative design team

TLC Creative’s theme for April is “PowerPoint charts”. And that had me looking way, way back to our past blog posts. Back in 2008 (17 years ago!) this posts contains tips to overcome the common frustration of “I edited the chart, but need the original version.”

The original post from November 3, 2008 is here.

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For many projects I find myself ungrouping charts for custom animation or any number of other reasons. But what often happens is there is need to adjust the chart… oops it is now 50+ individual text boxes and autoshapes.

My solution is before I break apart a chart is to create a duplicate it.

Then shrink the duplicate to a miniature size.

I then move the miniature version off the slide so it is not seen during a slide show (or I have also ‘hidden’ it under another graphic).

Now I can ungroup the chart on the slide and do whatever the special needs are – and still have a backup option should the data need to be adjusted.

– Troy @ TLC

This is from our Look Back series, rediscovering previous blog posts with relevant PowerPoint tips, tricks and examples. The original post from November 3rd, 2008 can be viewed here.

PowerPoint can embed fonts! On the surface this sounds like an amazing idea, especially when it comes to sharing presentations among multiple people. However, there are plenty of downsides that make this feature something that the TLC Creative team avoids.  But if you’re looking to embed fonts into a PowerPoint file, here’s how:

• First, if the fonts used are Microsoft fonts, these do not need to be embedded as they will automatically download and dynamically install when the presentation is opened.
• Open the presentation in PowerPoint
• Navigate to File > Options > Save
• Near the bottom, is EMBED FONTS IN THE FILE checkbox. After checking, there are two options for embedding the fonts.

1. Embedding only the characters used in the presentation – best for reducing file size (there is not a lot of file size in fonts, so this is not our recommendation).
2. Embed all characters – best for editing by other people (this is the better – and obvious – choice).

Select an embed option, save the presentation, and the fonts would be baked into the file itself.

SOUNDS GREAT – BUT…

Before deciding to embed a custom font, it’s best to check its licensing restrictions as some fonts won’t allow embedding.

• To verify, go to your system fonts folder (often C:\WINDOWS\FONTS)
• Right-click the font, select Properties, then Details
• Look for the embeddability value:
  • Installable or Editable: Embedding allowed
  • Preview/Print or Restricted: Embedding not allowed

There’s also other downsides of Embedded Fonts:

• They can bloat file size
• May cause editing issues
• Have limited cross-platform support
• Risk potential corruption

Best Practices:

• Use System or Microsoft Standard/Cloud fonts for maximum compatibility
• If necessary, share custom fonts with viewers (check license allowances)
• Google Fonts are all embeddable (see “How to Use Google Fonts in PowerPoint” post)

If you’ve ever found the popup toolbar distracting while presenting a slideshow in Microsoft PowerPoint, you’re not alone.

Fortunately, PowerPoint offers a setting to disable this feature, providing a cleaner and more focused presentation experience.

• Open PowerPoint
• Go to > FILE > then, select OPTIONS

From the PowerPoint Options dialog box:

• On the left column go to ADVANCED
• On the right, scroll to the SLIDE SHOW section
• Disable SHOW POPUP TOOLBAR

• Click OK to apply the changes
• Done!

Important Notes:

• App-Level Setting: This is an application-wide setting, meaning it applies to all presentations you open or create in PowerPoint. You won’t need to disable the popup toolbar for each presentation individually.
• Accessing Presentation Controls: Even with the popup toolbar disabled, you still have access to all the same presentation controls by simply right-clicking anywhere on the slideshow screen. This brings up a larger overlay menu with all the necessary options, but it’s not persistent and disappears after selecting.

By disabling the popup toolbar, you can deliver a more polished and distraction-free presentation. Should you ever need the toolbar back, you can easily re-enable it by following the same steps and checking the Show Popup Toolbar box again.

Hope this PowerPoint tutorial helped. Enjoy presenting with a cleaner interface!

-Christie @ TLC

GET credit where credit is due.

PowerPoint has file properties that list who created the presentation (really!).

Below is a the step-by-step of where to find the properties field that lists the name. But first, take a look at some of your recent presentations. Mouse over the file. Is your name listed as the Author – of your presentations? When PowerPoint is first setup, it asks for a few details about you, and automates the Authors property to use that name. Two things happen that often results in your name, not being the name listed. IT sets up your computer with a generic User Name, which is what PowerPoint uses for each presentation created. Or you opened a presentation that someone else started, which keeps the original person who started the presentation, listed as the author. So, where do you confirm your name is the name PowerPoint lists as the author for new presentations? Go to File > Options > the General tab > and the “Personalize Your Copy of Microsoft Office” section.

Is your name and initials shown? These settings are used for all presentations created on the computer (assuming Office is signed into the same profile).

But how is an existing presentation updated to your name when another name is already there?

In the presentation go to File > Info > and expand the far right list of properties. There are AUTHOR and a LAST MODIFIED BY fields. If your name is not listed in the AUTHOR field you can click the ADD AN AUTHOR and add yourself.

But, if you want to remove a name and replace with your name, there are a few additional steps. Go to File > Info > Check for Issues. Then Inspect Document > and run by clicking Inspect.

Click REMOVE ALL for the Document Properties and Personal Information and close the dialog.
Note: this action removes the existing Author listed, AND also removes other properties such as comments, Company, Last Modified, and more.

After the properties are clear, just save the file and your name (from the Personalize Your Copy of Microsoft Office fields) will be listed as the Author! Or, if the author field remains empty, click the ADD AN AUTHOR option to select your name.

There it is. How the mysterious “Author” name is added to presentations, and how you can manage who is listed as the author of your presentation!

Troy @ TLC

PowerPoint unfortunately does not have the capability to animated individual cells, rows or columns of tables. PowerPoint offers the ability to animate a table as a whole unit. Let’s talk about a workaround to overcome this limitation. By using the Microsoft PowerPoint BrightSlide add-in (which is free and has Windows and Mac versions!) several table formatting options become available to us, specifically the ability to break apart table cells – which we can use to achieve animation needs!

First, select the table.

Right-click on the table and go to table > BrightSlide > Split Table > Split into Rows.

For this sample table, this instantly creates 4 separate tables – one for each row! Note: I have spaced them apart for this demo.

Because PowerPoint can only animate an entire table, we now have 4 tables, which can easily be animated! As example, this table now animates in one row at time, each row on click (yay!)

As a second option, going back to our original table, we can split it by columns in a few clicks. Right-click the table > BrightSlide > Split Table > and now select “Split into Columns”.

Done – 5 separate tables, one for each column!

Apply PowerPoint animations as needed; entrance, exit, emphasis. Here I have set the table to build left-to-right automatically.

And now is where things get good! Going back to our original table, right-click > BrightSlide > Split Table > Split into Cells.

20 individual tables are created instantly!

The option to animate each cell is available, as I have done in this example. BUT, if you just need to animate on a few areas of a table, use this to create the individual cells needed for the animation (works great with Morph!). The options available are limitless now.

TIP: BrightSlide also has fantastic options to “put a table back together’. The two options are “Merge as Columns” or “Merge as Rows”. We want to make a single column, select “Merge as Rows” and it will give you 4 rows in a single column.

Continue with the same steps for the other columns, then select both, and click “Merge as Columns” to place the table back together.

BONUS TIP: Duplicate that original the table, and turn it off in selection pane to always have a secret version of the original table available for any future needs.

Troy @ TLC