What You Do Not Know – Advanced Image Cropping
PowerPoint’s Image Crop tool is fantastic. Combine it with Crop to Aspect! Get the full tip at The Presentation Podcast, episode 192.
PowerPoint’s Image Crop tool is fantastic. Combine it with Crop to Aspect! Get the full tip at The Presentation Podcast, episode 192.
Start a PowerPoint presentation from the the app or from the keyboard. Here is a quick audio takeaway from the conversation. Listen to the full conversation at The Presentation Podcast, episode 192.
The previous blog post sharing the TLC Creative 2023 Christmas Card had a nice 3D layout to the card. That layout was entirely created in PowerPoint!
Step 1 was adding images of the outside and inside print layouts. Then cropping the image to just one side.
Next is to use PowerPoints’ 3D perspective options. Apply to the image.
Duplicate the image and adjust the crop to display the other half.
Update the 3D perspective to the opposite perspective.
Now move the two perspective images to align.
Group both images and add a PowerPoint drop shadow.
Done! Repeat for the interior layout using the desired 3D perspective (see my 3D perspective applied to the inside and outside layouts on the previous post).
Troy @ TLC
The Noun Project has a direct integration with PowerPoint and as a presentation designer is invaluable. If unfamiliar the Noun Project has “the most diverse collection of free icons and stock photos with over 5 million art-quality icons and free photos.”
Three great callouts:
TO GET STARTED
Troy @ TLC
Wouldn’t be amazing if a shape or vector art could have a video fill it, like the previous posts showcased the Picture Fill? Although the capability of inserting a video into a custom shape isn’t possible just yet, there is a work around!
Troy @ TLC, with Christie on the TLC Creative presentation design team
This is the last week of 2023 and we used the rapidly approaching start to 2024 as inspiration for another how-to on using PowerPoint’s Picture Fill feature.
Troy @ TLC, and Christie on the TLC Creative design team for the slides and screen capture!
One of the hidden design features within PowerPoint is the PICTURE FILL option. I use this in combination with PowerPoint shapes and inserted vector art to create custom art elements for slides. Because it is Christmas time, my example is a Christmas Tree slide.
Troy @ TLC (with special thanks to Christie on the TLC Creative team for the screen captures!)
This is a continuation from the last post, about PowerPoint Placeholders – the master layout preset text and media placeholders that show up as a dotted outline on slides. And I included an example of a media placeholder with instructional placeholder text.
I received an email saying only part of the descriptive placeholder text was displaying. There is a reason, and we need to do a bit of a text formatting hack to make the above placeholder look like this on inserted slides.
It is typography “hard returns” vs “soft returns”. Placeholders only display the 1st paragraph. Additional paragraphs are there, and seen on the Master Slide, but only the 1st paragraph is seen on inserted slides.
For quick reference:
With PowerPoint placeholders, if the text uses hard returns for each line:
At the slide level, only the first paragraph is going to display
The text formatting hack is to use soft returns to create line breaks, but keep all of the text within the 1st paragraph.
Now PowerPoint sees all of the text, even thou it looks like 3 line breaks, it is 1 paragraph and on slides everyone sees all of the helpful placeholder text!
Troy @ TLC
I am working on a fairly robust PowerPoint template design, and one of the template build steps has become a good conversation with the client – the Placeholder Text.
Placeholder text is the “description” text in slide placeholders. Placeholders are visually distinguished by having a dotted outline (vs. solid outline). The dotted outline indicates it will not display when presented or printed.
The great thing is, the placeholder text can be updated on each layout. As example, the default “Click to Add Title” can be made more descriptive to lead the team into what content is expected in that text box, on that layout. I updated the title slide text placeholders here to literally instruct anyone using the template that the title is a SHORT set of words – not a full sentence.
The Master Slide, and each Slide Layout have placeholders, with description text. Customize them to help end users know what is expected.
For this template project, there are image placeholders for partner logos. The client had a good question, which went into a more detailed conversation about what a good logo is. So, we updated the placeholder text to provide technical guidance.
PowerPoint has hundreds of backend options that can be preset – making placeholders helpful is just one of them our design team at TLC Creative Services customizes.
Troy @ TLC
Rounded corners are a subtle design accent that is easy to apply to shapes, photos, even videos. But why is there no way to make the corner radius the same across multiple objects on a slide!
Fortunately, the capability is within PowerPoint, just not exposed on the Ribbon or any of the object formatting dialogs. The ToolsToo add-in suite has added the functionality to easily select multiple rounded corner objects and make the corner radius the same on all (yay 3rd party add-ins!).
Here is my example slide with 3 rounded corner rectangles. Because the rectangles are different sizes, and the corner radius scales with the shape (where is the “locked corner radius” option Microsoft!) the corner radius is different on each of the rectangles.
I have selected all 3 shapes, selecting box #1 first, because this is the reference object and all objects will match its corner radius.
Go to the ToolsToo ribbon > Make Same > Make Same Rounded Corner
Done! All 3 rectangles now have the exact same corner radius (yay!).
TIP: because I use this tool often, and I have added it to my QAT so it is now an instantly available 1-click formatting thing.
Troy @ TLC