The PowerPoint® Blog

I work with PowerPoint on a daily basis and I am very honored to be a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP. We have a talented team of presentation designers at TLC Creative Services and ThePowerPointBlog is our area to highlight PowerPoint tips, tricks, examples and tutorials. Enjoy! Troy Chollar

Lori’s Card #1

Starting things off is Lori Chollar, CEO of TLC Creative Services, who drew card #1 – Basic Chunking (I am admittedly biased, but this is a great slide design, and why Lori is always in demand for presentation design!).

By |2023-02-24T22:38:46-07:00March 6th, 2023|Portfolio, PowerPoint|

Bulletless Design – An Internal Project

Nolan Haims created “The Better Deck Deck”, which is a great example of modern presentation communication. The product tagline is “52 Alternatives to Bullet Points” which is an obvious clue that The Better Deck Deck has 52 cards, each with a design example of ways to visually communicate.

As an internal design project among the TLC Creative Services team, I created a fun (at least I thought it was fun) project for everyone to create a series of slides using some of The Better Deck Deck’s slide layout options. Before sharing some of the (amazing) slide designs, let me share the design team instructions:

  1. Google “random number generator”. Set the max at 52. Generate.
  2. That is your first Better Deck Deck style to use.
  3. Go to https://www.mentalfloss.com/amazingfactgenerator (okay to refresh until there is a stat you like)
  4. Create a boring/standard bullet point list slide based on the amazing fact.
  5. Create a bulletless design slide, using The Better Deck Deck card style that was randomly assigned to you in step #1.

Troy @ TLC

By |2023-02-24T22:35:56-07:00March 2nd, 2023|PowerPoint, Resource/Misc|

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

By |2023-02-28T00:27:52-07:00February 28th, 2023|Personal, PowerPoint, Software/Add-Ins|

Switch Teams Tenants within PowerPoint

Thanks to Sandy Johnson who gave this as her Pro & Tech Tip on episode 168 of The Presentation Podcast! This applies to everyone that has multiple accounts, or tenants, on Microsoft teams.

Within Microsoft Teams, if there are multiple accounts, click on your name and available accounts are shown in the dropdown.

Microsoft Office now has the option to choose what account, or tenant, Office is using (no more signing out of one account to sign into another, it is now a dynamic selection!). Within PowerPoint, if there are multiple accounts, click on your name and available accounts are shown in the dropdown.

Troy @ TLC

By |2023-02-18T16:57:40-07:00February 23rd, 2023|PowerPoint|

The Presentation Podcast Episode Releases Today!

There is a new PowerPoint centric book, and this conversation is Troy, Sandy and Nolan talking with Chantal Bosse about her just released book, ” Microsoft PowerPoint Best Practices, Tips, and Techniques”. Listen in on a great conversation and book that everyone who aspires to use PowerPoint’s tools and features will want to add to their library. Listen here.

By |2023-02-18T16:52:51-07:00February 21st, 2023|PowerPoint, Resource/Misc|

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

By |2023-02-07T07:47:08-07:00February 9th, 2023|Software/Add-Ins|

The Presentation Podcast – episode 167

Episode 167 of The Presentation Podcast releases today! Troy, Nolan and Sandy welcome returning guest, David Blatner from the CreativePro Network. They talk about the upcoming Design + PowerPoint online conference, and then chat about a really interesting design philosophy, “All Design is Creating an Experience for a User.” Listen here.

By |2023-02-07T07:18:59-07:00February 7th, 2023|PowerPoint|

What is a PPT File ?

I have been doing some video editing and was adding from Adobe Premiere templates for effects. I had not noticed this before, but an Adobe “Premiere Pro Template” file is also labelled “PPT”! PPT of course being a PowerPoint file in my world. Ironically, this is also becoming an outdated term as it refers to the now legacy file format .ppt (now .pptx).

Troy @ TLC

By |2023-01-23T09:34:20-07:00January 24th, 2023|Personal, PowerPoint|
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