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

Pixar Work

Here’s a quick photo of me and my computers for a recent meeting for Disney-Pixar (Toy Story is on the computer and a display for Cars is in the background). It’s always fun to be around the novelty of Pixar – and the meetings are a ton of fun (especially watching pre-release sections of movies :D).

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:17:56-07:00December 1st, 2008|Personal, Portfolio|

PowerPoint — Admin….???

So I have never visited elance.com, until today. I had to see what someone told me, and seeing is believing. Now I admit this is a bit personal, but they have categories like:
– Web
– Design & Multimedia
– Admin Support
– Sales & Marketing

And where is PowerPoint listed? Not Design & Marketing or even Sales & Marketing. PowerPoint design (hey there’s the word “design”) is listed in Admin Support!!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:18:52-07:00November 26th, 2008|Resource/Misc|

Use PPT for Other Projects

I develop a lot of multimedia CDROM’s and these projects always begin with PowerPoint. After gathering details from client I create a mock-up of the various navigation points within the application. Then in PowerPoint make a flow diagram of what the user experience will be. This allows client to visually see my interpretation of their information before I dive into the actual programming.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:19:14-07:00November 24th, 2008|PowerPoint, Tutorial|

Online Teleprompt Application

So if you are video taping a presentation, doing a webcast, or want to practice your presentation script while walking around (highly recommended) – here is a nifty online application.

CuePrompter.com is an online teleprompter that works in your browser (computer does need to be online).

Just paste in your text, make a few formatting selections and click START PROMPTER.

The scroll speed is constant, but it does have 9 speed options. It is easy to read – somewhat depending on your screen size and is a quick-easy-free option.

If you want to install a teleprompt application on your computer, Prompt! is an industry standard and they offer a lite version of their software for free. You can get it here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:19:31-07:00November 21st, 2008|Software/Add-Ins|

What is a Teleprompter?

A teleprompt system allows a speaker to look naturally into the audience/camera while hiding the fact that they are reading a script.

The most common telepromptor equipment I see for my shows are “presidentials”, which have a small profile and do not pull the audiences attention from the presenter.

The presenter supplies their script to the teleprompt operator, who then runs it in a word-processor like application that allows the script to be scrolled at the pace of their speaking (this is a very simplified explanation/description).

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:19:50-07:00November 19th, 2008|Resource/Misc|

FreePowerPointDownload.com – Free PPT Templates

If you are looking for a template, or at least some nice backgrounds, this site has a large collection (250+) of PowerPoint templates that are free for download. Better yet, there is no log-in, capturing your email address or any other ill marketing stuff. You do have to endure pages full of ads, but that’s it. Take a look at www.freepowerpointdownload.com

The templates are nice, but very simple on the formatting (eg. you will probably want to adjust things on the Master Slides). Here is one I downloaded from the Christmas themes to preview the quality:

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:20:12-07:00November 17th, 2008|Software/Add-Ins|

Save As PDF – From PPT 2007

I email a lot of PDF proofs of presentations for client review. They are smaller in file size and not editable. If you are using PPT07 creating a PDF is done through the SAVE AS dialog, not the PRINT dialog.

If you go to START >> SAVE AS and see this option: “Adobe PDF”

Then you have the full version of Adobe Acrobat with Distiller installed, or another Adobe PDF creation option installed.

But what you really want is this option: START >> SAVE AS >> PDF

This is Microsoft’s PDF print driver and it works incredibly fast, makes perfect PDFs of slides (including semi-transparent .png’s and autoshapes) and is my preferred method.

If you do not have this option don’t worry, it is not installed by default. Just head over to Microsoft’s website, go the Download Center, do a search for “Office PDF” and you will find these 2 links:

The PDF printer is free, and the XPS format is a Microsoft equivalent to PDF (not highly used yet), so you can choose to install it or the PDF only version.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:20:41-07:00November 14th, 2008|Tutorial|

New Look!

If you have visited ThePowerPointBlog in the past, you may notice things look a bit different – as of yesterday. I have (finally) upgraded to the latest version of the blogging software (b2evolution) which has many, many more features over the version I was previously running (hey, it was cutting edge when I installed it 3 years ago!).

So in addition to the nicer, more high-tech look and layout I will be focusing on some of the new tools available over the next few months (like in-line video tutorials and enabling viewer comments!).

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:21:17-07:00November 12th, 2008|Personal|

Make It Small(er)

I often see “Continued” or “More” in slide titles to indicate the slide contains a continuation of information from the previous slide. So the title looks like this:

But the “(CONT)” is not part of the topic and is distracting to the title. It takes more effort, but I recommend manually adjusting the font size of this special set of information to not be as distracting and to help provide a hierarchy of information. The adjusted text looks like this:

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T12:21:38-07:00November 11th, 2008|Tutorial|
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