Resource/Misc

PowerPoint Animation Jitters Update

This is a quick (and great!) update to last week’s post “Stop PowerPoint from Getting the Animation Jitters!“

The incredibly talented coder, Chirag, quickly put together (in his words) “a very simple and small utility… that toggles the (regedit) setting when you execute it. When it states that sprite clipping is disabled, you get smooth animations. Ensure that PowerPoint is not running when you execute this utility.”

I have not tested, partly because I have manually updated all computers at TLC with the registry update. Download the free utility – https://www.officeoneonline.com/download/SpriteClipping.exe (61KB).

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T10:29:11-07:00July 17th, 2013|Resource/Misc, Templates/Assets|

Add Twitter Feed To Slides

We were recently at a show to handle the presentations, and the presenter encouraged the audience to tweet about the conference daily events. During the break, we were asked to show the twitter feed. Advanced planning is great – this was not it.

We used Visibletweets.com to provide a solution. Visibletweets.com is a Flash based website with no download (other than the Flash player if not installed). On the website, you are prompted to type in a hash hag, search a term, or use someone’s twitter id.

Then one tweet at a time fills the page, each animates to the next. There are 3 types of animation to choose from: Letter by Letter (which is our favorite), Rotation, and Tag Cloud.

If you use the option to run the show in the web browser full screen, the background automatically changes colors.

There are 3 options for using visibletweets.com during a presentation.
Option 1: Run the website from a backup computer (with internet access) and toggle it to the screen.
Option 2: Have a link to the website on a slide and use it to switch from presentation to web browser (going back to the presentation requires using ALT+Tab or closing the web browser – so not as seamless and elegant).
Option 3: Use Shyam’s LiveWeb add-in to display a webpage directly on your presentation slide (this is a FREE add-in that can be downloaded here).

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T10:31:07-07:00July 10th, 2013|Resource/Misc, Software/Add-Ins, Tutorial|

Stop PowerPoint from Getting the Animation Jitters!

Long scrolling animations worked great back in PPT 2003. But with the new .xml format (.pptx) came a new render engine for animations and it caused these same animations to stutter and “jitter” as they played.

You can fix these with a registry edit (Note: the registry controls the computer and in general mistakes in here can be very bad).

First, download this test file and run (download here, 3.7MB). Take note of how smooth, or jittery, the text animation is.

Close PowerPoint.

To update a computers PowerPoint settings:

1. Start >> search bar “regedit”

2. Go to Hkey Current User>>Software>>Microsoft>>Office>>15.0>>PowerPoint>>Options
– Note: This is the path for PPT 2013. For PPT 2010, it will be “12.0” vs. 15.0.

3. In the right section, right-click and select NEW >> DWORD (32-BIT) VALUE

4. Name it “DisableSpriteClipping”

5. Find the new entry and right-click and select MODIFY

6. In the VALUE DATA box, enter “1” (BASE can be Hex or Dec) and click OK

Start PPT and run the test file again. Take note of how smooth, or jittery, the text animation is.

Many thanks to Steve Rindsberg of PPTools for making me aware of Microsoft’s Chris Maloney’s shared bit of coding that works wonders for anyone fearful of animation jitters!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T10:31:29-07:00July 8th, 2013|Resource/Misc, Software/Add-Ins, Tutorial|

Happy 4th of July 2013!

Have a great 4th as we celebrate the start of the USA! Staff designer, Josh, created this great patriot slide for the occasion. The background and fireworks were developed in Photoshop and the 3D text in PowerPoint 2013.

Download slide here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T10:32:06-07:00July 4th, 2013|Resource/Misc|

PowerPoint Outline – inside/outside/middle ???

A stroke and an outline are the same thing, but called different things based on the program being used. It is a line around the perimeter. The line can be any color, even a gradient of colors and any width. But PowerPoint has a flaw in its outline/stroke feature:

When you apply strokes to shapes in Illustrator or Photoshop, you have the option to align the stroke to the outside, inside, or center of the shape:

In PowerPoint, the stroke is automatically applied to the center of a PowerPoint, or vector, shape:

However, with inserted images, the stroke gets applied to the outside:

And for text, the stroke is applied to the center:

This makes it difficult if you are trying to align shapes with images, the strokes don’t align even if they are the same weight simply because PPT aligns to the edge of the shape/image and now the same size elements with the same width stroke are different sizes, because on one the stroke makes the shape wider than the other. With the text, the actual text starts to disappear (above example is the base text and then a 10pt stroke applied – which almost completely eliminates the black text). There is not a solution for PowerPoint as of PPT 2013, but we can hope for user control over the placement (inside-outside-center) by the designer to improve PowerPoint.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T10:33:55-07:00June 24th, 2013|Resource/Misc, Templates/Assets|

Florida in September – Yes!

Fort Lauderdale, Florida in September is perfect! I, and hopefully you, will be there for the 2013 Presentation Summit. I will be hanging out in the Help Center answering PPT questions throughout the event and have 2 presentation sessions.

Here is the session schedule, which is packed with great topics by the top people in the presentation industry. My talk titles are:
1. “PowerPoint is my Creative Suite”
2. “Don’t Be the Presenter the AV Crew Hates!”

On the schedule webpage, the talk titles link to a more detailed description of each talk. Hope to meet up with lots of you there!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T10:34:30-07:00June 21st, 2013|Personal, Resource/Misc|

Lori’s Showsite Staging

This is Lori’s show she is running the presentations for today. Unfortunately, when I stopped in (I am actually running GFXs for a different meeting at the same venue), it was not the more elaborate presentation graphics, but each section of custom shaped staging is projection mapped for content.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T10:37:54-07:00June 17th, 2013|Resource/Misc|

Online Art with Silk

Silk is an online interactive art generator, where you create the art. The art is based on mirrored, or reflective, creation and it is much easier to experience than explain – so go experience it here.

I have saved out some images from Silk to use in PowerPoint template background development and also used the abstract art as images on slides. It is definitely a unique site that quickly produces unique art images.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-10T10:39:05-07:00June 12th, 2013|Resource/Misc|
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