Tutorial

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

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:

• A “Hard Return” is a line break that starts a new paragraph. In typography, the icon for a hard return is:

• A “Soft Return” is a line break without starting a new paragraph. In typography, the icon for a soft return is:

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

I really (really) do not like it when a separate text box is placed on top of a circle, because “the text would not fit”. In transparency, this may be exactly what I dealt with while formatting a presentation – and I am solving the problem by showing how to “make the text fit” in a circle.

Here is the common situation. The circle is where it is needed, and the size needed. The text is added to the circle object, but it does not fit and wraps to two lines.

Looking at the circle and its text properties reveals the problem. The circle has an interior text margin applied, making full circle not available for the text.

If we remove the interior margin and set the Left/Right/Top/Bottom to zero, the text now has room to fit inside the circle! Same font and font size, the text just needed to be able to get closer to the edge of the circle.

Here I do not want the text to fit, I want it large and overlapping the circle. But PowerPoint is being too helpful and keeping the text inside the circle. Note: the shape margins are set to zero’s (which is great).

In this situation, turn off the text wrap. This allows the big text to stay as part of the circle, but go beyond the circle shape

Troy @ TLC