Tutorial

PowerPoint Gets The Blame with Widescreens

There are times when it looks like PowerPoint is to blame, but in reality it is a computer OS setting that is making PowerPoint appear to behave badly. An example of this that comes up often is running a presentation on a widescreen monitor.

Recent Post on the PowerPoint Forum:
I have a widescreen monitor powerpoint distorts graphs. The font becomes much larger and squished together. How do I stop the powerpoint from changing things?

My Response:
(on a pre-Vista OS) Go to START >> CONTROL PANEL >> DISPLAY >> SETTINGS tab >> ADVANCED button >> depending on which video card, find setting for MAINTAIN ASPECT RATIO. Now 4×3 presentations will display with black bars on the left/right so nothing is distorted on a widescreen monitor.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T15:38:48-07:00February 13th, 2007|Tutorial|

Video Tutorial on PowerPoint Photo Crop Tool

For a recent client I supplied the PowerPoint template and a quick video tutorial on using PowerPoint’s Crop tool to provide some tips on how best to insert a series of photos. Now for your viewing pleasure I have uploaded that tutorial to one of my servers for all to enjoy!

Note: This was unscripted and created in just a few minutes, so it is definitely lacking much of the polished professional touches that go into real projects… Click here to view.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-05-13T15:19:43-07:00February 11th, 2007|Portfolio, Tutorial|

Add Align Tools to a Toolbar

I use the Align and Distribute tools constantly. But accessing them by going to the DRAW button and then into the ALIGN OR DISTRIBUTE tab was just to much work. I added these important tools to my Draw toolbar, which now has a number of addtional buttons – all to make my work faster and easier.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T15:32:04-07:00January 22nd, 2007|Software/Add-Ins, Tutorial|

What’s Wrong With It? (Alignment!)

In working through many, many presentations this week a large part of my time was spent not only improving the overall visual content and layout, but giving the small, but professional, tweaks to elements. As example:


Here are two elements, as provided. They screamed out to me, but what was the problem…


Zooming in we can see that the two equal size boxes are not aligned.


The solution is very easy in PowerPoint.
Select both boxes.
Go to DRAW >> ALIGN OR DISTRIBUTE >> ALIGN LEFT.


Now both boxes are perfectly aligned! (and all is good with in my world… just 200-300 more slides to go).

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T15:31:46-07:00January 20th, 2007|Tutorial|

Why Do My Slides Start at Zero?

Had a client call with this situation – which is frustrating if you don’t know where to look.

You look at your slides in Slide Sorter view, or on a printout, and the first slide is not labeled as #1, but as #0.

To “fix” go to FILE >> PAGE SETUP

In the Page Setup Dialog note the NUMBER SLIDES FROM option. Change the “0” to “1” and all is back to normal.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T15:31:00-07:00January 16th, 2007|Tutorial|

PPT Brightness & Contrast Buttons

PowerPoint has very, very basic image editing capabilities. But some great effects and adjusts can be created quickly using the Brightness and Contrast toolset. Here is my original image of a chess board added to the slide.

But it is to dark and too much contrast to effectively overlay text on.

Here is my adjusted image:

Instead of opening the image in Photoshop again – adjusting the brightness and contrast – saving out – re-inserting into presentation, I did all of the needed adjustments directly in PowerPoint.

I selected the image, increased the brightness around 8 clicks and decreased the contrast around 10 clicks and now the image is ready for the text box to be added to the slide. Took less than 10 seconds!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T15:30:18-07:00January 12th, 2007|Portfolio, Tutorial|

Embed Large .Wav Audio Files

I have covered this before, but it keeps coming up. This week I created this quick tutorial for a client, so here it is in a bit more detail.

1. The only audio format that can be embedded into a PowerPoint presentation is a .wav

2. By default PowerPoint will only embedd a .wav file if it is under 100k (very small – generally less than 10 seconds)

3. You can raise the embeddable file size to 50 MB!

4. Go to TOOLS >> OPTIONS

5. Go to the GENERAL tab

6. Change the 100 to 50000 (do not add a comma)

7. Done!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T15:29:56-07:00January 10th, 2007|Tutorial|

Hardware Acceleration and The PowerPoint Viewer

The super-useful PowerPoint Viewer application does have one flaw – it does not have the ability to take advantage of a computers graphics card power with the “Use Hardware Acceleration” feature. So if you have a presentation that is going to be distributed and viewed with the PowerPoint Viewer I would recomend turning off the Hardware Acceleration and viewing the slideshow to get a better idea of what others will see.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T15:07:47-07:00November 29th, 2006|Tutorial|

Should I use Hardware Acceleration?

If your computer has dedicated graphics memory – yes.
If the computer has a shared memory graphics processor – no.

To check what you have, go to:
(1) START >> CONTROL PANEL >> DISPLAY >> SETTINGS tab
(2) Select “Monitor 1”
(3) Click the ADVANCED button

(4) Go to the ADAPTOR tab. Here you can see the manufacturer, model and amount of memory of the graphics card.

TIP: if the computer uses an Intel graphics processor, it is shared memory. ATI and NVidia manufacture both shared memory and dedicated memory cards.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T15:05:58-07:00November 27th, 2006|Tutorial|

Smoother Animation with Hardware Acceleration

If you notice some of your animations are not playing smooth, check to assure you are using all of your graphic processor’s power. Go to SLIDE SHOW >> SETUP SHOW >> check the USE COMPUTER HARDWARE ACCELERATION.

Now run the presentation and things should be running much smoother.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-11-17T15:05:01-07:00November 25th, 2006|Tutorial|
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