Personal Technology Tips in Plain English
Powerpoint
Valetine’s Day Secret: A Powerpoint Trick You’ll Love
Feb 14th
As media director for my church, I am constantly working with Microsoft Powerpoint. While most people cringe at the sound of the presentation software being mentioned, I’ve found that it’s a really useful application if you know around it.
There are some neat features in Powerpoint that are not normally utilized, but are quite useful — outside of just presentations and reports. One of them is to use Powerpoint as a graphics design program. No, it won’t come close to Illustrator, Photoshop, or any of the other nifty (and expensive!) applications out there.
But if you need to create some decent graphics for your website, flyers or any other desktop publishing scenarios, Powerpoint can be your friend.
One of the best features for graphics is Powerpoint’s ability to create and save file in formats other than the .PPT format. Did you know you can create web graphics files with Powerpoint? Microsoft has included a feature to convert any slide (or all of them) to JPG, GIF, TIFF and PNG formats.
Here’s how to do it…
Powerpoint Tip: Stop Following Orders
Jul 25th
Did you know that Powerpoint turns 20 this year!
The creators Dennis Austin & Robert Gaskins both readily admit that there are tons and tons of BAD Powerpoint presentations and users.
The original intent of Powerpoint was to use it as a SUPPORTIVE tool to your presentation, not to bore the audience to death by dragging them through an entire detailed presentation — even when the content on the next couple of slides are irrelevant or already covered or just plain moot now based on the discussion in the room.
One of my best and most used tips is something that helps keep presentations alive and focused on the information you want to deliver to the audience in real time — the ability to jump to specific slides within a presentation ON DEMAND, AT WILL. Everyone I’ve shared this with found it incredibly useful and you could see a smirk reveal iteself when they started to imagine how useful it would be in a live powerpoint presentation.
It’s so simple, yet you’d think only powerusers and Powerpoint Magicians would have these super powers. Here’s how. . .
How to Insert Slides from One Powerpoint Presentation File into Another
May 19th
There are many times when you are preparing a Powerpoint presentation in collaboration with others. While you may be the main author or presenter, you need to integrate various sub-sections of the prestentation created by others on your team. While it would be ideal if everyone worked off the same template, fonts, formatting, etc. it’s not realistic to assume this would happen all the time.
If you work with others on Powerpoint presentations, you’ll need to learn how to insert their slides into the master presentation file. Much of the time a simple Copy/Paste of the slides with both Powerpoint presentations open will do the trick. BUT beware that many times you loose the original formatting, font assignments, text shadows, etc. Instead of grumbling under your breath while you go through each slide and touch up text and other elements to make it look nice and pretty, here’s a way to insert slides without loosing any of the formatting. . . Read the rest of this entry »
I love tech, gadgets and the web. Hope you pick-up a useful tip or two here today that helps you use technology to your advantage! Better yet, why not share your own expertise in a comment on a post today to help the other readers that land here for answers!