PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Save as PDF in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Saving a PowerPoint presentation as a PDF has its pros and cons. The biggest advantage is that recipients won’t be able to edit, and you can embed fonts easily. An even better advantage is that you may use PDFs as a substitute for printing drafts or finished slides, thus saving so much paper. Disadvantages include that you cannot be entirely multimedia-friendly. Whatever your thoughts may be, PowerPoint makes it very easy to create PDFs.

Create PDFs from your presentation slides in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Microsoft Windows, Office 2016, PDF, PowerPoint 2016, Save, Tutorials

Create a Pop-out Effect in PowerPoint

Do you always struggle to make people focus on your presentations? Maybe you’re not a Photoshop pro who can spice up the images by using fancy layers and filters. Has it ever occurred to you that you can add the same Pop-out effect right in your PowerPoint presentation?

Let’s see how we can create a Remove Background effect or the Pop-out effect. This effect can be used if you have many images in your slides and want people to concentrate only on a certain part of your image.

Let us take an example of the given image file:

Before
Image: Unsplash

Consider that you only have to concentrate on some aspects of the image. So, you can highlight them and fade out the rest of the image. So, if you want to focus on the window, you can show the image like this.

After

Let’s see how we achieved this result:

1. Create a duplicate slide of the image file, simply by pressing the Ctrl + D shortcut. Select the image. Now on the Format tab, choose Remove Background.



PowerPoint Keyboard Shortcuts

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2. Select only the part which you want. In our case, it is the window—the rest of the image will turn purple, indicating that it will be removed. After you are done selecting, you will have something like what you see in the image below. Only the window will be shown, and the rest of the image will be covered with a pink mask.



3. Now, to create the faded effect, take the replica of the image we created. Click on the Format tab and then click on Color for various pre-defined options. In our case, we use the Gray option. Using that color, the image will look faded.



4. Now, the final part is how to merge both these images. Paste the file with removed background on this faded image. Sometimes both these files may not be aligned. In that case, select both the images then go to Format | Align. Click on Align Center and Align Middle. There you go, we have the final picture ready. You can also repeat the same steps for any other parts of the image you want to highlight.

Use this remarkable effect to make impressive slides and keep the audience engaged to the part that you want. If you have another creative Pop-out effect idea, comment at the end of this blog.

  Rishabh Pugalia is a Chartered Accountant. Before being involved with content creation at Yoda Learning, he worked with KPMG and J. P. Morgan. He enjoys working with both Excel and PowerPoint, and in the remaining time, you will find him playing Counter Strike. Do take a look at some of the tutorials on his site; he hopes they will help you make presentations like an investment banker or a consultant.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Filed Under: Guest Posts
Tagged as: Guest Post, Pictures, PowerPoint, Rishabh Pugalia, Tutorials

Crop Picture to Shape in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

While you can conventionally crop pictures in PowerPoint to a rectangular constraint, you can also opt to use another shape to crop instead. This tutorial explains the Crop to Shape option that lets you choose non-rectangular cropping shapes for your pictures; the results tend to look like a picture contained within a shape.

Learn to crop pictures using the Crop to Shape option in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Crop, Graphics, Microsoft Windows, Office 2016, Pictures, PowerPoint 2016, Tutorials

The Authority Guide to Presenting and Public Speaking: Conversation with Steve Bustin

    Steve Bustin has worked with major brands (MTV, TalkTalk, The Guardian) as well as charities (Stonewall, The WEA, Girls Not Brides) and hundreds of small businesses (SMEs) and individuals over the last 15 years. He has helped them to communicate better in order to build their business, reach new audiences and support their team.

In this conversation, Steve talks about his book, The Authority Guide to Presenting and Public Speaking.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Books, Interviews, Presentation Skills, Public Speaking, Steve Bustin

Background Removal in PowerPoint: Conversation with Tucker Hatfield

Tucker Hatfield has been working as a Program Manager at Microsoft for 18 years and the last ten of them have been in Office. He’s worked on Cropping, Background Removal, Artistic Effects, Co-authoring, and Comments. He’s currently working primarily on Pen and Ink improvements for Office, including the recent Ink Editor feature. When work and family allows, he indulges his love for photography and is trying to teach himself play the ukulele.

In this conversation, Tucker explores the Background Removal in PowerPoint.

Geetesh: Tucker, you have been involved with the amazing Background Removal options in PowerPoint. What prompted you to add this feature?

Tucker: Background Removal was a lucky synergy between Microsoft Research (MSR) and the Office Graphics team.

As digital cameras and smartphones were beginning to make use of images in Office documents more common, we began to get feedback from customers that they needed to do simple photo editing without having to invest in expensive editing software or involve an artist. During planning for Office 14 (Office 2010), we decided we needed to improve our support for pictures in the core applications to address those needs. As a result, we made improving picture editing a priority and began planning.

At the same time we were planning, MSR was also investigating ways to improve the picture editing experience. During our research, we found an internal website from MSR Cambridge showing images of a program they were calling “Grabcut” that could isolate parts of a picture and let you remove the background. It included some demo videos that were short but impressive and we contacted them to find out how long it might be before that technology was available.

To our surprise, they responded by sending back a demo app that actually worked. It had a very minimal user interface and required a little finesse to use, but it worked quite well, so we started deeper discussions about how to get it into Office. Integrating Grabcut involved a lot of work to make it compatible with Office code, our rendering system, and our user interface, but MSR helped us every step of the way. In fact, our team received a Technology Transfer Award from Microsoft Research for our collaboration.

We shipped it in Office 2010, along with other picture editing features. During Office 2013 (Office 15) development, our India Development Center took over developing picture features and have made further improvements.

Geetesh: Have you been surprised by the ways in which the Background Removal tool has been used—in other words, have you seen Background Removal being used in ways never imagined before? Alternatively, do you want to share a story or some trivia about the Background Removal tool?

Tucker: It’s been amusing to see how much we use Background Removal ourselves. We do a lot of decks and specification documents where product shots, images of a user interface, or logos need to be used and we use Background Removal so that the image “floats” instead of having a rectangular border and a bland background. It also gets used a lot to remove parts of the image that we don’t want to show or to isolate objects or UI so that it’s the focus of the discussion. Seeing it used so frequently in work documents is very cool.

But I’d have to say that the most impressive use I’ve seen background removal put to was shown to me by one of the people who make decks for some of Microsoft’s major presentations. It’s a process where they take a single picture, remove specific background elements of it, and then “layer” it on top of itself. The result is that you can have objects look like they’re behind one element of the image and in front of another. You can even animate the shapes.

In the example I was first shown, the author used an animated icon of a skier skiing between background-removed layers of mountains. You can also animate layers moving horizontally at slightly different speeds to give a “Ken Burns” style pan of a static image. I’ve used these stacked images a lot since discovering the technique – it can add a lot of interest to an otherwise static picture.

As an example, I can take three versions of a mountain landscape: one complete, one with just the sky removed, and one with the sky and mountains removed. I then stack them so that they align and look like the original, but by adding in shapes at various Z-orders in the stack of images, I can create a 3D effect.

The Selection Pane helps a lot in ordering them correctly and since pictures “snap” in alignment, it’s easy to realign the separate images.

Geetesh: Thank you so much for sharing some amazing thoughts in this feature, Tucker. Many Indezine readers will find inspiration from the Background Layers trick! I look forward to interviewing you again.

See Also: PowerPoint Feedback and UserVoice: Does This Go Anywhere?

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Background, Interviews, Microsoft, PowerPoint, Tucker Hatfield