PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Picture Borders in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

In PowerPoint, the Picture Border option adds an outline or even a beautiful frame to your picture. Once you insert a picture on your slide, you can apply various Adjust Picture options. You can also apply any of the preset Picture Styles available for the picture. In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to add a border to an inserted picture in PowerPoint 2016.

Learn how to add and edit picture borders in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

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

Picture Effects in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

After inserting pictures within your PowerPoint slide, you may want to change their appearance. You can add distinctive borders to your pictures or use the various Adjust Picture options. Alternatively, you can directly apply preset Picture Styles as well. These Picture Styles are based on PowerPoint’s Picture Effects capabilities and add some effects with a click. Most of the time, this means that a single Picture Style adds a reflection, a glow, and a border to your picture. However, you can also apply any of these effects individually to your pictures. In all, PowerPoint provides 6 effects: shadow, reflection, glow, soft edges, bevel, and 3-D rotation.

Learn about Picture Effects in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

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

A Journey with NXPowerLite: Conversation with Mike Power

      Mike Power is the founder and Managing Director of Neuxpower, a software solutions company based in the UK. Neuxpower custom-builds both stand-alone applications and add-ins that enhance existing software such as Microsoft Office. Their commercially-available file optimization software NXPowerLite compresses PDF, Microsoft Office and JPEG files simply and effectively by up to 90%, making them easy to email as attachments.

In this conversation, Mike explores NXPowerLite retrospectively and looks at the near future.

Geetesh: There are several file compression products, but NXPowerLite was the original PowerPoint compression product, and it still works seamlessly with PowerPoint and also other Microsoft Office file formats. Can you reminisce a bit about the journey so far?

Mike: It’s been a huge amount of fun!

When we first built NXPowerLite Desktop back in 2001 email bandwidth limits were incredibly tight, so creating a product that quickly made large PowerPoint files small enough to slip under the radar netted us some very excited and appreciative customers. At the time Neuxpower was a digital marketing agency, so the first version of NXPowerLite was a side project. The idea to make PowerPoint compression software came after chatting with a client. He had spent a painful morning hand-optimizing all of the images in his presentation to make it small enough to send to his colleagues in the US. We figured that there must be an easier way… and later that year NXPowerLite was born.

On Launch day we sold a single license to a gentleman called Stewart McKnight from PepsiCo, which was very exciting for us. We were pleasantly surprised a week later when he came back and bought 10, then completely blew us away when he bought 100 licenses the month after! That’s when we realized we were building something that people really wanted, something important. Now we’ve sold roughly 2.5 million licenses of NXPowerLite Desktop, which we are utterly humbled by, it’s a huge number.

The software has evolved dramatically over the years and substantially expanded in scope and capabilities. If you’re interested in seeing what NXPowerLite looked like back in 2001, take a quick look at our blog post charting the first 12-years evolution of the software.

In spite of bandwidth limitations easing over the years, we still find that many people continue to struggle sending large files. Whether it’s a restriction at their end or with the recipient – large files continue to cause email problems. It’s gratifying to have made such an impact over the years, and exciting to still be able to innovate and develop our solutions further. We have some exciting plans for a major update in 2017 when we release version 8. Improving file reduction remains our primary focus, but we will be making time to completely rework the way files are added, optimized and saved to making the software an even more seamless experience. Watch this space…

Geetesh: Can you share a story about how NXPowerLite made a difference to the way people work?

Mike: We talk to our customers as much as we can, seeing things from their point of view is key when solving problems. The most common thing we hear from them is that sending large files by email can be hard work. They claim other compression tools don’t reduce their files, and they don’t like the inconvenient extra step required to unzip files.

We’ve changed the way these people work by eliminating the time-consuming and often frustrating effort involved with sending large files. Our users don’t even have to think about whether a file is too large. The combination of NXPowerLite’s unique reduction capability and seamless email integration means that people can focus on doing their jobs rather than troubleshooting email delivery. The added bonus is that files reduced with NXPowerLite don’t need to be unzipped, which makes life easier for the recipients too!

You May Also Like: NXPowerLite 6: Conversation with Mike Power

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: Add-in, Compression, Interviews, Mike Power, NXPowerlite, PowerPoint

Identify Font File Types in PowerPoint

Have you heard that all fonts are not the same? Did you know that only TrueType fonts can be embedded in PowerPoint, and that too only on Windows versions of PowerPoint? And what are the other font file types? On this page, we will explore these topics.

Learn how you can identify font file types.

Filed Under: Fonts
Tagged as: Fonts, PowerPoint, Tutorials

Picture Styles in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Similar to Shape Styles for the shapes on your slide, PowerPoint also provides Picture Styles for your inserted pictures. With a single click, Picture Styles can transform a simple looking picture to something that’s more distinct. Note that unlike Shape Styles, Picture Styles are not Theme specific. They just transform your picture to make it look stylish by applying a border, or 3-D effect, or by changing the frame shape, etc.

Learn how to apply preset Picture Styles in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

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