PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Embed Fonts in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

Have you ever been in a situation where your presentation looked so awesome with some amazing typography, but when you opened the same presentation on another computer, the text looked positively terrible! This behavior may happen if the font you used is not available on the other computer. The best solution to this problem is to use safe fonts that are available on most computers, or you may also explore the option to embed fonts in your PowerPoint presentation.

Learn how to embed fonts in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Embed Fonts, Fonts, Microsoft Windows, Office 2010, PowerPoint 2010, Text, Tutorials

Outstanding Presentations 2016: Conversation with Ellen Finkelstein

Ellen Finkelstein is a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP, a recognized expert, speaker, trainer, and best-selling author on PowerPoint, presentation skills, and AutoCAD. Her articles have appeared in numerous magazines, newsletters, and blogs. She is presently running the Outstanding Presentations Workshop 2016 series, her webinar series that allows everyone to learn from renowned presentation experts.

In this conversation, Ellen talks more about this new webinar series.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed Under: Events
Tagged as: Ellen Finkelstein, Events, Interviews, Outstanding Presentations Workshop

PowerPoint and Presenting News: October 11, 2016

Widescreen slides are becoming the norm, and it is getting difficult to decide which slide proportions you should use for your next presentation, especially if you have no control over the projection environment. We explore this area in our Should You Create Widescreen Slides article. We also get you another foundation-level article–about differences between bitmaps and vector graphics.

In the Tutorials section, PowerPoint 2013 users can learn about moving shapes within SmartArt graphics, converting SmartArt into individual shapes, and formatting text attributes within SmartArt. PowerPoint 2010 users can learn about hiding and unhiding slides, and exporting presentations to video clips. Finally, do not miss the new press releases and templates of this week.

Read Indezine’s PowerPoint and Presenting News.

Filed Under: Ezine
Tagged as: Ezine, Indezine, News, PowerPoint

Insert an Organization Chart in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

You won’t find an option to add an Organization Chart in PowerPoint 2013’s Insert tab of the Ribbon. Instead, you will find the SmartArt option in the Insert tab, and organization charts are just one of the many variants of SmartArt graphics you can insert into your slide. An organization chart graphically represents the management or hierarchical structure of an organization. If you want to illustrate the reporting relationships in your company or organization, you can create a SmartArt graphic using the Organization Chart variant.

Learn how you can add an organization chart in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: Diagrams, Graphics, Office 2013, Org Chart, PowerPoint 2013, SmartArt, Tutorials

Recording Live Presentations with Camtasia: Conversation with Jake Pechtel

  Jake Pechtel is the Strategy Lead for TechSmith’s popular screen recording and video editing desktop software, Camtasia. He has an extensive background in marketing and branding, as well as mobile games and applications.

In this conversation, Jake discusses how you can record live presentations using Camtasia.

Geetesh: Presenters always want a way to record their presentations—at least the slides and their narrative if not their body language. How can Camtasia help them achieve this objective?

Jake: Camtasia can help people record their presentations in several ways. Many people record a pre-existing presentation, front to end; while talking their viewers through the slides. Camtasia’s core capabilities help presenters quickly and easily accomplish this. For PowerPoint specifically, Camtasia can operate as a plug-in, allowing presenters to initiate their recordings from within the PowerPoint application.

Camtasia also allows you can select any portion of your screen, your entire screen (or even a secondary screen connected to your presenting machine), and start recording it with just a few clicks. In addition to recording the screen, Camtasia can use the system microphone to capture narration.

We think it’s important to be able to make a human connection with your audience when creating a presentation or knowledge transfer recording. Camtasia can use your webcam to capture the presenter during the recording. That webcam video can be overlaid onto a part of a recorded presentation for a picture-in-picture effect. The webcam is recorded as a completely separate track for use in the Camtasia editor, so it can be removed for parts of a presentation. This allows you to keep body language, facial expressions, and personality in your video, which is often important for viewer engagement.

Camtasia includes a video editor, built for people who need to create the video but aren’t video professionals. So, it’s very accessible for presenters who have little to no video editing experience. Removing errors, trimming dead space, removing ‘ums’, adding callouts, highlighting specific content… it’s all there. Camtasia removes the pressure of the perfect one-take recording and gives presenters tools to help draw their viewers’ attention to key information in the recording.

Geetesh: Jake, are there any specific hardware issues that this approach for recording presentations with Camtasia would entail, and can you share recommendations and tips?

Jake: For most recordings – especially for presentations to be shared internally with a team, or a small group of viewers, the microphone and camera on most laptops are perfectly suitable (some devices are better than others of course). If you are planning to record a lot of presentations, or high-stakes presentations that go to a large audience, picking up a decent USB microphone is a wise investment. You might have a great presentation with plenty of relevant content, but if the audio is poor quality or hard to understand… viewers will flee almost immediately.

Overall, creating a basic presentation recording can be easily accomplished without an additional investment by almost any current generation system. Of course, the more you dive into Camtasia – adding tracks, effects, imported videos, or annotations, the more complex the project becomes, and the more system resources it requires to keep the experience smooth. However, presenters will be able to create some excellent videos with the machine they are using today.

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.

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Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Camtasia, Interviews, Jake Pechtel, PowerPoint, Presentations, Techsmith, Video Recording