PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Texture Fills for Slide Backgrounds in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Textures are the “in” thing even in a world that looks so much at the new flat design concept — and the reason is not difficult to understand. The right texture can add interest, and make your slide content look crafted.

Learn how to use Texture fills for Slide Backgrounds in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Background, Fills, Microsoft Windows, Office 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Textures, Tutorials

3 Techniques for Highlighting Important Words

By Ellen Finkelstein

When your audience sees a slide that is a sea of words, they will remember almost nothing. This type of slide overloads short-term memory and as they say these days, it’s TMI (too much information).

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Filed Under: Guest Posts
Tagged as: Ellen Finkelstein, Guest Post, PowerPoint, Techniques

Presentation Guild Survey: Conversation with Sandra Johnson

    Sandra Johnson has owned her presentation design business since 2001. As a certified Woman-owned Business Enterprise, she works with individuals and corporations across the globe to ensure that they PowerPoint. Responsibly. Sandra first earned the Microsoft PowerPoint MVP Award in 2008 and is currently among around 40 people around the globe with that distinction. Sandra is a founding member and Vice President of The Presentation Guild.

In this conversation, Sandra talks about the ongoing Presentation Guild Survey (link no longer exists).

Geetesh: Tell us more about the Presentation Guild, and what do you expect to achieve from this survey?

Sandra: This is just the first in many surveys we hope to conduct with potential Guild members. We are in the early stages of forming a trade association whose mission is to promote the presentation design and production industry as a profession, recognize the skills and expertise of presentation creation specialists, and provide opportunities for members to expand their knowledge and abilities. To that end, it is important to us that we learn more about what presentation professionals face when it comes to presentations so we can create an organization that meets their needs.

So, whether respondents work in an administrative role, create presentations for presenting at work, design presentations for others for a living, work backstage in an AV environment, or rely on others to create presentations for them to deliver, we’re asking presentationists to take 5 minutes to tell us a little about that role.

Geetesh: How will you use the responses in the survey to make the Presentation Guild more representative and relevant to its members?

Sandra: We will listen to every suggestion to make the Presentation Guild relevant to today’s presentationists. From presentation designers to the profession’s leading practitioners, we hope to draw members from all backgrounds, all fields, and all levels of experience—from all around the world. That’s why the results of this survey are so important – it will allow presentationists everywhere to influence an organization built just for them.

Disclosure: Geetesh Bajaj of Indezine is a founding member of The Presentation Guild.

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: Interviews, Presentation Guild, Sandra Johnson, Survey

Picture Fills for Slide Backgrounds in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Most presentations contain pictures. A picture in PowerPoint can be used in many ways — as a picture you insert, as a picture you place within a shape, or even as something that covers the entire slide as a background. In this tutorial, we will look at the last option — that lets you use a picture as a slide background. Before you begin, you need to put in plenty of thought into whether the picture you are using will work as a slide background or not? So how do you determine if a picture will work as a background or not?

Learn how to use Pictures as fills for Slide Backgrounds in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

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

Pattern Fills for Slide Backgrounds in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Patterns in PowerPoint are two-color designs comprising lines, dots, dashes, checks, etc. PowerPoint includes 48 such patterns with names like Plaid, Weaves, Shingle, and Zigzag. This tutorial builds upon what you have already learned in the Format Slide Background tutorial and shows how you can use a Pattern fill for your slide background.

Learn how to apply Pattern fills as Slide Backgrounds in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Background, Fills, Microsoft Windows, Office 2016, Pattern, PowerPoint 2016, Tutorials