PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Widescreen Implementations in PowerPoint

PowerPoint’s implementation of the Widescreen aspect ratio has changed somewhat over the last few versions. Although this is a small change, it is important to understand what is happening behind the scenes.

Explore the gamut of Widescreen slide aspect ratio implementations in PowerPoint.

Filed Under: PowerPoint All Versions
Tagged as: Aspect Ratio, PowerPoint, Tutorials, Widescreen

SwiftPrez / PresentAssist: Conversation with Jamie Garroch

  Jamie Garroch, CEO of YOUpresent (formerly GMARK) founded the company to provide presentation professionals with presentation software, content and training. Jamie uses a range of presentation and e-learning tools on PC and Mac from PowerPoint to Keynote, Adobe CS and iSpring for presentations and Articulate Storyline for e-learning. He also uses PowerPoint as a programming environment to create authoring automation for his company’s productivity needs, custom add-ins for clients and off-the-shelf products for presentation designers.

In this conversation, Jamie discusses the new SwiftPrez/PresentAssist add-in for PowerPoint.

Geetesh: Jamie, tell us more about your new product, SwiftPrez — how it came about and who the target audience is?

Jamie: As a long-term user of PowerPoint within corporate environments, I’ve often observed the challenges faced by marketing teams as they battle with the need to provide up-to-date content to tens, hundreds or even thousands of users. Quite often, templates, slides, pictures, and other content are emailed out to users, either as links to file servers or the files themselves, and the recipients quickly forget where this valuable content is stored. If they manage to find it they’re then left wondering if they’ve got the latest version.

The other aspect of dealing with a large number of employees is how to make sure that everyone is designing new slides to be on-brand. One common approach is to provide a template file that contains example slides of how content should be laid out and designed. But again, many users simply can’t remember all of the styling rules they’re supposed to abide by.

SwiftPrez is designed to address these two challenges by providing a built-in solution within PowerPoint, delivering the following:

• Brand Library – a synchronized library of templates, slides, photography and graphics (e.g. shapes, icons, illustrations, tables, charts). All assets being directly accessible from the PowerPoint ribbon.
• Brand Checker – a configurable rules-based engine that automatically checks presentations for brand consistency e.g. fonts, colours, effects, layout positioning and more.

Combining these two powerful approaches to content creation ensures that the organization’s brand champion can deploy and maintain up-to-date content whilst managing their brand identity within the client-facing presentation space more effectively. SwiftPrez adds this functionality within a new tab in the PowerPoint ribbon, the SwiftPrez brand being replaced with the client’s chosen brand.

The solution can also alleviate some of the challenges involved in deploying and updating PowerPoint templates and Chart templates thanks to them being optionally included in the installer and/or being updateable via the Brand Library sync engine. This will be particularly advantageous to any IT professional used to the difficulties of managing Microsoft Office customization deployments.

Geetesh: What opportunities are there for presentation design agencies to build SwiftPrez into their business offering?

Jamie: The challenges described above are not only faced by the organizations creating in-house content but also those agencies creating presentation content on behalf of their clients.

One case in example is that of Buffalo7, the UK’s leading PowerPoint presentation design agency, which markets the add-in as PresentAssist in the United Kingdom.

Buffalo7 worked closely with YOUpresent to incorporate the add-in into its structured offering. By providing clients with the option to onboard the platform, Buffalo7 has been able to provide even more value when it comes to presentation design solutions.

Buffalo7’s Creative Director Richard Barnes commented that “you can produce the best-branded presentation template for an organization, but there’s no way you can ensure that that staff across the business will make use of it and adhere to its style guidelines. We integrated PresentAssist into our offering to answer this problem.

“It’s powerful presentation compilation tools and guidelines checker means that it provides a centralized solution that not only makes presentation content easily accessible to users but provides an efficient way to make sure presentations are on-brand across the company.”

For more information, visit SwiftPrez (YOUpresent customers) and PresentAssist (Buffalo UK customers).

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors 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, Buffalo 7, Digital Asset Management, Interviews, Jamie Garroch, PowerPoint, PresentAssist, SwiftPrez

Pixel-Art Heart Shapes for PowerPoint

Hearts typically have super-smooth edges but in today’s world, you need more options. So we decided to create Pixel Art versions of Heart shapes! You get four variations. These Heart shapes are already placed within slides and are available in both black and white. Do remember though that they can be recolored using PowerPoint’s native options for fills, lines, and effects. Just copy the Heart shape you like and paste into another PowerPoint slide, or even a Word document or Excel worksheet.

Download and use these Pixel-Art Heart shapes.

Filed Under: Presentation Bank
Tagged as: Graphics, Hearts, PowerPoint, Shapes, Silhouettes, Visuals

Duplicating a Presentation in Microsoft Sway

Sway is a fantastic tool to create presentations, but let’s face the fact—no Sway file sits on your computer or backup device that you can revert to if you make a mistake! At other times, it is easy to get carried away with Sway’s Remix option, where an action that resembles rolling the dice gets you immediate results—and you just go on playing with Remix! You may then long to go back to a state that was 25 Remixes ago, or you may not even remember how far you want to go back!

Explore how to duplicate a presentation in Microsoft Sway.

Filed Under: Sway
Tagged as: Duplicate, Microsoft, Online Presentations, Sway, Tutorials

Link to Word Bookmarks from PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

Yes, you can link to a Word document from a PowerPoint slide object. We have already explained this process in an earlier tutorial. However, that process only links to the Word document. Most of the time, this will open the Word document with the first-page active. However, what if you wanted to link to page 33 of a 50 page Word document? This is doable, but it must be one of the least well-known secrets ever known!

Learn how you can link to specific locations in Word documents from PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: Bookmark, Hyperlinking, Linking, Office 2013, PowerPoint 2013, Tutorials, Word