PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

PowerPoint on Cruise Control: Conversation with Taylor Croonquist

  
Taylor Croonquist is the co-founder of Nuts & Bolts Speed Training, a website delivering actionable PowerPoint training and speed strategies, helping professionals cut their build time in a third. Prior to Nuts & Bolts, Taylor lived and worked in China for 10 years in finance and consulting. When he’s not busy crafting PowerPoint training, you can find him traveling and scuba diving.

In this conversation, Taylor, the shortcuts gurus from the Nuts & Bolts blog shares tips on how not to shoot yourself in the foot with a bazooka in PowerPoint.

Geetesh: You often say that people are shooting themselves in the foot in PowerPoint? Can you elaborate?

Taylor: Yeah, they’re shooting themselves in the foot with a bazooka! Here’s what I see happen all of the time.

People sit down at their computers to build their slides and with the best intentions…

They painstakingly, one-by-one, manually do all of these things in PowerPoint that the program could easily do for them…

And PowerPoint could do it 10 times faster and 100% more accurately…It’s what I like to call “PowerPoint on Cruise Control”

Imagine that you’re pushing a gasoline mower around your yard really really hard, instead of just turning it on. Yes, if you push the gasoline mower hard enough and sweat buckets, it might work, but why not just turn the engine on and let the mower do its thing?

The same thing is true in PowerPoint.

For example, people are investing hundreds of hours a year (yes, hundreds) manually formatting their objects (pushing that mower) instead of recycling their formatting (turning the mower on). In my free Cruise Control training video, I talk about the 6 different ways to do so, that they are all almost-instant and 100% accurate.

All natively in PowerPoint too…no add-ins or extra purchases required!

And if you knew better, why would you invest 5 minutes formatting a chart (for example) when you could simply apply your formatting in 5 seconds? You wouldn’t!

But that’s what people are doing to themselves every single day in PowerPoint, and hence, how they are shooting themselves in the foot with a bazooka!

≫ See How To Put PowerPoint On Cruise Control Today

Geetesh: What’s one hidden shortcut you think every PowerPoint user should know?

Taylor: Without a doubt, it’s the bonus feature of the duplicate shortcut (Ctrl + D).

First off, the duplicate command is twice as fast as the normal copy (Ctrl + C) and paste (Ctrl + V). So right off the bat, you are doubling your speed on a common and repetitive task.

But it gets a lot better than that!

The bonus feature of the duplicate command is that when you duplicate an object a second time, the new object automatically jumps in the same direction and distance as your last manual movement.

What does that mean?

It means that if you build your slides using the concept of Relative Alignment and Positioning (something I talk a lot about in my training) as you duplicate your objects within your layout, they literally jump into perfect alignment and positioning on your slide…automatically and with no extra work on your part!

It seriously looks like magic when pulled off correctly and goes right back to getting PowerPoint to do the work for you…

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, Keyboard Shortcuts, PowerPoint, Taylor Croonquist

PowerPoint and Presenting News: December 15, 2015

We bring you an exclusive conversation with Motti Nisani of emaze, who discusses the new Automaze option in emaze that actually lets a machine make better slides! We also bring you a Visual Resume Templates for PowerPoint, plus a Christmas PowerPoint Kit.

We explore interface options in the new PowerPoint 2016. This week we look at the Guides and the Outline View. Finally, don’t miss the new discussions and templates of this week!

Read Indezine’s PowerPoint and Presenting News.

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

Outline Pane Options in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

The Outline view in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows essentially brings up the Outline pane on the left side of PowerPoint 2016 interface. Note that this now replaces the Slides Pane that shows up in Normal view. Also, any changes you want to make to your outline can be made through right-click options, and we’ll show you how you can do so.

Explore Outline pane options in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Microsoft Windows, Office 2016, Outline, Outline View, PowerPoint 2016, Tutorials

Made in Office: Conversation with Victor Rodriguez

Victor Rodriguez is the Vice President of Business Development at Made In Office, a leading provider in the development of Microsoft Office solutions. He is a twenty-year veteran in marketing and digital strategy and is responsible for the marketing and sales of Made In Office’s flagship product, empower enterprise, in North America. Victor earned an MS in Management of Technology from Polytechnic Institute of New York University. Before joining Made In Office, he was the Managing Partner in a digital marketing agency.

In this conversation, Victor talks about empower.

Geetesh: Can you tell us more about your Empower slide content management solution – what motivated you to create this product?

Victor: Our empower enterprise content management system for PowerPoint was developed organically at the request of many of our clients. They were looking for functionality that PowerPoint did not offer out of the box. We, at Made In Office, have been developing custom Microsoft Office solutions for over a decade and we took that development experience and created empower v1.0 six years ago.

What you’ll find is that empower enterprise takes a holistic and practical approach to facilitating slide management, search, collaboration, productivity and brand consistency within corporations.

Geetesh: How is empower different than other similar slide management programs – what sets it apart?

Victor: First, unlike browser-based solutions you can access the slide library directly within PowerPoint as empower is an add-in. There is no need to open an additional application or browser to have access to everything that you need to create presentations. The adoption rate for our PowerPoint Ribbon is high while the user learning curve is low. In addition, empower enterprise has offline sync capabilities that lets you work offline while allowing the PowerPoint user complete access to the library.

Second, the empower library allows an admin to bulk update a slide that is in multiple presentations without having to open each presentation in PowerPoint. It will also notify a user if he or she is opening a PowerPoint presentation that includes an old slide and start a wizard to guide them through the differences. So no more outdated versions of slides company-wide!

Lastly, in contrast to other slide management programs, empower not only supports managing existing content but helps during the entire presentation creation process: with empower’s productivity tools, you can very quickly create striking, professional and impactful presentations. And with empower’s brand consistency capabilities, all PowerPoint content will match your brand guidelines.

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, Digital Asset Management, Empower, Interviews, PowerPoint, Slide Management, Victor Rodriguez

Views in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Your slides remain the same, yet the various views in PowerPoint make exploring those same slides a little different. This approach makes sense because viewing slides in Slide Show view gives an entirely different perspective than editing them in Normal view. Further, it’s easier to reorder and work with multiple slides in Slide Sorter view and make changes to individual slides in Normal view.

All put together, PowerPoint 2016 provides you with ten different views. Eight of these views can be accessed from the View tab of the Ribbon.

Learn about various views that allow you to edit and show slides in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

You May Also Like: Presenter View in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows | Normal View in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows | Outline View in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Interface, Office 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Tutorials, View