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Thoughts and impressions of happenings in the world of PowerPoint and presentations, continuously updated since 2003.
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PowerPoint and Presenting Notes
PowerPoint and Presenting Glossary
The Remove Background option is among PowerPoint’s newest and most wonderful abilities. It lets you remove the background from an inserted picture — this can be a great feature if you want to remove a sky, a wall, any backdrop, or something else in a photograph so that the slide background shows through as transparent within the removed parts of the picture.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Background, Design, Graphics, Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Tutorials
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You can insert a picture within your Sway as a background for a Title Card or a Heading Card, or even as a picture placed in a Picture Card. There may be times when you want to pan and zoom the picture between two or more important focus areas — almost like a Ken Burns effect. You can do so within Sway using the Focus Points option.
Explore the Focus Point option for pictures within Sway.
Filed Under:
Sway
Tagged as: Focus Points, Pictures, PowerPoint for the Web, Sway, Tutorials
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Bethany Auck has been working in the presentation design industry for nine years. She cut her teeth at a small litigation consultancy, where she consulted on major trials helping her clients build persuasive narratives and poignant demonstratives. Bethany founded SlideRabbit in 2012 to bring high-quality design to all industries at low cost levels.
In this conversation, Bethany discusses her session at the upcoming Presentation Summit 2015 series.
Geetesh: Bethany, you are doing a session this year at the Presentation Summit called Simple Wins: Apply simple concepts to create fantastic results. Can you tell us more about this session, and what takeaways can the audience expect?
Bethany: Simple Wins will be all about basic and accessible ways to improve your everyday slide design. Using before & after examples from the audience and our own body of work, we’re going to correct some common missteps and share a few ways to improve the overall polish of a deck of slides.
First we’ll look at what to stop doing; we tend to see the same easily avoided mistakes in our clients’ decks time and time again. These range from design choices to materials used, and we’ve got the corrections and solutions to help get any presentation creator on the right track.
Once we’ve corrected some of those ingrained behaviors that are hurting the design, we’ll look at how to actively improve it. We’ll focus a lot on basic compositional approaches and how to use design theory to give content a little design lift.
We’ll also talk color. How to approach choosing colors, why they are important and how to mix colors with success. We’ve got some free resources to share to help non-designers build and use pleasing palettes.
Lastly, we’ll take a quick look at fonts. We’ll talk font limitations, mistakes, and approaches. Getting away from those everyday fonts can give slides a custom and professional feel, but it’s important to be aware of how and when to use custom or unusual fonts.
We’d love questions throughout the session — really the goal is to solve the everyday problems that non-designers face when they are putting together a slide deck. We hope everyone will leave more confident in their slide design.
Geetesh: You’ve been part of the Presentation Summit before — can you share your thoughts about how this event benefits new attendees, and also how it helps repeat visitors?
Bethany: Last year was my first time attending the Summit. I didn’t quite know what to expect and whether it would be worthwhile for me. I have to say, I was so very pleasantly surprised.
The Summit does an excellent job at the very challenging task of accommodating a wide range of skill levels and varying sets of goals. It truly creates an atmosphere where we can all learn from each other.
My favorite part of last year was spending several days with the professionals who, like my clients, want to put out great slide decks, but don’t have the training or time to get to that final level of polish. We’re so excited to be teaching a course that aims to help just these people. Even more than that, I’m excited to learn more about the pain points people are experiencing and the creative workarounds people are finding.
We ended up loving the Summit so much, we wrote about it. Very excited to take a more active role this year!
For many years now, Rick Altman has been hosting the Presentation Summit, a highly popular event that is geared towards users of PowerPoint and other presentation platforms.
Date: September 27 to 30, 2015
Location: Astor Crowne Plaza, New Orleans, USA
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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Events
Tagged as: Bethany Auck, Interviews, PowerPoint, Presentation Summit
A Title Card is something that’s part of every Sway you create. You cannot delete the Title Card nor can you add a new Title Card to any existing Sway. In other words, a Title Card signifies the existence of any Sway you create and is among the most important parts of your Sway document. Not surprisingly, changes you make in the Title Card influence almost everything within your Sway. In this tutorial, we will explore options that you can use to work better with a Title Card.
Explore how Title Cards have unique abilities that you can exploit within Microsoft Sway.
Filed Under:
Sway
Tagged as: Docs.com, PowerPoint for the Web, Sway, Tutorials
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After careers in theatre and the circus, Nolan Haims moved into the world of presentation, designing presentations for Fortune 500 CEOs, leading financial institutions and all the major television networks. Nolan was the Presentation Director for Edelman, the world’s largest independent PR company. He writes about visual communication at Present Your Story.
In this conversation, Nolan discusses his sessions at the upcoming Presentation Summit 2015 series.
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Events
Tagged as: Interviews, Nolan Haims, PowerPoint, Presentation Summit
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