PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Learn PowerPoint 2013 for Windows: Artistic Effects for Pictures

PowerPoint is a slide program but that doesn’t mean that it does not have some cool picture editing tricks up its sleeve. When we say “cool”, we certainly do not mean just inserting a picture, or even the fact that you can apply corrections or recolor hues. PowerPoint 2013 provides around 23 filters as part of its Artistic Effects options. Some of these filters (effects) can make your pictures look like paintings or sketches, and others can change the texture of your pictures.

Learn how to apply Artistic Effects to pictures in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: Pictures, PowerPoint 2013, Tutorials

Learn PowerPoint 2013 for Windows: Remove Bookmarks from Video Clips

After adding Bookmarks to video clips in PowerPoint 2013, you may want to know how you can edit and remove those Bookmarks. At this point of time, let’s state some facts — we have bad news and good news. The bad news is that PowerPoint does not let you edit the inserted Bookmarks — for instance, you cannot change the time of the Bookmark from 25 seconds to 28 seconds. You will have to remove the Bookmark you wanted to edit, and add a new Bookmark all over again! On the other hand, removing a Bookmark is easy — and that is the good news!

Learn how to remove Bookmarks from a video clip in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2013, Tutorials, Video

Learn PowerPoint 2013 for Windows: Changing Color of Pictures

Working with pictures in PowerPoint 2013 can be so much fun and fulfilling at the same time. One of the coolest options is to recolor the hue of your entire picture so that it looks almost like a duotone picture. You have already learned how to apply corrections to your inserted pictures — and this Color option can help you do more with your pictures. Be aware though that although the option itself is called Color, it does not work like a coloring book — rather it changes the overall hue color of the entire picture. This option also allows you to saturate color values, change the overall color tone, and do more.

Learn how to change the color hue of pictures in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: Pictures, PowerPoint 2013, Tutorials

Learn PowerPoint 2013 for Windows: Add Bookmarks to Video Clips

If you want your inserted video clip to play from a certain point within the video clip, you can actually trim the video so that it only plays the parts you want. However, there is another elegant solution that lets you achieve the same results, and do even more. This feature is called a Bookmark – it is similar to the conventional bookmarks you place within the pages of a book you are reading. Just like how you can easily go to that particular page with the help of a bookmark, the Bookmark you add to a video clip becomes an indicator of the position you want to go to.

Learn how to add Bookmarks to video clips in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2013, Tutorials, Video

Animate Slide Content: Conversation with Irwin Hipsman

Irwin Hipsman is the Director of Customer Community at Brainshark, Inc. Brainshark’s cloud-based software lets users create online and mobile video presentations -– using simple business tools like PowerPoint and the telephone –- and then share and track their content. Thousands of companies use Brainshark to improve the reach and results of their business communications, while dramatically reducing costs.

In this conversation, Irwin discusses Brainshark’s repertoire of amazing animated slide content.

Geetesh: You folks at Brainshark created a repository of slide content that users can download for free and use – can you tell us more about this content?

Irwin: Many of Indezine’s readers are familiar with Brainshark’s cloud-based business presentation solutions for sales, marketing and training. Every month, tens of thousands of PowerPoint presentations are uploaded for either live presenting using SlideShark or for the delivery of voice-enriched presentations using Brainshark On-Demand.

So the business presenters that use our products are heavy users of PowerPoint, but designing graphics for visual communications may not be every presenter’s strong suit. The more that we can provide helpful resources to our users, the more successful they will be in delivering engaging communications in a short amount of time. If you search the web, you will find lots of PPT background templates, but very few places to access pre-produced animations to use in presentations. The animations templates can both save people time and provide inspiration. What I particularly like about them is the ability to deconstruct or see how the effects were built by looking at the animation and selection panes.

Geetesh: What are the most popular content types available within this repository? And how can users send you feedback about what they would like you to provide next?

Irwin: We’ve seen great response to prior templates we’ve issued. In this new collection, we looked at what people downloaded the most, and added to that based on what we felt would round out the collection. We’ve also greatly improved how users can navigate the templates to quickly find what they need.

So far, the most popular are the highly visual animations, which you can see below.

Anyone can access the animations templates by visiting this page. There are 9 categories including agendas, maps, calendars and timelines – all things that business communicators frequently need. Just choose the collection and you will see a Brainshark presentation that shows what the animations look like.

Then you can access it from the attachments tab. Once downloaded, the slides and animations are completely editable. You can change the text, size, and speed of animations, colors – anything you would normally do with your own slides. If you are not familiar with PowerPoint animations and how to work with them, check out the Brainshark PowerPoint Helpful resources page for a wide range of tutorials.

We are always on the lookout for additional animations and we encourage your readers to contact us at [email protected] to provide or license your animations.

I also just published a 3-part blog series, What can you learn from a 30-second TV commercial or a 4-minute radio news story. Part 2 may be of interest to your readers as it looks at the relationship between TV commercials and Animations.