PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Troubleshooting Menu Activation

It really does not matter which program you are using on a Mac — your Menu Bar remains constant irrespective of the program being used. Yes some menus do change but some such as the Apple menu are retained all the time. To activate the Menu Bar without a mouse, you can press the Ctrl F2 key combination (or Ctrl Fn F2, if you use a smaller keyboard on a Mac laptop). Thereafter you access various menu options by typing their first couple of letters. Sometimes, this feature may suddenly stop working — you may not be able to activate the Menu Bar using the key combination Ctrl F2 (or Ctrl Fn F2).

Learn about troubleshooting the menu activation in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Tutorials

Learn PowerPoint 2003 for Windows: Applying Masters

Once you have applied a template within PowerPoint 2003 that has multiple masters, you can thereafter apply different Slide Masters to the slides in your presentation. This tutorial therefore assumes that your presentation already has multiple masters available. Having said so, the reason why you want to apply multiple masters is preferably only to have sets of slides that look a wee bit different rather than ending up with something that’s inconsistent. Ultimately the role of masters is to ensure that your presentation remains consistent in design, layout and form.

Learn how to apply Masters in PowerPoint 2003 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2003
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2003, Templates, Tutorials

Learn PowerPoint 2013 for Windows: Edit Points for Shapes

When a shape is inserted within PowerPoint, its default appearance is related to the points that it contains — and you can thus change the actual shape to anything you want. PowerPoint’s native Edit Points tool makes it almost a drawing program that provides you the option to play with vertexes (points), handles, etc. This is very similar to what you would do in Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW. By using the Edit Points tool, you can change a rectangle to a rhombus, or even edit a curved or freeform line differently.

Learn how to reshape a shape in PowerPoint 2013 by using the Edit Points option.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Keyboard Sequences

Unlike the Windows versions of PowerPoint where you can quickly press the Alt key to access the menu or even the Ribbon tabs, the Mac versions of PowerPoint provide no equivalent feature. However there is an alternative – you can learn how to invoke keyboard sequences by accessing your menu bar in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

Learn about keyboards sequences in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Tutorials

XML Editing in Visual Studio Express with 7-Zip

A PPTX file or any of the new file formats that Office 2007 and later use such as POTX or THMX are different than the older binary file formats such as PPT. Even more interesting is the fact that the actual file is not an XML based file but only a wrapper that contain many disparate and related XML based elements. The wrapper technology used is just simple ZIP technology. If you want to edit Office XML files, you will therefore need to unzip, edit, and finally zip the file. Alternatively, you can perform XML Editing using 7-Zip and Visual Studio Express — both of these products are free!

Edit PowerPoint files within Visual Studio Express with a little help from 7-Zip.

Filed Under: PowerPoint All Versions
Tagged as: PowerPoint, Templates, Themes, Tutorials