PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Set Line Style for Table Borders

The borders for tables that you create within PowerPoint are thin lines by default. You can change the thickness of these borders — but even before you do so, there are certain prerequisites to take care of. First of all, if you use Table Styles, then some borders may have been set to be invisible. So first of course, you need to set them to be visible since there’s no sense in thickening an invisible border. Once borders are visible, you can make changes to their appearance such as changing their color, line style, or the thickness of the table borders. We will now explore how you can make table borders sport dashed or dotted lines instead of simple thin lines.

Learn how to set line style for table borders in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

New PowerPoint Features for Courtroom Presentations

By Herb Rubinstein

The new PowerPoint 2013 has some extremely good features, but…

I hate to start out with a negative. However, the very best new feature in PowerPoint 2013 was the ability to embed video from any of the sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, etc. This feature alone was worth upgrading for. Because Google and Microsoft always seem to be butting heads, Google made changes to YouTube, and this feature no longer works. There is much buzz that this will be resolved but for now, the only video service you can embed from is through a OneDrive account.

Image: Yay Images

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Filed Under: Guest Posts
Tagged as: Guest Post, Herb Rubinstein, Legal, Opinion, PowerPoint 2013

Learn PowerPoint 2013 for Windows: Insert Online Pictures

It’s always been possible to add pictures from an online source within PowerPoint — for more than a decade this online source has been the pictures available online at Office.com — in most previous versions, this was achieved through the Insert Clip Art option. Now in PowerPoint 2013, this option has been greatly enhanced — and you are no longer restricted to content from just Office.com. Of course, this also has a new name now, it’s called Online Pictures. This feature is very helpful as you are not limited to just the pictures available on your system. You get variety of other picture source to choose from. Some of the picture sources also allow you to choose from Creative Commons pictures. And all this happens within PowerPoint — there’s no need to open your web browser.

Learn how to insert a online picture on a slide in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

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

PowerPointLabs: Conversation with Damith Rajapakse

  Damith C. Rajapakse is a faculty member at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore. He has a deep interest, and many years of experience, in presentation design and the craft of software building. He is the project mentor for the PowerPointLabs project and other similar efforts.

In this conversation, Damith discusses the currently free PowerPointLabs add-in for PowerPoint.

Geetesh: Damith, tell us more about your PowerPointLabs add-in for PowerPoint. How did this evolve?

Damith: Out of the box, PowerPoint creates boring slides. Though it’s capable of creating awesome slides that takes much more effort than it should. For example, animating a shape requires you to figure out its path, size, and angle. It’d be a lot easier if you could just specify where the shape should start and where it should end up, then have the animation done automatically for you. That’s the type of thing we want to do with PowerPointLabs: make it really easy to create good, engaging slides.

The PowerPointLabs team is based in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore, and currently consists of Jerome, Raunak and myself. We aim to help presenters create better slides with less effort.

Geetesh: You already have an add-in available but you did mention that newer features are planned. Can you tell us more?

Damith: We have a long list of PowerPoint pain points we want to fix, but we want to take a few steps at a time and perfect what we have before moving on to the next stage. One of the features we’ll be releasing soon is the ability to generate audio narration and captions from slide notes. We hope this will help users get a rough idea of how the presentation will sound to their audience during preparation, and also in creating self-learning materials without actually having to record audio/video.

Something else we’re working on is the ability to simulate zooming in to an area of the slide – just like our existing auto-animate feature, this helps make presentations more dynamic, and also lets the presenter emphasize a certain section of their materials.

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, Interviews, PowerPoint, PowerPointLabs

PowerPoint and Presenting News: January 28, 2014

We first begin with looking at pre-created jigsaw shapes that you can use within your PowerPoint slides — these jigsaw shapes make a seemingly difficult task very simple! We then have an exclusive conversation with Greg Flynn of Brainshark who discusses their newly released Cloud Packages. We then explore Adobe Presenter, an amazingly capable add-in that plugs right inside PowerPoint and helps you create and distribute your slides in many different ways. It also allows creation of elearning content. PowerPoint 2013 for Windows users can learn about how the lesser known slide background fill can help you create puzzle pictures within the program. You will also learn about picture fills for slide backgrounds. PowerPoint 2011 for Mac users can learn about erasing table borders, toggling their visibility, and setting border colors. And finally, do not 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