PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Gradient Stops in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

Once you add gradient fills to shapes in PowerPoint 2013, you may want to make the gradient fill look a little different — or even a whole lot different. Yes, you can use the More Gradients option to add different types of gradients as fills to the shapes but that only provides more gradient fill types, and does not let you customize the colors within the gradient. In this tutorial, we’ll step into a little more detail and show you how gradient stops work. When you are done with this tutorial, you can create your own gradients, or edit existing ones.

Learn how to work with Gradient Stops and to create new gradients in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Chart Area Font Options

By default, text used within a chart is not really formatted and looks very simple. Note that the font style used by default is derived from the information available within the Theme or template used for the slides. Now you really should not change the text formats within your chart unless you have a compelling reason to do so because there’s no reason to make appearances inconsistent just because PowerPoint allows you to do so!

Learn how to format text within the Chart Area in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2013 for Windows: More Gradients

Add a quick gradient fill to your shape, and you may run into limitations — for one, PowerPoint’s default gradient options choose all the gradient colors for you — and all available gradients seem to be based on the same color family. While this sort of restraint does keep your slides looking consistent and aesthetic, they also seem to prevent you from playing more with gradients. To play more, you must choose the More Gradients option — this option leads you to a detailed gradient editor that’s capable of making changes to the gradient type, direction, angle, color, etc. We explain these extra gradient options available within PowerPoint 2013 in this tutorial.

Learn about the different options within More Gradients in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

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

How to Avoid the Horror of Frankenslides

By Eric Albertson, Doug Neff, Corey Rothermel from Duarte.com/edy

We’ve all seen them. We may have even created them ourselves. Frankenslides.

You know, the decks where we borrow a few slides from that person in Finance and combine them with the product slides from Engineering, then throw in a few compulsory “features and benefits” slides from Marketing—each of which has its own look and feel? The content may be great, but the execution—not so much. The inconsistent treatment of all those different design elements leaves your audience feeling unsettled and makes your idea seem only half-baked.

So how do you combine slides from different decks so that they don’t end up being a mess?

1. Apply a consistent template

Choose one template to use for your deck, and apply that to all your slides. This will create a consistent color scheme and background for every slide in your deck. Note that applying the template to slides from other decks may shift things around on your slides, so be prepared to re-align text boxes, titles, photos, charts, etc. Still, this is a good first step in getting all your slides to look like they belong together.

2. Apply slide layouts

Once you have all your slides in a consistent template, go back and apply the appropriate slide layout for the type of content you have. Assuming the content was created in the regular placeholders, this will snap titles back to their correct locations, change the font to the template font, and bring another layer of consistency to your slides.

3. Make colors, fonts and images consistent

Even after applying layouts, there may still be elements that need updating.

Colors:

Go through and make sure all of the colors are ones from the template’s color scheme.

Fonts:

Check all the fonts to make sure there are no incorrect ones in there. A good technique is to use the Replace Fonts feature to update the fonts in the whole document. In addition to the font itself, make sure the formatting is consistent. For example, if you highlight text with bold and red, make sure you use that design element consistently throughout the presentation.

Images:

Look at the images (photos and illustrations) in your document. Do they all look like they came from the same photo session or the same illustration library? Do you have a mixture of styles, like photos and clip art? Remove or replace graphics that do not fit within the photo or illustration style. Also, make sure you’ve used a consistent image treatment (outline, reflection, shadow, shape, bevel, etc.)

4. Review your slides in Slide Sorter mode

Once you feel like you have your slides in order, put them in Slide Sorter mode to see them all at a glance. What stands out? The things that are not consistent will jump out. Address these things, and then repeat this step until all the slides feel like they belong to the same family.

You can combine slides from other sources, but make sure you take the time to make them consistent. Otherwise, your dream deck will come across as a nightmare!

Duarte.com/edy is a web series from the minds at Duarte that teaches the ABCs of creating great presentations, told with a little humor, a bit of advice, and maybe a monster or two. Eric Albertson serves as the Director of Instructional Design at Duarte. Doug Neff is the Content Director. Corey Rothermel is the web series director.

See Also: Duarte.com/edy: Conversation with Eric, Doug, and Corey

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, PowerPoint, Presentation Skills, Training

PowerPoint and Presenting News: October 29, 2013

In this issue, David Cowan of FlexiPrez discusses the new FlexiPrez add-in for PowerPoint that lets you make your PowerPoint presentations more interactive. PowerPoint 2013 for Windows users can learn all about the basic and advanced options that let you play with picture fills within shapes. PowerPoint 2011 for Mac users can explore Data Labels in charts, and also the entire Chart Area. 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, PowerPoint