PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Changing Proofing Language for an Entire Presentation in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

While it is easy to change proofing language for selected text containers, that happens to be a great time waster if you need the language changed across all content in all slides! There are two ways to set the proofing language for your entire presentation — and you can use any of these approaches. Make sure you have the proofing tools installed for all or any of the languages that you need to work within PowerPoint.

Learn how to set proofing language for an entire presentation in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

PowerPoint and Presenting News: September 10, 2013

In this issue, we tell you about Dave Paradi’s new PowerPoint survey. There’s also an exclusive interview with Ellen Finkelstein about her new Outstanding Presentations series of webinars. We complete our Bing Image Search series of tutorials by exploring the Date and License filters. Have you added a password to your PowerPoint presentation, and then discovered that there’s no Remove password button? We show you how you can remove or change that password in PowerPoint 2010! PowerPoint 2013 for Windows users can learn about duplicating shapes using the Ctrl+D keyboard shortcut — you also learn about drawing multiple shapes easily. And then explore how you can align these shapes! PowerPoint 2011 for Mac users can learn about using SmartArt to create flowcharts — and also about using proofing dictionaries of foreign languages. 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

Align Shapes to Center of Slide in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

We have already shown you how to align shapes in PowerPoint 2013 — however for alignment to work, you need to have more than one shape (or any other slide object) selected so that they can align to each other. However, you may want to align just one shape (or even a single group of shapes) to the exact center of your slide. Fortunately, that is easy to achieve, as explained in the following steps.

Learn how to center a shape on a PowerPoint 2013 slide.

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

PowerPoint’s Video Exports: Conversation with Tom Howell

  Tom Howell is a PowerPoint designer and the founder of Synapsis Creative, a boutique presentation design agency. Tom started his career as a designer for multiple disciplines and specialized in PowerPoint six years ago and has never looked back. His clients come from an array of different industries, among them are Universal Pictures, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Goldman Sachs Investment Banking, and the United Nations. Tom loves the challenges and successes that are achievable in PowerPoint and lives to make presentations stand out for all the right reasons.

In this conversation, Tom discusses how much you can achieve with PowerPoint’s video export feature.

Geetesh: What do you think about PowerPoint’s Create a Video feature that lets you export an entire presentation to a video clip – are there are raves and rants you want to share?

Tom: I think the Create a Video feature is one of the most under-utilised additions to PowerPoint from 2010 onwards. Don’t get me wrong, like every tool in PowerPoint, it can be grossly misused. No one wants to see a video of 70 slides of text! But if you know from the outset what you want to create, the steps and tools available in PowerPoint help you to quickly create a storyboard and then adapt your storyboard into an animated video.

There are no professional video editing programs that allow you to create your storyboard, and then animate it! This makes the production time from storyboard approval to initial animated draft is very quick indeed. A traditional Ken Burns effect (pan and zooming images) is very easy to create and develop in PowerPoint. Add onto that how easy it is to Fly-in and Fly-out text and you’ve got a simple but very effective video already.

I started exploring the benefits by watching other videos and paying close attention to how everything was done. If you want to start, jump on YouTube and take a look at some corporate videos and ask yourself “How would I do that in PowerPoint?” It becomes about creative problem-solving. Most of the simple effects are already pre-built into PowerPoint and those that aren’t built-in can be achieved through combinations of effects at the same time.

My rants? There are two. Some of the more extreme zooms (say, for example, I want to ‘crash zoom’ into a full stop so it takes up the expanse of the whole page) won’t render very well in Slide Show mode (quite jerky) but will render perfectly in the video. This means there is a little bit of trusting yourself that you’ve done it right. The second rant? When you ‘Grow’ (I call it Zoom) an image in, it takes the image (or vector) by the visible size it is and Grows from there, which creates a pixelated effect which is visible when Growing more than 150%. The workaround is to take the image and scale it to 150% of its desired size first, then use the Shrink animation down to 66%, then Grow to 150%. This creates a perfect zoom that is high-definition. I think with a lot of tools in PowerPoint, if you know exactly what you want to do, there are workarounds and patches to get what you need to be done, and once you know them, you can be unstoppable!

Geetesh: Can you share some stories about video clips you have created within PowerPoint?

Tom: Having had experience with some professional video editing suites, one of the big advantages in using PowerPoint for the simple videos is that the video is editable very easily right up until you hit the Create a Video button. For the corporate clients who pitch and need to make copy changes, this is a huge advantage.

I’ve had times where I’ve been required to create a 4-minute video in a single day. I’d got the script in the morning and within an hour, I had a rough storyboard put together with some images. Whilst this went to the client for approval, I started building the animations together. The client came back with some copy edits they needed and requested a few different images in the storyboard. I simply made the text edits (the animation wasn’t affected) and used the Change Picture feature to swap some new images in place of the ones that needed to be changed (again, the animation wasn’t affected). We pulled the video together and just after lunch we sent the first draft with full animation to the client. The client has delighted and we added a soundtrack (Insert Audio, Play Across Slides) and then finalized the video as a WMV video and send it across. The result was a very happy client, a 4-minute video with a soundtrack, and a very proud PowerPoint designer!

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: Interviews, PowerPoint, Tom Howell, Video

Setting Proofing Language for Text in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

English is spelled and pronounced differently in various parts of the world. For example, color is perfectly valid spelling in the US, but not so in the UK. And PowerPoint works different too depending upon which language settings have been specified — if your proofing language is set to English (UK), then the spell checker will suggest that the word color needs to be changed to colour. Clearly, the fact that PowerPoint adds red squiggly underlines to properly spelled words can be a nuisance — but that’s something you can rectify. In such situations you first need to have proofing tools installed for all or any of the languages that you need to work within PowerPoint.

Learn how to set proofing language for selected text containers in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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