PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Picture Fill for Text

PowerPoint provides you with plenty of text fill options — most of these are similar to the options available as fills for shapes. In this tutorial, let us learn how to use a picture as a fill for your selected text in PowerPoint 2011. Although all picture fills may or may not look good on text, you must remember a few points when selecting a picture for a fill: Never use a busy, confused picture as a fill — a picture that has too many colors will rarely look good.

Learn how to add a picture fill to the selected text in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

Set Text Indentation Using Numerical Values in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

When your text paragraphs comprise multiple bulleted levels, indentation becomes a must to make your text look consistent and clear. Indent Markers visible on the Ruler are probably the easiest way to achieve structured results. However, this method does not let you precisely position the indentation since you just drag and pull the Indent Markers rather than setting them up via an exact numerical value. Fortunately, you can also set indentation using set numerical values — for this you need to access the Paragraph dialog box.

Learn how to set text indentation using numerical values in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2010, Text, Tutorials

PDF to PowerPoint Creator: Conversation with Cindy Pearson

Cindy Pearson is an IT manager and a brand evangelist at PDFConverter.com. She loves all things technology and Internet and enjoys playing with all sorts of tech tools and gadgets.

In this conversation, Cindy discusses their online PDF to PowerPoint creator.

Geetesh: Why did you create a free online PDF to PowerPoint creator? Tell us more.

Cindy: At PDFConverter.com, we know that people — especially business professionals like project and finance managers, accountants, entrepreneurs, writers and many others — use PDF files on daily basis. It is a widely known fact that the Portable Document Format is the most convenient file format for saving, archiving, sending and sharing all sorts of documents. PDF ensures that the intended recipients can open the file regardless of the device or platform they use. That is why we initially designed a comprehensive desktop PDF converter software, PDF Converter Elite — for total PDF management. From PDF creation to editing and conversion capabilities, PDF Converter Elite is an all-in-one solution for PDF management. It offers many advanced options like OCR conversion, editing, extracting, merging, modifying, securing and protecting PDFs. It is designed as an affordable alternative to Adobe Acrobat with business users in mind.

However, we realized that not only business professionals use PDF, but also many other computer and Internet users like students, teachers and many other individual users. They don’t necessarily need professional PDF software with tons of advanced capabilities, but rather an accurate, reliable and safe solution for quick PDF conversion. Also, we know that students and many educators worldwide operate on a shoe-string budget that doesn’t allow them to use commercial software products. Since technology and the Internet allow us to market our product, we wanted to contribute and give back to the net. That is how we came to the idea of creating a free online PDF conversion service that allows user to create PDFs from literally any Windows format and convert PDF to PowerPoint, Word, or Excel quickly and accurately without the hassle of downloading and maintaining any piece of software on their computer. Free online PDF to PowerPoint converter is one of the conversion options we offer in our attempt to support presenters, public speakers and other Microsoft PowerPoint users worldwide.

Geetesh: Can you share some stories of people who have found your service helpful?

Cindy: Our user base is constantly growing and we perform more conversions each day. So, that is one indicator that the service is being seen as helpful. We also regularly get emails from our users, thanking us for offering free PDF to PPT conversion and telling us how they use it. Here are some notable examples.

A teacher who likes to try out new ways of integrating technology into her classroom told us that she used the tool for a computer lab activity during which her goal was to teach children several things: to learn how to do a specific search on Google (she asked them to search for interesting PDF presentations on a given topic), to convert the files to their original format (she used our tool for this activity), and to practice editing presentations in Microsoft PowerPoint.

Then there was a project manager’s assistant whose boss asked her to urgently modify one presentation he sent her a couple days before to proofread and save as a PDF. Since she deleted the PowerPoint version of the presentation from her computer and was afraid to ask her boss to resend it to her, she took the PDF slide deck, converted it with our free online PDF to PPT, made the necessary edits and eventually got complimented for her efficiency and good work.

Furthermore, we have recently received an excited email from a college professor who informed us that he was able to convert over 50 of his archived PDF lessons, recreate and reversion them in PowerPoint and then publish them again as an electronic textbook for his students’ learning and reference needs.

If this sounds like something you and your users need, I invite you all to give our free PDF to PowerPoint online converter a spin. Should you like it, feel free to come back and convert as many PDFs to PPT as you want, and as often as you need!

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, PDF, PowerPoint

PowerPoint Concept Slides: Organic Diamonds

Shapes that look scribbled or doodled attract more attention from audiences these days – surely, audiences are so bored looking at all those straight lines that characterize perfect, geometrical shapes! Just like fashions change, so do contemporary tastes in slide design. You can easily achieve this hand drawn look with our Organic Shapes series. Diamonds are just one of the shapes that we doodled on paper – and then reproduced as native PowerPoint shapes for you to use. Including diamonds, our Organic Shapes collection contains 8 shape types – each type has 10 variants – so you end up with 80 hand-drawn shape options! These shapes will help break the monotony of text heavy slides, and assist you in explaining difficult concepts better to your audiences. Using these organic shapes also convinces your audiences that you care enough about them to make the slides look appealing and comprehensible. What’s more, these shapes are also so much fun to use!

Buy and download these slides now.

Filed Under: Presentation Bank
Tagged as: Design, Graphics, PowerPoint, Presentation Samples

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Gradient Fill for Text

Gradient fills are typically blended fills between two or more colors that graduate from one color to another. Text filled with a gradient can look great or gaudy depending upon the type of gradient you use for your text. There are some more guidelines that will help you create great looking gradient fills for your text: Gradient fills look great as text fills only when your text is fairly large sized. Also, using too many colors in the gradient fill may make your text distracting. Try to use the gradient colors which contrast well with the slide background. Also use gradient colors that are not too different so that you achieve a subtle merge of colors.

Learn how to add a gradient fill to selected text in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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