PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Text Layout Options

The three types of text containers available in PowerPoint are Text Placeholders, Text Boxes, and Shapes — and although these three types of text containers are different from each other, all three are sufficiently similar as far as the layout options for the text contained inside them are concerned. In this tutorial, we will explore the alignment and text direction options for text within a text container in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

Explore the text layout options available in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

infoDiagram: Conversation with Peter Zvirinsky

  Peter Zvirinsky is from the very heart of Europe; he’s a Slovak, now developing his business in Poland. Peter is a big fan of sketching and simple visual communication. Besides being the founder of InfoDiagram, Peter and his wife, a professional designer run Prezentio, a slide design company where they create tailor-made presentation slides for various companies. Prior to starting his own business, Peter had been working as a head of marketing & business development in data analytics consultancy. He also acted as a trainer on presenting and IT topics.

In this conversation, Peter discusses his infoDiagram site.

Geetesh: Tell us about infoDiagram, what do you provide at this site, and what motivated you to create it?

Peter: Hello Geetesh. Thanks for asking. We created infoDiagram to help people use visualizations in their presentations, so they use less text and more visual diagrams.

infoDiagram provides pre-designed editable visuals. For example, if you are creating a SWOT analysis, there is a slide set which you can fill with your content. As a result, you can create professionally looking slides and save your designing time.

Other content covers various management methodologies and training materials. We also provide generic graphical elements such as handwritten icons and sketched shapes for enhancing presentations, such as hand-drawn markers, highlighters, arrows, and figures.

Our illustrations are fully editable directly in PowerPoint so people can freely change colors, shapes, resize without losing illustration quality, as is the case of bitmap pictures.

infoDiagram, as an idea was born when I was working in a consultancy company. There, we dealt with many complex concepts that needed to be explained. I saw how communication could be much more effective if people used drawings to support their written text. However, there was usually lack of time or skills to create well-designed illustrations.

Thus, together with some friends, we decided to create a website for presentation designers.

Geetesh: Most of your content has a hand-written, organic look to it. Why is it important for presenters to embrace this look?

Peter: Yes, handwritten shapes and clip arts are our specialty. We love this graphical style. It gives a nice personal touch to usually formal presentation content.

I think presenters should use more handmade elements. This way presentations could look more friendly and more authentic. Even if someone is presenting some unexciting data, adding a handwritten highlight to the key data values gives the presentation a unique personal style. It shows that there is a human presenter behind, rather than that it was prepared by a machine.

One of our customers has expressed the power of handwritten elements very well, They are warm and express joy, which makes people more receptive to the content; they make the presentation seem natural, spontaneous and out of the ordinary and this is what I am looking for in my presentations.

Check out our handwritten work for free. Get a sample of handwritten PowerPoint shapes and icons. Now there are also Christmas icons, so people can design their personal cards in PowerPoint. Try to experiment with them – they are all vector shapes, hence fully editable in PowerPoint.

Let’s build more effective presentations, with less text-only slides.

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: Design, Graphics, Interviews, Peter Zvirinsky, PowerPoint

Indezine News: November 20, 2012

We have another set of frame corners in this issue that you can use as picture corners on your slides. And an amazing excerpt from Nancy Duarte’s new book on why your audience is so important. PowerPoint MVP Steve Rindsberg gives you some magical code so that you can turn your embedded videos to linked — and you can do this even if you know nothing about programming in PowerPoint. SlideShark, my favorite iPad presentation app crossed the millionth milestone, and added some extra features. There’s a cool new PowerPoint add-in that lets you play with 3D inside PowerPoint without having to learn anything other than what you already know. Jim Endicott brings you an amazing video and text post on why you should keep things simple. There are free Movember slides for you, and yes, that was indeed Movember and not a typo for November!

You’ll also find new tutorials on playing with picture effects in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows. Mac users can learn about working with text boxes in PowerPoint 2011. And last but not the least, yes — all this happened in just one week! And finally, today is the last day for you to benefit from the rare Indezine PowerFinish promotion.

Read all in Indezine News.

Filed Under: Ezine
Tagged as: Ezine, Indezine, News, PowerPoint

Learn PowerPoint 2010 for Windows: Crop Pictures

After inserting a picture in your slide, you should first consider if the picture you have used complements the message of your presentation and slide. Even if it is relevant, you should consider making it more pertinent by removing the areas that may be not required — in other words, you must ponder and decide whether you want to use PowerPoint’s Crop options. Cropping an area removes extraneous areas, and lets you add focus to the areas of the picture that are appropriate to the topic of your presentation.

Learn how to work with crop options for pictures in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

What is Your Body Language Saying About You?

By Sandra Schrift

Your body language, nonverbal cues, tell a lot about how you perform at a job, career, and on stage as a public speaker. Research suggests that nonverbal cues are more important than verbal ones. I came across one study that spoke about body language comprising 55% of the force of any response, whereas the verbal content only provides 7%, and “paralanguage,” or the intonation, pauses, and sighs given when answering or speaking, represents 38% of the emphasis.

Image: Pixabay

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed Under: Guest Posts
Tagged as: Delivery, Guest Post, Sandra Schrift