PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Learn PowerPoint 2013 for Windows: Changing Interface Color

When PowerPoint 2013 is launched, you see the Presentation Gallery. Notice the bright orange section on the left side of the Presentation Gallery. When you work in PowerPoint 2013, you’ll notice the bright orange Status Bar -– also, all selected options are colored bright orange. Is this bright orange color hurting your eyes? In this tutorial you’ll learn how to change this interface color.

Learn about changing the interface color in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

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

Movember Moustache Graphics for PowerPoint

These moustaches (mustaches) are PowerPoint-ready clip-art graphics that you can use within your presentation slides. These moustache graphics are provided as both fill-only and line-only variants that you can mix and match. All moustaches are available in both grayscale and color — both variations are contained within a sample presentation you can download. Remember, these moustache graphics are vector shapes, so you can easily edit them within your PowerPoint or other Microsoft Office program.

Download and use these moustaches in your slides.

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

Handmade Slides: Frame Corners for PowerPoint – 04

These frame corners are contained within a PowerPoint presentation that you download. Use these to make your pictures look stylish. You will find these frame corners in both black and white colors, and also filled with some solid colors, textures and gradients. Just copy and paste them as individual frame corners over your inserted pictures (or other slide objects). Start with placing them on the top-left corner of your pictures. For the remaining three corners, duplicate the existing frame corner, and place the duplicates on the other three corners, and rotate them as required.

Download and use these frame corners in your slides.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Resize Text Boxes

You may need to move text boxes to different areas on your PowerPoint slide. Sometimes you may also want to resize them to fit in the new position. While you may think that selecting and resizing is all that is to be done, there’s so much more you can do even with mere resizing — if only you know that there are some tricks and shortcut keys that can make your task far more intuitive and easier!

Learn how to resize text boxes on a slide in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

Presente3D: Conversation with Dennis Cafiero

Dennis Cafiero, the chief visionary for Presente3D, realized in 2011 that many of his customers were turned off to 3D because of the high cost of development. It just wasn’t simple to make 3D unless you were a trained 3D professional. Before starting Presente3D, Dennis was Technical Director at EON Reality which provides 3D solutions for business and educational needs based on 3D Virtual Reality technology. With over 16 years of experience in the 3D industry, he understands the challenges facing the industry and consumers in the 3D marketplace.

In this conversation, Dennis discusses Presente3D, a new 3D add-in for PowerPoint.

Geetesh: What motivated you to create Presente3D? Also, what are the types of presentations where your product can make a difference?

Dennis: For the last 16 years, I have been developing 3D Interactive simulations and stereoscopic presentations for 3D immersive environments. What I found was that the cost of creating these simulations and presentations was expensive and most of my customers were happy with simple text and images popping out at them. I knew that most of my customers wanted the ability to create their own 3D presentations, but they did not have the skill set to learn 3D modeling, editing, or graphics. I decided that I would then create a simple 3D presentation software that just contained simple 3D objects like text, shapes, and images.

I then told a good friend my ideas and he said people don’t want to have to learn a new program and everyone knows PowerPoint. Microsoft PowerPoint is what 95% of the people use for presentations. We did not want to have to win over users. Microsoft had spent so much time in creating an easy-to-use presentation tool, and we had to incorporate 3D into Microsoft PowerPoint.

I knew that when we did this integration with PowerPoint, we had to make it simple for a user by just adjusting a couple of values to their existing presentation. We could not make our users take hours to create a slide in 3D. We had to give the ability for users to add 3D to their slides in minutes. Everyone knows that most people create presentations the day before or at the last minute. We had to make sure Presente3D still gave you this ability at a cost that was affordable too.

So, with these goals in mind, we started to develop Presente3D which was just recently released out of beta.

Geetesh: How easy is it for a newbie to get started with using Presente3D – how much of a learning curve can one expect?

Dennis: We made it simple to use Presente3D by adding all functionality to Microsoft’s Ribbon Bar.

Below you can see an image of the ribbon bar:

A user can easily learn Presente3D in under 15 minutes just by adjusting Z-Depth (Pop-Out and Pop-in) and thickness levels on their existing slide objects. We have simplified the process to assigning two values to each object; we even give you some presets to make the process easier. Once you have assigned your 3D attributes, all you have to do is select your output display properties for your 3DTV, or 3D-enabled projector. We even allow you to run on non-3D displays through our support for Anaglyph 3D.

We really made this simple for the other 99% of the people that know nothing about 3D. Every time I do a demo for people to show how easy it is, they say it looks simple enough for them to do it. I promise you, you can!

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: 3D, Add-in, Graphics, Interviews, PowerPoint