PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Slide Transition Sound

Sound effects that play along with slide transitions are one of those small touches that can add interest or be pesky. Whether you want to add these sound effects is entirely your call, but do remember that discretion can often be a better choice! Tread with caution since a sound playing with every slide transition can not only sound cheesy, but it can also unnecessarily distract your audience. Having said that, there are occasions where a sound effect can be wisely applied to PowerPoint slide transitions — maybe a chime sound for just one slide? Whatever you decide, let us now show you how you can add a sound to accompany a slide transition.

Learn how to add slide transition sound in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2010 for Windows: Recovering Presentations Manually

Have you ever created a brand new presentation in PowerPoint and then closed it without saving it for even once? This scenario seem to be little unbelievable – because even if you accidently close your presentation, PowerPoint asks whether you would like to save the presentation or not. So just in case you did the unbelievable and discarded all your changes, there are chances that your updated presentation may be saved in some state — also it’s entirely plausible that you may have lost all your file changes to a system or PowerPoint crash. Most of the time, PowerPoint will salvage your file and offer to open it for you the next time you launch the program — alternatively, if you don’t see any files being offered for recovery, you can set the process in action manually.

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Learn how to recover presentations manually in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

Presentations Perspective

By Tom Mucciolo

After being a public accountant and well-trained stage actor, I began to develop a growing interest in the microcomputer industry in the late 1970s. Observing the early technologies of Apple, Microsoft, and IBM, I watched operating systems and software programs evolve. The swiftly changing technology actually shifted work habits, opening up windows of opportunity for me, in more ways than one.

Desktop computers placed more information immediately at our fingertips, creating greater sense of urgency as organizations differentiated by pushing the most relevant content. The traditional work schedules of 9-to-5 were quickly waning as the collecting and managing of retrievable bits of information unfortunately made the normal workday much longer. These in-house, overtime efforts were often relegated to administrators and general staff who were spending late nights and weekends producing deliverable media for executives who were touting their solutions in face-to-face meetings.

Smaller companies, with dedicated teams, offered services to assist in time-management-related tasks, such as building presentations, and outsourcing options were a welcomed sigh of relief to overworked staff.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed Under: Guest Posts
Tagged as: Guest Post, Opinion, PowerPoint, Presentation Skills, Robert Gaskins, Tom Mucciolo

Concept Slides: Seven Segment Circle

A segment of a circle is defined as the region between the chord of a circle and its associated arc. This conceptual slide contains a circle with 7 segments you can use to illustrate any concept or entity comprising 7 components/elements, for example seven days of a week. Try and use pictures that complement each other – or even strongly contrast with each other. In the sample slides you see, we used an Education theme for all the pictures within the 7 segments. Whatever choices you make, the resulting slide should have a compelling impact on your audience – and should sync with the message of your presentation. We have used basic PowerPoint shapes to create most of these conceptual designs. Also, some of them are imported from other graphic programs and converted to PowerPoint shapes.

Download and use this concept slide in your presentation.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Create Custom Theme Fonts Using XML

As discussed in our Sharing and Deleting Custom Theme Fonts in PowerPoint 2008 and 2011 for Mac tutorial, you cannot create your own Theme Fonts sets from within PowerPoint 2011 or PowerPoint 2008 for Mac. However since all Theme Fonts sets essentially are a bunch of code within an Open XML file, there’s nothing preventing you from opening any existing Theme Fonts file with the .XML extension, and then editing them within a text editor. Save this file with a new name in a designated folder and you actually end up creating your own custom Theme Fonts set!

Learn how to create custom Theme Fonts using XML on the Mac.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Fonts, Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2008, PowerPoint 2011, Text, Themes, Tutorials