PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Using Stock Photos and Diagrams in Business Presentations

By M. S. Ramgopal

Business presentations are increasingly becoming visual. Slide decks are being used more as visual aids for audiences than as memory joggers for presenters. In this article, we explore the specific roles played by two common visual tools -viz. stock photos and diagrams in business presentations.

The Difference Between Stock Photos and Diagrams

Even though the terms photos and diagrams are quite common, the difference between the two tools is not clearly defined. So, let us take a minute to spell out the difference as we see it:

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Filed Under: Guest Posts
Tagged as: Graphics, Guest Post, PowerPoint

Indezine News: October 16, 2012

In this issue, you’ll find our exclusive coverage on the just concluded Presentation Summit — read about all the keynotes, and also the optional crash courses held a day before the Summit started. You also get two more PowerPoint concept slide sets this week: segmented heptagons and octagons. We then explore how you can edit your PowerPoint files using XML within Visual Studio. Read an exclusive conversation with Lisa Johnson of Brainshark about amazing new features in their SlideShark app for iPads and iPhones. There are plenty of other tutorials – learn about text fills in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows. And if you are a PowerPoint for Mac user, learn about font styles.

Read the newsletter here.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2010 for Windows: Texture Fill for Text

Although you can fill text with a texture in PowerPoint, the appearance of the text depends upon the texture you use, and how well it contrasts with the slide background. For reasons of readability, make sure that the texture used is not too crowded or even multicolored — and as already stated, choose a texture that contrasts with your slide background.

Learn how to add a texture fill to the selected text in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Character Spacing

When you increase or decrease the font size of text in PowerPoint, you’ll discover that not only does this make a difference in the aesthetics of your slide, but the text itself uses more or less space than you may want. Sometimes, you may want the text to take just a wee bit lesser space so that all content can fit within two lines rather than three. If you want to alter the spacing between text characters, you can do so by using PowerPoint 2011’s Character Spacing option that influences the appearance and readability of both Title and Body text. Character Spacing is the amount of space in-between individual letters.

Explore various Character Spacing options in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

Slides and Speakers

By Tom Mucciolo

Ever since PowerPoint began to dominate the market, more and more casual users entered the design arena, and a wide variety of “how to” books emerged. In October of 1998, I was asked to co-author a series of PowerPoint books with Patrice Rutledge under the Special Edition: Using Microsoft PowerPoint label of the current Pearson Publishing (QUE) group. I have contributed to several of these titles to match the multiple releases of PowerPoint, through 2007. Geetesh Bajaj was a contributing author in the 2007 book. This was one of the few PowerPoint series that went beyond teaching people how to use the software, as several chapters in the book were dedicated to developing, designing, and delivering the content. In these sections, I was able to share guidelines based on all our audience feedback over the years.

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