PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

ToolsToo 5.1: The Indezine Review

Arranging shapes and other objects on PowerPoint slides is just one of the few things that could be more intuitive–and did you ever want to make all shapes on your slide equally sized? If you wish that there were better aligning options that PowerPoint included, then you are not alone. Many PowerPoint users, especially those who create slide all day want features that will make their workflows simpler and faster. ToolsToo, our review product is a PowerPoint add-in that tries to be that simpler and faster option right inside PowerPoint.

Learn about ToolsToo, a collection of tools that can reduce the time you spend creating your PowerPoint slides.

Filed Under: Reviews
Tagged as: Add-in, PowerPoint, ToolsToo

Learn PowerPoint 2010 for Windows: Edit Points for Motion Path Animations

While working with Motion Paths, especially after drawing a Custom Motion Path to animate your slide object, you may feel that the path drawn is not very smooth. Or you may have used one of the preset Motion Paths to animate your slide object, and now you want to make some changes. Maybe you want to extend the path, or use smoother corners rather than the default pointed ones. Drawing with a mouse typically does result in paths that don’t look too good!

Learn how to edit the motion paths with the help of Edit Points in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

OfficeOne Shape Locker: The Indezine Review

Limited Time Offer: Until August 31, 2012 you can get OfficeOne Shape Locker for 50% off the listed price — so you pay only $24.97 instead of $49.95 — just remember to use the promo coupon code: INDEZINE-SHAPELOCK50

For the longest time, PowerPoint users have been asking Microsoft to provide lock and unlock options for slide objects so that some objects cannot be moved from their positions, resized, or even selected. We haven’t been lucky yet, but looks like there’s a third party vendor who’s taken up this challenge to create an add-in that does all the locking and unlocking. Shape Locker is a PowerPoint add-in that allows you to lock several attributes so that slide objects are prevented from further modifications. These objects can be on slides, Master slides, and even Slide layouts.

Read the Indezine review of Shape Locker.

Filed Under: Reviews
Tagged as: Add-in, PowerPoint, Review

Getting the Office 2013 Customer Preview Beta

Now that Microsoft has released a publicly available customer preview of Office 2013, there’s so much to explore and learn. In a few months, the next version of PowerPoint will be officially released — but you do not have to wait that much longer to play with it. In fact, you can get your hands on this new version of Office (and PowerPoint) today, as we shall show you in the rest of this post.

There are two Office 2013 customer preview releases that you can download — both of them differ in how they are downloaded and installed:

1. The public preview of Office 2013 can be downloaded from Micosoft’s Office preview site.

   The site uses the term Office 365 all the time rather than Office 2013, although the downloaded product is still called Office 2013. Sounds confusing? You get to install Office 2013 as part of your Office 365 subscription. Still sounds confusing? OK, let’s just call this the new version of Office.

   This new version installs straight from Microsoft’s servers using a cloud-enabled technology called CTR (Click-To-Run). That means there’s no ISO, MSI, or other setup files to download. All you need is Windows 7 or 8 installed, and a nice fat pipe connection to the internet. Also add a few hours to the requirements list — don’t try this if you need to be somewhere else in an hour, although I know people who needed 7 hours for the installation to get done! It took me an hour and half to get done with this installation — the installed version number was MSO (15.0.4128.1014) 32-bit.

2. Yes, there’s also a conventional MSI package available that runs the setup locally on your system — if you choose this option, you cannot run Office 2013 along an older version of Office. You get this version by clicking the link right at the bottom of this page — Microsoft probably wanted to make this link as difficult as possible for you to find!

In addition, there’s also a third option available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers — this is a conventional download option. You essentially get a simple EXE file that works even if you have an older version of Office installed. Why doesn’t everyone else get this simple download? That’s the price you pay for not having an MSDN or a TechNet subscripton! It looks like you end up with the same product with the CTR or the MSDN / TechNet download — the version number for my MSDN download version was the same: MSO (15.0.4128.1014) 32-bit.

In subsequent posts we will explore all these installation options, especially the CTR experience.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Open and Closed Motion Paths

Motion Path animations are movements that happen along a path. You can choose from several preset Motion Paths for simple animations — these include lines, curves, stars, and several other paths. These paths may indicate an animation, but for all other practical reasons, they are essentially just ordinary lines (shapes) that have curves, points, etc. You can edit these Motion Paths in the same way as you can edit any other lines in PowerPoint. If you are familiar with the drawing tools in PowerPoint, or if you use a graphic illustration program like Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW, you know that paths can be either open or closed. A circle is a good example of a closed path, whereas a curve is an open path.

Learn about the open and closed Motion paths in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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