PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Learn PowerPoint 2010 for Windows: Font Dialog Box

Fonts are more than just pretty typefaces although even your choice of typefaces can have a profound effect on how readable your text is to the audience. We have already explored how you can format font styles to make your text bold, italicized, underlined, etc. Beyond these basic offerings, PowerPoint 2010’s Font dialog box offers some advanced format options for selected text. You can still change the font type, set the font size, color, and other font attributes in this dialog box, and you can also do more. In this tutorial, we’ll explore the font format options within the Font dialog box.

Explore options within the Font dialog box in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

Keyboard Shortcuts: PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

Have your ever used keyboard shortcuts in PowerPoint? Or are you a complete keyboard aficionado? Do you want to learn about some new shortcuts? Or do you want to know if your favorite keyboard shortcuts are documented? Here’s the most comprehensive list of PowerPoint 2013 keyboard shortcuts that we know about — how many of these do you presently use?

Explore keyboard shortcuts in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Remove Animation

You may want to remove the animation applied to a slide object for several reasons. First, you may have animated the wrong slide object, added animation by mistake, or you probably overdid your animations and ended up with a chaotic slide! Whatever your reasons may be, removing the animation is a simple select-and-click task. But before you do remove any animation, here are some thoughts and obvious scenarios to ponder about.

Learn how to remove animation applied to any slide object in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

ToolsToo: Conversation with Gil Segal

  Gil Segal is the creator of ToolsToo and a senior software consultant. Gil is always on the lookout for ways to automate manual tasks in any software he uses and has been a PowerPoint power-user since the mid 90’s.

In this conversation, Gil talks about his ToolsToo add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint.

Geetesh: What motivated you to create ToolsToo, and evolve it with the comprehensive capabilities it possesses?

Gil: The motivation was to do things easier or faster. If there is something that I find myself doing manually over and over, I will generally automate it. But with PowerPoint, it was more than that -– it was also the desire to make slides look better, more aligned, more uniformly sized, spaced, formatted, etc.

An example of how the tools made things easier and faster is the Insert Picture from Clipboard tool. At the time I created the tool, I was doing a lot of screen captures and pasting them into a presentation. This required quite a lot of steps within PowerPoint: inserting a new slide, pasting the picture, scaling the picture, centering the picture on the slide. With the tool, just one click does all the work.

It all started with the alignment of shapes. Like most things, ToolsToo started out small, very small. Version 1.0 had just 6 tools: the basic alignment of shapes relative to the first shape. For a long time, I referred to it as ByFirstShape – the name ToolsToo came much later. Additional tools were added gradually over time. I recall one day, in particular, I was watching a presentation being given by a colleague and one slide caught my eye. The funny thing was that it was a slide that I had presented myself tens of times, but this time, I noticed that it did not look quite right. The Align Edge tools were born just a few days later to fix that slide.

Most of the tools arose from my own presentation editing needs. On any given day that I’m working on presentations, I will use nearly all of the Adjoin/Align Edge/Align Shape/Order tools and many of the Make Same tools. I can’t imagine creating a slide- other than a simple text-only slide – without these tools.

Geetesh: Can you share a story or a user experience about a particular ToolsToo option you added based on customer feedback?

Gil: I always welcome customer suggestions, but get surprisingly few requests for new features from my customers. Perhaps the most interesting request I did get was to add the Drawing group from PowerPoint’s Home tab to the ToolsToo tab. This is something I would have never thought of, but it turns out to be a major click-saver – just about all the shape tools you need are available directly within the ToolsToo tab, greatly reducing the need to go to other tabs and back. It also surprised me that such a great time-saver was very easy and quick to implement, as it required only one line of Ribbon customization code.

You May Also Like: ToolsToo 5.1: The Indezine Review

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, Gil Segal, Interviews, PowerPoint, ToolsToo

Indezine News: Installing Office and PowerPoint 2013

PowerPoint 2013 is our topic of discussion again this week — and there’s so much information to share with you that we created a separate section below on all PowerPoint 2013 related topics. At this point of time, we are helping you install the Customer Preview version of Office 2013 — this includes PowerPoint 2013 and corresponding versions of other Office programs such as Word, Excel, Outlook, Access, etc. The installation itself is one big new feature for this version of Office — in fact, most users need not download an installation file since the install actually streams off Microsoft’s servers in a way that you would expect a YouTube movie or something from Netflix to play!

Read the newsletter here.

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