PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Reposition Picture Fills with Crop

In PowerPoint, shapes and pictures are important parts of a slide — both of them are mainly used to add visual elements to your presentations. However, there are some problem areas when you use a picture as a fill for a shape. Primarily, you’ll find that PowerPoint insists on filling the entire picture to a shape — in the process, the picture itself may appear distorted. Figure 1 depicts an example — on the left is the actual picture we used to fill the shape on the right — note that the man’s face is squeezed and squashed when used as a picture fill. This completely destroys the look we wanted to attain. Fortunately, regaining the proportion is an easy option, as you will learn in this tutorial.

Learn how to reposition the picture fill in a shape, using the Crop to Fill option in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

Businessman Silhouettes for PowerPoint – 02

These silhouettes depicting businessman are ready to use within your PowerPoint presentation slides. As you can see, these clip arts have been provided in two color variations — black and white. You will find them contained within two separate slides in a single presentation that you can download. If you want, you can also apply PowerPoint’s fills, lines, and effects to these silhouettes to make them appear coordinated with your slides.

Copy the silhouettes graphics (clip arts) of your choice from the downloaded presentation, and paste them into your PowerPoint presentation slides. All these silhouette graphics can be used and customized with Shape Styles just like any other PowerPoint shape. You can also paste them into a Word document, an Excel worksheet, or any other program.

Download and use this presentation.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2010: Animate Text

In our ongoing animation tutorial series, we showed you how you can add an animation to any slide object in PowerPoint. However, there’s more to text animation than just adding animation. By default, when you animate a text placeholder or text box, all the text contained animates at one go unless your text content is within a bulleted or numbered list — in that case, all text animates in sequence. Even then, the animation is sequenced to first level paragraphs (first level bullets) — and any sub-bullet levels contained in your text placeholders or text boxes animates along with its parent level. In this tutorial, you will learn how you can access some specialized options for animating paragraphs and bulleted text sequentially by words, by letters, and by paragraph levels.

Explore the extra options available for text animations in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Crop Pictures (Mask to Shape)

You already learned how to play with all the different Crop options in PowerPoint 2011 — all except the Mask to Shape option, which we explain in this tutorial. Mask to Shape can be immensely helpful if you want any picture to show contained within a shape. In other words, you start with a conventional, rectangular picture and end up a picture that’s not contained within a non-rectangular shape.

Learn how to crop pictures using Mask to Shape option in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

Resonate on iPad: A Book That’s Now Become an Experience

When Nancy Duarte sent me a copy of her book, Resonate that has been recreated for the iPad, I knew that what I was looking through on my iPad was more than just a presentation book. In fact, this was more than a book–it was Nancy sharing her thoughts, her encounters, and her inspiration with everyone.

The folks at Duarte did post about Resonate’s new incarnation on their blog, and while I agree with them when they say “Resonate is the first interactive business book built using Apple’s iBooks Author”, I don’t think that iBooks Author is the only nuance that sets this book apart.

So what is it that sets Resonate on the iPad apart? And how did something that is so interactive happen? Also, did Resonate on the iPad happen because the iPad as a medium is a great way to share content?

The answer is both yes and no. The iPad certainly facilitated this metamorphosis of a book to an experience but when you look (notice that I used the term look rather than read) at Resonate on an iPad, you will observe that Nancy and her team at Duarte have done so much more than using the iPad as a medium! There are small touches everywhere–like when Nancy talks, or when there is an animation that’s soothing and resonating. Also, I loved the video in which sound waves create patterns using salt–yes, everything that I have discussed is available in the printed book, but then that’s just a book, this is an experience!

Also, you will notice how within the introduction video, there’s a flame or a source of light that moves almost in 3D space amongst 2D pictures (see the embedded YouTube video below). Clearly, the team at Duarte worked with this project with tons of planning and oodles of experiments. Go and get this book and enjoy–it’s not everyday that you get to look at a book, and feel an experience of this sort!

You May Also Like: Nancy Duarte on Indezine | Illuminate: Conversation with Nancy Duarte

Filed Under: Thoughts
Tagged as: Books, Duarte Design, iPad, Nancy Duarte, PowerPoint