PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Lingo 2: The Indezine Review

Although it is easy to change the proofing language for specific text placeholders within a PowerPoint presentation, this can be a monotonous and long task. If you need to change the proofing language of over a hundred slides, you can be assured that this might take away a larger part of your working day. Fortunately, our review product can be a huge help! Lingo 2 is a PowerPoint add-in that changes the proofing language of all slides within a presentation at one go! It searches almost everywhere in your presentation to locate instances of language attributes in the Masters, tables, SmartArt, Notes pages, grouped shapes and text boxes, text placeholders, etc — and changes the proofing language.

Learn about Lingo, a PowerPoint add-in which enables changing the proofing language of the presentation’s text content to various languages.

Filed Under: Add-ins
Tagged as: Add-in, PowerPoint, Proofing

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Reroute Connectors

You have already learned about the amazing stuff you can do with connectors — starting from drawing to formatting them. Many times when you draw connectors between slide objects, the connector may use the shortest path between two slide objects — this might overlap the connector over other shapes, text boxes, or any other object. You might have another reason to use a longer connector between two slide objects as well — whatever your reason may be, the good news is that you can easily reroute your connectors — either automatically or manually.

Learn how to reroute connectors automatically, and also how you can use the yellow diamond handles in connectors within PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

Creating Anchor Points for Connectors in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

While PowerPoint lets you attach a connector to any slide object, these connectors can only be attached to wherever you see an anchor point on the slide object. Most of the time, the location of these anchor points may work well for you — however, in certain scenarios, you may want additional anchor points at a particular location. The good news is that you can add new anchor points for shapes and text boxes using the technique explained on this page. For text placeholders though, you cannot add new anchor points. If you need more anchor points for pictures, it is suggested that you use any shape as a container for a picture fill, and add anchor points as required for the container shape.

Learn how to create Anchor Points for connectors in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

Thin Smiles, Thinner Audiences!

Yesterday evening, our bank invited us to a presentation by one of their insurance consultants. Since I am in the business of presenting, I always love to be part of the audience. I did not know at that time that I was going to run into something I have never experienced before!

What I encountered was a thin smile. The presenter had this thin smile plastered on his face right from the start to the end of his presentation, and that lasted for a good hour and a half. Fortunately, I had my tablet with me. So, I used it to good advantage to pencil all my thoughts immediately!

Before we get to these thoughts, what exactly is a thin smile? Fortunately I found a picture on Microsoft Office that shows exactly what I encountered!

We all do realize that the opposite of a smiling speaker is a grumpy one. Yes, that’s not a great alternative. Yet, how many of you can tolerate a speaker who has a thin smile all through his or her presentation? So what is the correct balance between smiling too much, and just being happy? Here are some thoughts to share. You can use these as guidelines to help you prevent a death-by-smiling experience.

1. Don’t smile too much. The audience may think that you are laughing at them.
2. Also if you smile too much, the audience may think you are covering up your lack of confidence.
3. Smiling also has quite a bit to relate to the topic of your presentation. If you are discussing something funny, it might work. However, if you are doing a session on bankruptcy or some other negative topic–then the smile may be a huge liability. Our presenter was talking about insurance, and most of that related to benefits after the death of an insured person–the continuous, thin smile was completely out of place.
4. Smiling distracts the audience from your speech. At this point of time, you have lost the attention of the listeners.
5. If you smile too much, your audience will avoid eye contact with you. That may be detrimental to the reason and objective of your presentation.
6. If your audience does not find the topic of your presentation funny, then, it’s not funny if you smile.
7. Presenters who smile too much may come across as insincere, insensitive, unconcerned, and untrustworthy.

Now by extolling the virtues of not smiling, I do not mean that you should not smile at all. You should certainly smile when appropriate, especially when you are directly speaking with a single member of the audience. And a “thin smile” is something entirely different from a regular smile–the former seems plastic and lacks involvement, while the latter also results beyond smiling lips to smiling eyes. And a smile that stops after a few seconds is always good. Soon thereafter, you can get back to talking in your most business-like, neutral tone so that you can continue to hold the attention of your audience. And they will believe in you.

Filed Under: Thoughts
Tagged as: Delivery, Opinion, Presentation Skills, Smile

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Detach, Re-attach, and Delete Connectors

When a connector is inserted to link two shapes or slide objects together, it gets attached to a certain point on both objects. For every object, there are several anchor points where you can attach a connector — for a typical rectangle (or square) shape, you will see four anchor points (red squares) when you are attaching a connector to it. Sometimes you may attach your connector to the wrong anchor point, and may need to detach it from that point, and attach it to some other anchor point. Or, maybe you connected to the wrong slide object altogether, and now want to detach the connector from one slide object and attach it to another. In this tutorial, we will explore ways to detach and attach connectors.

Learn how to detach, re-attach, and delete connectors in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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