PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Learn PowerPoint 2010: Sharing Custom Dictionaries

Each logged-in user has a default custom dictionary called CUSTOM.dic — in addition you can create and use many more custom dictionaries. Over time, your custom dictionaries may become a very useful resource, especially since any custom dictionary loaded is used by all the Office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Let us assume that you have added several words to the custom dictionaries over the last 4 or 5 years, and now you need to move to a new computer. Or probably you have a colleague who is going to help you with some documentation, and you obviously want him or her to use your custom dictionary. To share the actual dictionary files (.dic), you first need to find out where they are stored on your computer.

Learn how to share custom dictionaries.

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

Efficient Elements: Conversation with Felix Dollinger

Felix Dollinger studied Business Engineering at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, and at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, USA. He started his career as a Strategy Consultant and Project Manager at Siemens Management Consulting, one of the leading strategy consultancies in Germany. Having to create countless slides himself, he quickly identified the huge efficiency potential in slide creation. Joining forces with a friend from university, Felix founded Efficient Elements GmbH in 2008 with its first product, Efficient Elements for presentations.

In this conversation, Felix discusses the Efficient Elements add-in for PowerPoint.

Geetesh: Tell us about your Efficient Elements add-in for PowerPoint, what it does, and how it evolved.

Felix: Efficient Elements for presentations will help you both save time and improve quality in creating slides. The Agenda Wizard automatically creates and updates agenda slides for you — it has never been easier to calculate time slots and shuffle complete presentations. The Slide Wizard saves you from reinventing the wheel every time, offering a large library of standard elements like three-column designs, process chains or editable country maps. Both Agenda Wizard and Slide Wizard can be fully customized to any corporate design — so it is actually easier to comply with the corporate design than not to comply. The My Elements feature works like favorites in a browser — you can easily organize your own frequently used elements for later reuse. And last but not least, the Efficiency Tools will help you in aligning slide elements faster and more precisely, or in emailing selected slides with a single click. There are actually many more time savers included, just give it a try with our free 30-day trial.

At Efficient Elements, the daily annoyances in PowerPoint have always been the main driver for further development, initially triggered by our own (painful) experience, later on also by our customers’ feedback and ideas. It all started with the library of the Slide Wizard and the alignment functions of the Efficiency Tools. In the meantime, many other features have been added and further development is always ongoing, currently also for a new product for Microsoft Word.

Efficient Elements has been growing very rapidly since its foundation and it is amazing to see how fast it spread across all 5 continents. Feedback from our global customers shows that an average user saves more than 2 hours per week with Efficient Elements. For us, it is always most rewarding to see the positive impact our tool has.

Geetesh: Can you tell us about the new features added to Efficient Elements, such as the built-in fully configurable color palette?

Felix: The most recent feature we added to Efficient Elements is a fully configurable color palette. An unlimited number of colors in any kind of grouping can be easily configured based on RGB values. This is particularly useful if the corporate design specifies more colors than PowerPoint can address in a color scheme. The individual colors are shown with their RGB values and can even be named for easier recognition.

Another feature that we added recently is called Intelligent Elements. It gives you the opportunity to use date, time or file variables in text boxes with automatic updating upon saving the file. This way you can easily have e.g. the current file name or current date in any text box you like.

See Also: Efficient Elements: The Indezine Review

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, Efficient Elements, Felix Dollinger, Interviews, PowerPoint

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Shape Subtract

PowerPoint 2011 lets you merge the shapes with its four Combine Shape commands: Combine, Union, Intersect, and Subtract — you can end up with some seriously impressive results. In this tutorial, we’ll show how you can subtract one shape from another. For example, we placed several shapes over one larger heart shape as shown towards the left of the figure shown. With these shapes selected, we could use the Subtract command that is explained later in this tutorial to create a cutout shape, as shown towards the right of the same figure.

Learn how you can create new shapes in PowerPoint 2011 using the Subtract command.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2010: Disable, Enable, and Set the Default Custom Dictionary

Any custom dictionary that you create within PowerPoint or any other Microsoft Office program is used by all the Office applications installed on your computer. Also, if any changes are made to the list of words within a custom dictionary, it will be reflected within the spell check tools of all Office applications. Each logged-in user has a default custom dictionary called CUSTOM.dic, and this is stored in a separate folder for each local user.

Learn how disable, enable, and set the default custom dictionary in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

NewsPoint: Conversation with Kurt Dupont

  
Kurt Dupont, based out of Belgium heads PresentationPoint, a company that creates several amazing PowerPoint add-ins. After his Computer Science studies, Kurt started with Andersen Consulting (Accenture nowadays) in Brussels. After 3 years he moved to the Brussels Airport Terminal Company that runs the Brussels airport – this last placement inspired the start-up of Take-off (now known as PresentationPoint) in 1998.

In this conversation, Kurt discusses NewsPoint, a tool that continuously monitors various data sources and saves the results to a database or on a hard disk. This saved data can then be integrated to show up on PowerPoint slides using other products from PresentationPoint.

Geetesh: Tell us about the use of PowerPoint slides as a medium to show content from RSS feeds. How can your NewsPoint product help in organizing the content to show on such slides?

Kurt: Typically our clients use our products and PowerPoint presentations to broadcast a message to their audience. Think about displaying ads in a shop and broadcasting targets in a factory. These presentations should be real eye-catchers so that the message is obvious and direct. Some presentations tend to become a boring carousel of images and slides.

By adding real-time information to the presentations like world news, stock quotes, weather information, etc. You get living presentations that people like to watch continuously like your television at home.

Our new version of NewsPoint cannot only monitor RSS feeds. You can also monitor continuously stock quotes, weather information, and Google calendars (e.g. for room scheduling in a building) and save this information to a Microsoft Access database or a Microsoft SQL Server.

Another often requested feature was to synchronize databases from A to B and replicate XML file data to a database. Furthermore, NewsPoint can grab images of an internet page or take a picture on its own of an internet page. These duplicated images can then be used in a PowerPoint presentation to display e.g. hurricane warnings etc.

Geetesh: NewsPoint works very well with your other product, DataPoint – can you tell us more about this integration?

Kurt: True, NewsPoint works perfectly with our real-time information provider for PowerPoint. DataPoint links the content of your NewsPoint database to your text and table shapes on a slide. With that, you can display live news of your favorite news channel next to the weather forecast.

With DataPoint you turn your static presentation into a living presentation without stopping the slideshow for content updates.

You can go further with the iPoint product where you can set up a playlist of images, movies, and presentations, and then schedule this playlist at a given computer. iPoint will automatically distribute the playlist content to your iPoint players and start the playlists at the instructed times. Or use iPoint to play a CNN-like news ticker over your presentation.

See Also: An Interview with Kurt Dupont

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees 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, Interviews, Kurt Dupont, PowerPoint, PresentationPoint