PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

PowerPoint Chart Types

PowerPoint provides ample choices in chart types for almost every kind of graphical data representation. However, as you probably know all charts are not equal. Charts should be chosen depending upon the topic of your presentation, your audience, and the disposition of the presenter. The fact that you can change from one type of chart to another is a great way to experiment and play. Deciding upon the chart type though is just one of the decisions you need to take – you can then explore the different variants within each chart type. And if that was not enough, you can reposition, remove, or add chart elements such as data labels, legends, titles, etc. in differing layouts. Then color your charts as required – and ascertain whether you must animate them, or let them be static.

Explore various chart types that can be created within PowerPoint, and scenarios in which they are best used.

Filed Under: Charts and Diagrams
Tagged as: Charting, PowerPoint, Tutorials

Learn PowerPoint 2010: Loading and Using Custom Dictionaries

You may wonder what happens behind the scenes whenever you do a spell check in PowerPoint or any other Microsoft Office program. This is what happens: PowerPoint looks at each word you have typed and matches those words with the entries listed within its dictionary. If the dictionary does not contain some of the words in your slides, it goes ahead and marks those words as misspelled. Then it offers you suggestions for changing those supposedly misspelled words to other similar words that can be found within its dictionary.

So why did we use the term “supposedly” in the last paragraph? That’s because PowerPoint’s dictionary is quite basic, and includes mainly words used in common, everyday language — if a word does not exist within that dictionary, it is not necessarily misspelled! There are so many specialized words in different knowledge branches like medicine, research, law, computing, etc. that are not common words — yet they are perfectly valid as far as spellings are concerned.

Learn how to load and use custom dictionaries in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Shape Combine

PowerPoint has more than a hundred shapes but there are times when you want to combine two or more shapes to create your own shape. For example, we placed several basic shapes over a circle to create a smiling caricature as shown towards the left of the figure, below. With these shapes selected, we then used the Combine command that is explained later in this tutorial to create a unified, combined shape as shown towards the right in the figure below.

Learn how you can combine shapes in PowerPoint 2011 using the Combine command.

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

iPad Presenting 06: Connecting a TV or Projector to Apple TV

iPad presenting is a phenomenon that’s waiting to take off. We have already explored how the iPad 2 and Apple TV 2 combination can make this concept work using AirPlay. Now we come to the last part of the hardware requirements in this post — the part where you connect your Apple TV 2 to a TV or projector.

The Basics

Connecting to a TV or projector that has an HDMI input is easy. Just use a good quality HDMI cable to connect an Apple TV 2 to the TV or projector. Apple’s HDMI cable is very portable and thin, though not too long. If the length works for you, then that’s certainly the way to go. Our experience turned out to be a little different since our Apple HDMI cable would not work with an Apple TV, a Mac Mini, and a regular DVD player! We returned the cable. Right now, we are successfully using a Belkin PureAV HDMI cable to connect the Apple TV 2 to a Sony LED TV.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed Under: iPad Presenting
Tagged as: iPad, Keynote, PowerPoint, Projector

Learn PowerPoint 2010: Edit Custom Dictionaries

Imagine this scenario — you have created a specialized, medical presentation that’s full of squiggly, red, underlined words! These squiggly underlines indicate what PowerPoint considers to be as a misspelled word! Don’t blame PowerPoint, because its medical skills are somewhat limited — we do know that almost all the words in your medical presentation are perfectly valid as far as spelling is concerned. The silver lining here though is that you can teach PowerPoint to spell those words — and enhance PowerPoint’s custom dictionary. Of course, not only can you teach PowerPoint how to spell medical words, but you can also teach the program how to spell words that enhance lexicons in various other subjects such as research, law, computing, etc. Any changes you make by adding new spellings of words in PowerPoint will also influence spell checking in other Microsoft Office programs such as Word, Excel, Outlook, etc.

Learn how to edit custom dictionaries in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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