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Thoughts and impressions of happenings in the world of PowerPoint and presentations, continuously updated since 2003.
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PowerPoint and Presenting Notes
PowerPoint and Presenting Glossary
Text boxes in PowerPoint need to be moved and resized within different areas of the slide. While you may think that selecting and resizing is all that is to be done, that’s not the entire truth because there’s so much more you can do even with mere resizing — if you know that these options exist! In a previous tutorial, you learnt how to move text boxes on a slide. As suggested in that tutorial, you should only resize text boxes, and not text placeholders on the slide since the positioning of the latter is normally controlled by the Slide Master. Typically text placeholders for regular text content or even slide titles are located in the same position on successive slides — so if you really do need to resize a text placeholder, do it within the Slide Master so that this change of size happens on all slides, providing a consistent look to your presentation.
Learn how to resize text boxes on a slide in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2010, Text, Tutorials
Adding a shadow to a shape can give it more depth and you probably get that perfect shadow the first time you use PowerPoint’s default shadow options, as already explained in our Apply Shadow effects to Shapes tutorial. However, there are times when you want that shadow to be a wee bit longer, or just a little less pronounced. Fortunately, that’s possible and quite easy to achieve.
Learn how you can tweak the Shadow effects that you apply to shapes in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Effects, Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Tutorials
Have you seen that PowerPoint automatically reduces the size of your text when you type in too much text? Or does the text box itself increase in size when you type in a sentence or two more than what can fit into the text box? Does this automatic hand-holding by PowerPoint drive you crazy and want to hit your head on the wall? Well, you really don’t have to worry because you can make PowerPoint behave itself — and bend it to your will. You can make these changes in two places — and which place you choose to make these changes will depend upon how much control you want.
Learn about text box autofit options in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2010, Text, Tutorials
PowerPoint makes a great drawing program — however it is not too easy to duplicate content such as shapes, especially in a repeated pattern without summoning too many dialog boxes. However, tasks such as these can be made super simple — probably more simple than even doing it in a dedicated drawing program using Circlify, a third party add-in for PowerPoint. Circlify lets you quickly create circular graphics and intricate illustrations for icons, logos, illustrations, etc.
Read the Indezine review of Circlify.
Filed Under:
Companion Programs
Tagged as: Add-in, PowerPoint, Review
Jamie Garroch, CEO of GMARK Ltd., founded the company in 2009 to provide presentation professionals with PowerPoint software, content and training. Jamie conceived the idea for the company’s first product, ActivePrez from a non-linear presenting need and has recently added several other add-in products; MapPrez, SwiftPrez, Circlify and interactive maps.
In this conversation, Jamie talks about Circlify, a PowerPoint add-in that makes drawing multiple shapes in a repeated pattern seem easy.
Geetesh: What is the raison d’etre for your Circlify add-in for PowerPoint, and what motivated you to create it?
Jamie: GMARK creates a lot of slides for clients and one theme that often crops up is the need to equally spacing a quantity of ‘somethings’ around the perimeter of another shape. The somethings may be text or images or shapes and the perimeter shape is often circular. Basic diagrams aren’t so hard to do with the new PowerPoint SmartArt Cycle illustrations but there are limitations with the way that tool works.
For example, shapes are ‘resized to fit’ and there are several steps required to change the default shapes types. We just wanted an authoring tool that allowed the designer to pick any shape or their own custom shape and plot any given number of them around the circumference of any sized circle, overlapping them if they want. The real benefit of Circlify is one of time. It’s very fast to draw whatever you want, combine shapes or group shapes and then ask Circlify to plot the required number of them around a circular guide.
Geetesh: A fun add-in of this sort can be addictive, but it has much unobvious business uses as well in diagramming – do you want to share some thoughts?
Jamie: We’ve used it already to create some professional-looking illustrations for our clients. These have included cyclic process diagrams to more abstract illustrations of concepts, clock faces, and even some subtle texture effects for template backgrounds. We’ve also used it to create icons to indicate the progress through a presentation. In one example, we created a 3D sliced pie illustration to represent where the presenter was in the presentation.
As with any design tool, the limits to what can be created are tightly coupled with the limits of human imagination and we’re looking forward to seeing what folks can come up with through their use of Circlify. We’ve got some examples online and more are available in the free trial download.
Filed Under:
Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, Circlify, Drawing, Interviews, Jamie Garroch, PowerPoint
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