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Thoughts and impressions of happenings in the world of PowerPoint and presentations, continuously updated since 2003.
See Also:
PowerPoint and Presenting Notes
PowerPoint and Presenting Glossary
Do any of these scenarios sound familiar? The title placeholders in your PowerPoint slide may move to another position due to your mouse slipping off your fingers, and you did not realize that until you had already saved the presentation. Or you may have received a presentation from a colleague who has made some changes to text — for example, 6 pt Algerian font face in light yellow color over a white background. While you can manually correct all these discrepancies, it goes without saying that you will be spending a huge amount of time making these corrections — and that’s entirely unrequired for since we will show you how you can get over this problem with just a friendly click or two.
Learn how to reapply the Slide Layout to your existing slide in PowerPoint 2003 for Windows.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2003
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2003, Tutorials
In this series of tutorials about formatting lines in PowerPoint 2011, you have already seen how to apply weight, dash styles, arrowheads, and also gradients to the shape outlines and lines. While all shapes by default do have an outline, you can remove any outline so that you end up with a shape with just a fill, and no outline. Of course, you can also remove the fill of the shape as well — but do remember that a shape with no fill and no outline is as good as invisible!
Learn how to remove the outline from a shape in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Lines, Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Tutorials
Slide Layouts in PowerPoint 2003 are a collection of various placeholders laid out in a fixed arrangement on the slide. You cannot create your own Slide Layouts in PowerPoint 2003 (you can create Slide Layouts in later versions), but you can certainly choose from the several great Slide Layouts that PowerPoint 2003 provides. Let’s first show you what exactly a Slide Layout is, and then explore applying Slide Layouts.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2003
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2003, Tutorials
Last month, a Swiss group calling themselves the Anti-PowerPoint Party launched their efforts—complete with a bright red octagonal STOP sign logo—and took their place in a long line of detractors that stretches back to 2003. The formal start of the criticism was the publication in Wired magazine of an article called PowerPoint Is Evil: Power Corrupts, PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely written by Edward R. Tufte, the noted graphics guru and professor emeritus of graphic design at Yale University.
Readers of this site will recall that I’ve often challenged Mr. Tufte’s opinions, most recently here, but the beating of PowerPoint goes on. My argument, simply and repeatedly stated, is to blame the penmanship, not the pen. A bad presentation is the fault of the user, not the tool.
To be fair, the Anti-PowerPoint Party does not fully advocate what its name implies. In fact, its goal, as stated on its home page is much more aligned with my argument:
We do not want to abolish PowerPoint*; we only want to abolish the PowerPoint*-CONSTRAINT.
We want that the number of boring PowerPoint* presentations on the planet to decrease and the average presentation to become more exciting and more interesting.
Nevertheless, the hue and cry of the Anti-PowerPoint Party was echoed by Lucy Kellaway, who writes the respected Business Life column for Financial Times. In her July 17th article on the launch, Ms. Kellaway advocated that the APPP (Anti-PowerPoint Party) needs a terrorist faction, which would advocate cutting the wire in the middle of the table that connects the laptop to the projector…Better still would be to campaign for an outright ban.
Even better still would be to campaign for a correction of user errors by banning the use of PowerPoint for anything but presentations (not send-aheads or leave-behinds) and to subordinate and restrict its use during presentations to support and/or illustrate the presenter’s narrative.
Joining this approach was a letter to the editors of Financial Times on July 22nd in response to Ms. Kellaway’s article. The letter was sent by Michael Baldwin, a presentation coach in New York who wrote:
In print cartoons, there is a dynamic relationship between the image and the caption that makes them—the good ones—both inseparable and unforgettable. With proper training, presenters can employ this same dynamic to produce memorable and convincing presentations.
Heed Mr. Baldwin’s metaphorical advice or your presentation will become a literal cartoon.
Jerry Weissman is among the world’s foremost corporate presentations coaches. His private client list reads like a who’s who of the world’s best companies, including the top brass at Yahoo!, Intel, Intuit, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Netflix, and many others. Jerry founded Power Presentations, Ltd. in 1988. One of his earliest efforts was the Cisco Systems IPO roadshow. Following its successful launch, Don Valentine, of Sequoia Capital, and then chairman of Cisco’s Board of Directors, attributed “at least two to three dollars” of the offering price to Jerry’s coaching. That endorsement led to more than 500 other IPO roadshow presentations that have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in the stock market.
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:
Guest Posts
Tagged as: Guest Post, Jerry Weissman, Opinion, PowerPoint
Working with the different line types in PowerPoint 2011 is such a learning experience — if you have explored this entire series with us, you know that you can change the weight, dash styles, and arrowheads for lines. But there’s more — in this tutorial, you will learn about Gradient lines. Now, Gradient is an attribute that’s rarely associated with lines but once you start playing with Gradient lines, you will find that the results can provide a surprisingly different look, especially when applied to lines that are thicker in weight.
Learn how to apply gradient style to lines (shape outlines) in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Lines, Office 2010, PowerPoint 2011, Tutorials
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