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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
PowerPoint provides several bullet styles, and you can choose from them — but they do look a little canned since almost every PowerPoint slide these days uses the same bullet styles! You could get rid of bullets altogether and use a small sentence instead, or maybe you could explore picture bullets — to insert any picture as your bullet. Of course, for picture bullets to work, your picture needs to be small, no larger than a medium-sized dot. And it helps if it has transparent areas — if all this talk about the size and transparency of a picture bullet makes you dizzy, don’t worry because PowerPoint has so many picture bullets built within the program!
Learn how to use picture bullets in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2010, Text, Tutorials
You have learned how to use the Clip Art tab of the Media Browser in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac. This tab shows the clip art that is installed as part of Microsoft Office 2011 — you will notice that the clip art collection is divided into convenient categories. However, you’ll find only a few categories — and there is no obvious way to create your own categories. However, we discovered a solution outside Microsoft Office altogether that lets you get over this limitation.
Learn how to customize the Clip Art categories within Media Browser in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Tutorials
While it is a great option to change the bullet styles in PowerPoint 2010, sometimes you don’t want to really change just the bullets themselves — you might want to alter the size of the bullet so that it is somewhat smaller or larger than the text before which it is placed. Or maybe you need a particular color to be used for the bullets? Most of the time, the defaults actually work best — but just in case you want to make these changes, this is how you will go about the whole process.
Learn how to change the bullet size and the color attributes in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2010, Shapes, Text, Tutorials
In his 20-year career, Ken Revenaugh has always demonstrated a passion for mentoring. As a result, he founded Fast Track Tools, a professional training and coaching company. Using his “Communicate to Win” product, clients learn how to sell their ideas and communicate with impact. In the past, Ken has served in Senior Sales Leadership roles at FedEX, Global Experience Specialist, and Oakwood where he built out the sales operations function, and led transformational change in sales and marketing.
In this interview, Ken discusses the Fast Track Tools site and blog.
Geetesh: Tell us more about Fast Track Tools, and why you created the site and blog.
Ken: I developed Fast Track Tools because I was sick and tired of watching bad ideas win. You know the drill: Someone passionately advocates for an idea and clearly communicates why it should be implemented. Offering apparent benefits and potential consequences of not acting, the presenter moves the audience to action – to accept a weak or poor idea – on the strength of a powerful presentation.
I recognized that good ideas and a great vision are not enough. Winners need to couple their ideas with an authoritative, convincing, and articulate presentation. I want to spare others the years of frustration I’ve gone through watching bad ideas win. To make sure my client’s ideas win, I give them the proven tools and processes I’ve used over the years.
My primary passion is teaching and what better way to reach people, than my blog? This venue is perfect for sharing tips and tricks on developing presentations and selling your ideas to others. I find my readers love the weekly PowerPoint-Tastic templates. These templates make it simple to communicate your idea without spending hours fussing with the design of the presentation.
Geetesh: If there’s just one thing that people can do to create better PowerPoint presentations, what would that be?
Ken: I believe strongly in what I call “Talking Headers.” In PowerPoint we are prone to use a title at the top of each page. For example it’s common to see a slide that with a header that reads “Fourth Quarter Results.” Does that entice the reader? No, but a Talking Header may read “Profit up 20% in fourth quarter.” This ensures the audience knows the primary topic for the slide.
Some would say this is the the job of the presenter to communicate the key topic. I would argue, Talking Headers ensure that post presentation, anyone can pick up the deck and understand the message. It also acts as a filter for the presenter. If you cannot write out the primary message of the slide in one sentence, you likely don’t need that slide.
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: Interviews, PowerPoint
The Media Browser is a central repository of media content that you can use in your presentations. It has six tabs that we have covered extensively: Photos, Audio, Movies, Clip Art, Symbols, and Shapes. These six tabs are primarily of two types: Tabs that catalog content in your Mac OS X special collections and Tabs that catalog Microsoft Office assets. Although the first category of tabs may appear restricted to the Mac OS X special collections, they can be tweaked to show content from any other folder on your computer. In fact, you can add more folders to the Folder / Browser pane.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Tutorials
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