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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
Steve Rindsberg has been associated with PowerPoint since the product originated — his PowerPoint FAQ site is a treasure trove of PowerPoint information. When he’s not updating his site, he’s creating new PowerPoint add-ins that expand possibilities. Steve’s also into a lot of print technology-related stuff.
In this conversation, Steve answers my questions about finding links to missing picture fills in PowerPoint slides.
Geetesh: Let’s say I have a shape on my PowerPoint 2010 slide that I filled with a picture. Now I opted to override the default option to insert it as embedded, and went ahead and linked that picture. Six months thereafter, after some spring cleaning on my computer resulted in the deletion of the linked picture, I find a small red X icon with no info about the name or path of the linked picture! What are my options?
Steve: There’s no way to learn the name or path of the original picture either by normal means or using VBA, but you can find them in the XML files contained within the PPTX container that PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 use.
Unzip the container, and you’ll find a slidexx.xml for each slide in the presentation, where xx is the slide number. Similarly, there’ll also be a slidexx.xml.rels for each slide in a sub-folder. Open this file, and in the XML for the picture-filled shape, you’ll find:
Type=”http://long/string/of/stuff/we/don” t=”” care=”” about=””>
Target=”file:///c:blahpathtolinkedfile.jpg”
To avoid problems you can use the Insert and Link option that is available in PowerPoint 2007 and 2010. This option puts a copy of the image into the PPTX file but also remembers the path to the source image. When you open the file it checks to see if the source image has changed; if so, it updates it in the PPTX. If the source image isn’t available, PowerPoint just uses the last-updated embedded version of the image.
This gives you the ability to do image swaps by changing filenames of linked images, just as linked images would, but without the fragility of the links. The only downside is that the images are embedded; the PPTX files will be bigger because of it.
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: Fills, Interviews, PowerPoint 2007, PowerPoint 2010, Shapes, Steve Rindsberg
I have already explained how you can add gradient fills to shapes in PowerPoint 2010. In this tutorial you will learn about More Gradients option, which leads to a detailed gradient editor that’s very capable — and there’s a lot to learn!
Learn about the different options within More Gradients in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Fills, PowerPoint 2010, Shapes, Tutorials
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Once you have added gradient fills to shapes in PowerPoint 2010 you may want to make some changes to the gradient fill. You have already seen how you can use the More Gradients option to add different types of gradients as fills to the shapes. In this tutorial, I’ll step into a little more detail and show you how gradient stops work. When you are done with this tutorial, you can create your own gradients, or edit existing ones.
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PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Fills, PowerPoint 2010, Shapes, Tutorials
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Bess Gallanis is the founder of Speaking with Power and Persuasion, an executive communications consulting firm based in Chicago. She is a communication coach, speaker, journalist, a student of yoga and insight meditation and the author of Yoga Chick (Warner Books, 2006). For more than 25 years, public and private company CEOs, senior executives, portfolio managers, and financial advisors have sought out Bess to help them develop their leadership voice and to make an impact through skillful communications. She prepares clients for high stakes presentations, media interviews, and sensitive conversations. Bess draws from the universal wisdom of yoga and insight meditation as a model for Presentation Yoga, which emphasizes leadership from within, personal authenticity, and storytelling.
In this conversation, Bess discusses the concepts of Presentation Yoga.
Geetesh: What is Presentation Yoga and how can it help everyday presenters be better-equipped delivering presentations?
Bess: Effective presentations are the product of a combination of skills. Presentation Yoga is a set of exercises to help presenters stay centered under pressure, manage their physical energy, and project their authentic, best selves.
These also are the skills of great storytellers. The minute you open your mouth to speak, the audience is thinking: “So what? Who cares? What’s in it for me?” Effective presenters get ahead of these questions by telling stories. Stories can touch people in their hearts, stir their emotions, stimulate them to question their beliefs and motivate change.
Presentation Yoga begins with exercises in mindfulness, which is the practice of being focused on and present in your experience. Effective speakers use this skill to relive the experience of the story they are telling. As a result, they project a genuine and powerful emotional energy that resonates with their audience at a physical level. This is authenticity. We can use a dictionary to define authenticity, but most people trust that they know it when they feel it.
Meditation, breathing and stretching exercises help reduce stress and manage energy. The breathing exercises also help to develop breath control and vocal vitality. Vocal energy takes your audience from passive listeners to actively experiencing your message.
As a reflective practice, yoga cultivates listening to – and challenging — your inner voice. Every presenter at some time or another has heard that voice, the one that screams about performance anxiety and fear of failure. Challenging your insecurities and trusting your gut instincts are powerful tools to use in scripting a new mental talk track. Presentation Yoga includes confidence-boosting visualization and mantra exercises.
Geetesh: How and when did you discover and practice the relations between how yoga principles can benefit presenters – tell us more.
Bess: After a few years of serious study, yoga, and meditation practice with master teachers like Deepak Chopra and Thich Nhat Hahn, I began to connect the dots between my personal and professional worlds. Yoga and insight meditation are a set of practices that emphasize mindfulness and self-inquiry as the primary tools of self-mastery. If you are not the leader of your inner world, you won’t be much of a leader in the external world.
Like the strands of a braid, leadership and communication skills are integrally linked. As leadership guru Warren Bennis says, “Leaders are driven to express themselves.”
If you study powerful presenters and watch how they connect with their audience – whether it’s around a conference room table or from a stage — you can see that they are communicating from all three levels of consciousness: body, mind, and spirit. This is where yoga provides a model for presentation performance. I don’t mean ‘acting’ performance, but rather the impact a great presenter makes on the audience.
It did not take long before I began to develop business tools based on yoga to help my clients expand their presentation skills to meet the leadership demands they faced.
My challenge was to develop tools that were accessible, particularly to people who were not familiar with Eastern wisdom technologies. Though the tools are different, the concept of self-management and authenticity translates across cultures. My clients have been very receptive to the centering, meditation, breathing and visualization techniques in Presentation Yoga. One of my clients, a middle-aged, public company CEO, practiced yoga to prepare for a challenging presentation to investors.
Storytelling is the most difficult skill for business people to get comfortable with. We’re conditioned to trust data as infallible and to mistrust our own judgment. Presentation Yoga helps the most hardened data cruncher bridge the divide from communicating to connecting.
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Interviews
Tagged as: Bess Gallanis, Delivery, Interviews, PowerPoint, Presentation Skills
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It may happen that you add a picture fill to your shape, and may opt to link the picture rather than contain it within the presentation. You may thereafter forget about this altogether and delete the linked picture file or even rename it. Or you may move the presentation itself to another computer — and since the linked picture file does not exist on that other computer, PowerPoint may get some hiccups!
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Fills, PowerPoint 2010, Shapes, Tutorials
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