Long bullet points illogical?
How many times have you been cramming to prepare a PowerPoint presentation and it dawns on you that the bullet points in your slides are way too text heavy? It is very common for people to “brain dump” all of their ideas or thoughts into “stream of consciousness” bullet points as they create slides.
However, this creative technique becomes a problem when you fail to revisit your bullet points and simplify them so that your audience isn’t staring at a wall of text. It can be challenging to reduce and simplify what you wrote — but it needs to be done. More…
How do you keep the formatting of a slide you're inserting?
When you’re building PowerPoint presentations, you may need to copy slides from one PowerPoint slide deck and insert them into another. Sometimes these slides may have different templates, themes, or other formatting options. Whenever you insert slides from another presentation template, the inserted slides will default to the new presentation’s template and formatting options. In most cases, you’ll want to modify the inserted slides to the new presentation’s formatting in order to keep your slides consistent. More…
Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte
Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, written by Nancy Duarte, is a comprehensive guide to presentation design. Similar to Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen, Nancy advocates a more visual approach to slide creation - a “new slide ideology” as she calls it. Nancy shares several design tips from her extensive design experience working with large high tech companies and high-profile projects such as the “Inconvenient Truth” presentation she designed for Al Gore. More…
I didn’t comment on another key deficiency in PowerPoint 2007 in my recent “Missing-in-Upgrade” article, but there are only two clip art images that are ninja-related in PowerPoint 2007 (below) – and they’re lame. As the PowerPoint Ninja, I wanted to make sure that this problem is rectified.
Is the ninja on the left wearing a hooded Snuggie and a man purse? Maybe someone spilled his bowl of Cheetos while he was lounging on the couch in front of the TV and now he's out for blood...or he's just a nerd-ninja.
More…
An eye dropper tool should be baked into PowerPoint
If you’ve used drawing or photo editing applications such as Illustrator or Photoshop, you will be familiar with their color picker or eye dropper tools, which enable you to extract a color from an image so the same color can be added to other objects. I wish PowerPoint offered this same functionality, but alas it doesn’t. Luckily, there are many outside color picker apps that can be leveraged in conjunction with PowerPoint. More…
