SlideBlog

It has been too long since I have posted and for that I apologize. I didn’t take the time to post while on vacation in Norway. Anyway, I am back and today’s blog post is about the “Slides Reuse” feature of PowerPoint 2010.

Sometimes you may want to reuse a particular slide from another presentation you made before. Instead of having to open this presentation and copy/paste the slide from one presentation to the other, you can use the built in “Slide Reuse” feature of PowerPoint.

1. While working on a presentation in Normal view, be sure that you are looking at the “Slides” tab in the left hand side and click between the slides where you want to insert a slide from another presentation.

2. On the “Home” tab, click on the little arrow (the bottom part) of the “New Slides” button in the “Slides” group. In the drop-down choose “Reuse Slides” at the bottom.

3. The Slide Reuse pane will open on the right side of the window. You will have the option to insert a slide from another presentation or from a slide library. Here we will use another PowerPoint file.

4. Browse to the presentation that contains the slide you want to reuse. Click “Open”.

5. All the slides from this presentation shows up in the Slide Reuse pane on the right side.

6. Click on the slide you want to insert. The slide is inserted in between the slides you chose in 1.

You can click on another slide if you want use more slides from this presentation or browse to a different presentation or just close the Slide Reuse pane to continue working on your presentation.

Today I just wanted to mention a free add-in to PowerPoint I read about over on makeuseof.com. It is a free add-in called LiveWeb that can be downloaded here.

It basically allows you to place a webpage on your PowerPoint slide. The webpage will be live meaning it will be updated (provided you are connected to the internet). You just specify the URL of the webpage and some options such as whether to refresh the webpage automatically or not and the size/shape of the webpage on the slide.

It can be a neat way to avoid having to switch applications to show the audience something from a webpage. You can read more about it on makeuseof.com and download here.

Let me know what you think about it.

When using really large font sizes in PowerPoint the space between some characters might not come out perfect. The area between characters is know as kerning and you can read more about its importance here. The bottom line is, if the kerning is off the text will look funny. So here we will look at one way you can use to adjust the kerning in a large typeset text in PowerPoint.

1. You can see that the space between the first 1 and the 0 is much bigger than between the other characters. This is very noticeable and it feels like the 1 doesn’t belong to the other text.

2. Select only the 1. Or the first character before the space you want to adjust.

3. Click on the character spacing drop down in the “Font” group on the “Home” tab and choose “More Spacing…”. You can also get to this by clicking on the little icon in the bottom right of the “Font” group to see additional options.

4. A dialog box will show up that allows you to change character spacings

5. There is a drop down menu with 3 options:

• Normal – This is just the normal spacing
• Expanded – This is if you want more space between the characters
• Condensed – This is if you want to reduce the space between characters

We will choose “Condensed” since we want less space. Now we must decide by how many points we will reduce the space in the text input box. We experiment with different values and end up with 20.

6. And now we have text that has better kerning and is more balanced

Sometimes it is necessary to adjust the line spacing (or leading) in paragraphs of text (see here).

1. Slide with paragraph of text with perhaps a bit too much line spacing.

2. Select the text box and click on the additional options button in the lower right corner on the “Paragraph” group on the “Home” tab.

3. A new dialog box will open with the Line Spacing options in the lower right side.

4. There are several different options in the drop-down menu.

• Single – This is the default line spacing
• 1.5 Lines – This creates 1.5 times the normal line spacing
• Double – This doubles the line spacing
• Exactly – Here you can specify exactly how many points you want the line spacing to be
• Multiple – Here you can specify a number to multiply with the normal line spacing. So if you specify 2 that would give the same result as Double

5. Play around with the different options until you find the perfect one for your particular paragraph of text (here shown with Exactly and 60 pt).

Did you know that you can save one or more slides as images in Microsoft PowerPoint 2010. It is actually pretty easy.

You can either save all slides as images at the same time or do one slide at a time. Let us start by looking at how to save all slides at the same time.

1. Open the SlideShow you want to save as images

2. Go to the “File” tab (backstage) and click on “Save As”

3. A Save As dialog box will show up. Browse to the folder where you want the images to be saved. At the bottom click on the drop-down menu “Save As Type:”.

4. Scroll down to the type of image format you would like

• GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)
• JPEG (File Interchange Format)
• PNG (Portable Network Graphics Format)
• TIFF (Tag Image File Format)
• BMP (Device Independent Bitmap)
• WMF (Windows MetaFile)
• EMF (Enhanced Windows MetaFile)

5. Choose “File name” and click “Save”

6. A new dialog shows up asking with 3 buttons: “Every Slide”, “Current Slide Only” or “Cancel”. Since we are saving all slides in the SlideShow as images we choose “Every Slide”

7. A confirmation message shows up telling us that all our slides have been saved as a separate image. Click “OK”.

If we go to the folder shown in the confirmation message, the same one we choose in step 3, we will see a new folder with the “File name” we provided in step 5. Inside this folder will be one image file for each slide in our presentation.

If you only wanted to save one of your slides as an image just choose “Current Slide Only” in step 6. You will then have the opportunity to name the file something of your choosing. This as opposed to when saving all slides the names of the files will be “SlideX” where X is the slide number.

This is a really neat feature if you want to post an image of a slide or a whole SlideShow on your blog or online. It can also be used if you make a nice drawing or diagram in PowerPoint that you want to use in a page layout software for a brochure or magazine. There are probably many more times when saving your slides as image files can be useful. How do you use this feature?

When sharing a presentation with other people you may experience them calling you up saying that things are not aligned and look funny. This could be the result of you using a font in the presentation they don’t have on their computers. PowerPoint then substitutes your font with one on their system. To avoid this, it is possible to embed the fonts you use in the presentation. That’s what we are looking at today.

The place to find the settings for embedding fonts is in the PowerPoint backstage (the file tab), under “options” on the left side.

After clicking on options a new window opens up, the PowerPoint Options dialog. Click on “Save” on the left side and at the bottom of the window are the settings available for embedding fonts.

Click the little checkbox next to “Embed fonts in the file”. There are two options; one for embedding only the characters used in the presentation and one for embedding all characters in the alphabet. By choosing the first option it will help to keep the file size down. This can be a good option if the people you are sending the presentation to are not going to edit it. If you are sharing the presentation with someone for them to make edits, then you are probably better off choosing to embed all characters.

And that’s how you embed fonts in your presentation.

Sections are a new feature of Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and can help to organize slides, especially for presentations with a large amount of slides. Take a look at the screencast below to learn how to use sections in PowerPoint 2010.

iStockphoto recently announced the release of an add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 or higher (and also one for MS Word). Today we will take a quick look at how this add-in works in Microsoft PowerPoint 2010.

The first thing you must do is to go to iStockphoto and download the add-in. Follow the steps to install the add-in. You must have an iStockphoto account and some credits so you can buy images to really get any use out of the add-in. The add-in allows you to browse and purchase images from iStockphoto directly in PowerPoint.

So lets jump right in. I have already installed the add-in so we won’t go through the installation here.

The first thing you will see after having installed the add-in is a new tab in PowerPoint; iStockphoto.

If you select this tab you will see the iStockphoto ribbon and the different options you have. Most of them are pretty self-explanatory but here is a short description of each.

• Search: Click on this to search for images.
• Registration: Click here if you do not already have an iStockphoto account to sign up. You will be taken to the iStockphoto website where you can sign up.
• About: Will give you a window in the sidebar with some information and instructions about the iStockphoto add-in.
• Contact Us: You will be taken to the iStockphoto website contact section.
• Login: Click here to log in to your iStockphoto account
• Buy Credits: Click here to buy more iStockphoto credits. You will be taken to the iStockphoto website where you can purchase credits.
• Help: This will take you to the iStockphoto add-in website help section.

The above description refers to the ribbon when you are not logged in. You need to be logged in to purchase photos. When you click the log-in button you get a pop-up window for entering your iStockphoto username/member name and password.

After you log in, the ribbon changes slightly to reflect your logged in status. You now have access to some account information and a Logout button.

To find images, click on search in the ribbon. A search sidebar opens up.

Type a keyword into the search box and click search or press enter. Wait for the results to show up. You must be connected to the internet for the add-in to work. A list of search results appear in the sidebar.

If you hover over the image, a larger version appears or pops-up, just like on iStockphoto.com.

In the search result you get some information about the image and a button to download it.

When you find your desired image, click on the Download button to buy/download the image. A window will pop-up with options about file size and license type. Choose the desired file size and license type and click Download.

After clicking Download another window pops up with the standard iStockphoto license agreement that you need to accept to download the image.

Click on the Accept Agreement & Start Download button and a window will pop-up asking you where you want to save the image.

The image will not automatically show up or be placed on your slide. You will have to import the image from the location you just saved it in to use it in your slides using your preferred method (for example Insert Tab > Picture).

The iStockphoto add-in is a pretty neat addition to PowerPoint as it allows you to see the images right there in PowerPoint. This allows you to get a sense of whether or not the image will work with your style, your other images and fit into your presentation. It also appears that the default search is for images that have the aspect ratio that would fit slides. There is however an advanced search you can use if you want more options and be more specific in your search, just like on the iStockphoto.com website.

So go on over to iStockphoto.com and download the add-in.

When placing elements on a slide it is important to think about what elements you want the audience to notice first, second and so on. One way to achieve this is to add contrast to the elements to really emphasize your message or you point so your audience can immediately get it.

Many times we create contrast unintentionally and according to the law of informative change, people expect changes in properties to carry information. This basically means that any stylistic difference between two elements carry some sort of information. So unintentional contrast can confuse or contradict the intended message. Any stylistic choice has the potential to suggest importance, urgency and value. So it is important to have a purpose for any and all stylistic changes/choices you make in your slides.

Below are several examples of how one can create contrast between elements on a slide. Choosing which one to use depends on your message and what you are trying to emphasize.

Sources: Slideology, Presentation Zen Design