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One of the best-kept secrets of PowerPoint is the selection pane, that allows you to remove overlapping objects from a slide temporarily to make it easier to edit layers. Details here in a previous post.
PowerPoint makes it possible to morph text in a circle, read the details here in this earlier post.
Over the next few weeks I will be spending more time with my family, and less online (similar to what I guess many of my readers will do). Posting frequency will drop, and I will be re-posting some earlier post that I think could be useful for readers that have only joined this community recently.
These little annoyances in presentation design, the word “management” is one of them. You need it very often, it is relatively long, and it does not look good/readable when hyphenated. How many slides got a 2nd best design because of this word…
Painters first make a sketch before starting the final painting. Presentation designers should do the same. I have a big pile of old print outs that is my unlimited source of scrap paper. An important slide can take 5-10 page-filling rough sketches before turning to the PowerPoint editing screen.
I always carry one of these beautiful notebooks (affiliate link) with me to capture an idea that pops up in my head. Yes, a notebook and not an application such as Evernote on my iPhone because the idea is most of the time a sketch or a scribble. Hard to do in digital format.
The end of my most productive/creative days are always marked with a full paper trash can next to my desk.
The painting is Gauguin’s night cafe, info about him and Van Gogh painting at this location here and here.
A column chart with just one lone column is not a column chart. Column chart need to compare things, show a trend over time.
The site number quotes is a tool with a healthy dose of humor: it helps you “dramatize” a number, simply enter it and the site returns a long list of quotes. Maybe the exact quote is not what you can use in a “serious” presentation, but it might just open up a part of your creative brain that you did not yet access. Thank you Steven Duncan.
This vintage-style ad found on Ads of the World can easily be replicated in PowerPoint. A white box, semi-transparent with a bit of soft edges and a nice font against an image of a brick wall and you’re done.
PowerPoint files can still contain information that you thought was long gone. Watch out with this, especially when sharing files with outsiders via email, or on content sharing platforms such as SlideShare.
The easy solution is to convert PowerPoint files to PDF. If you want to stick to the PowerPoint format, here are some things to watch out for:
P.S. Image tags can be an unwanted piece of information in PDFs, here is how to get rid of them.
Making similar boxes the exact same size, and exactly aligned matters a lot in slide design. The brain gets distracted when object alignments is just a bit off.
Usually the slide starts out OK, ctrl-C/ctrl-V a bunch of objects and they are all exactly identical. Over time, things start to degrade. Accidentally resizing things a bit, moving a box a bit, etc.
You need to train your eye to spot the imperfections. The quickest fix is usually to select a group of objects, select “format” and then give them all the same size in centimeters (hight, width, both). In the Arrange / Align menu you will tools to spread objects out evenly.
Little effort, big result.