I find it useful when creating a presentation that has a custom colour palette to create a custom layout like the one below:
Colour Palette Assignment Slide Layout – accessible via Master view, or by selecting the layout
You’ll note that the RGB values for the colours are listed, and this is because prior to PowerPoint 2013, the eyedropper tool was not available. I also find it tremendously helpful to note what I use each colour for, so that when I open this file in a couple of years from now there will be a little less detective work.
This post is originally from 2018 If you want help with the newest and classic features in PowerPoint drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
I’ve been showing you how to use PowerPoint to quickly create stencil and lace effects. Now, let’s look at creating duotone photos. In addition to making a photo look very modern, duotone is a useful technique for using less than stellar photos.
Cat in the Kitchen
While the cat might be photogenic, the background is not. I want to move from the photo above to the duotone below, which is suitable for adding a quote.
So true
The first step is to crop the picture as closely as possible.
Just the handsome face here – no clutter
But unfortunately, once enlarged you see the photo is a little blurry. This won’t be a problem going forward and it shows how this technique can cope with less than perfect photos.
Going to Picture Corrections: Brightnesswas set to 65% Contrastto 100%
Picture Color: Saturationwas set to zero.
The Adjusted Photo
There is a bit of guesswork here, as I had to bring up Brightness enough to wash out the dark corner of the chair the cat is on, yet leave as much detail as possible. You’ll note that this brings out a lot of light spots on the pupils as well.
Why not just Recolorthe picture to Black and White? In this case, I felt that recoloring removed too much detail from the photo. In the case of a different photo, recoloring might be the quickest and easiest method. I’d definitely try it first and see if I liked the results.
I’ve drawn a rectangle and filled it with a bright colour for contrast, this has been placed under the photo.
Now I can make the white portion of the photo transparent, by selecting Picture Tools>Format>Color>Set Transparent Color and clicking on a white portion of the picture.
The black portion of the photo remains.
What’s also hard to see in the above picture is that the photo has a lot of small grey artifacts in the borders of the fur. This is exactly what we added in when making the lace picture earlier, but here it is unwanted. An additional step is required for this photo (again for some photos it might be unnecessary).
But before I do that – I’m going to use the Ink command and touch up the pupils to remove some of the glints. Ink is only available in Office 365.
Showing Glint repair using ink tool.
After filling in the glints on the pupils, I grouped the ink layer with the photo. Then I copied and pasted the photo (and ink layer) as a picture. PowerPoint remembers all the photo editing done to a picture (which is why the Reset command works) and applies those steps cumulatively. I want to start fresh and apply the Recolor command to strip out the grey artifacts without losing a lot of detail. After recoloring the photo to 25% Black and White I set the White color to transparent
The same photo, but now with a crisper look
Again, I grouped the photo with bright background rectangle, pasted it as a picture and this time set the black portion as transparent. This is similar to the photo stencil.
Photo with transparent cat
In the final step, set a gradient fill in your chosen colour scheme to colour the duotone.
Setting the background of the slide to colour the duotone
The main elements of this technique are applicable to a number of photo effects. Try them out and see what you get!
This post is originally from 2018 If you want help with the newest and classic features in PowerPoint drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
In a previous post, I discussed making a Button Bar Chart. That whole process really inspired me to think about simplified charts for presentations.
Which got me thinking about Waffle Charts.
Note how the smallest group stands out
Waffle charts are excellent for looking at data sets where the smallest numbers are the important ones. You can use colour (as I have above) to make those numbers stand out.
But oddly, I don’t see people using a lot of waffle charts in their presentations. And there is no template for a waffle chart in Excel.
You can find some interesting ideas about building Excel waffle charts for dashboard purposes and I recommend this article to you: Interactive Waffle Charts in Excel
However, I was looking for something different. Something that wouldn’t have me counting and colouring cells manually (shudder).
Building the Waffle
I chose to build the waffle chart using a series of conditional formatting rules. The first step was creating the formula to count the cells of the waffle.
Counting the cells in a 100 grid waffle
In case the picture is a bit small, the formula used here is:
=(MOD(ROW()+8,10)*10)+(COLUMN()-2)+1
This uses the row and column position of the cell to count from 1 to 100 in a 10 by 10 grid.
I then built on that base formula with this monster formula:
The formula checks the position number of the cell generated by the base formula and sees if it is less than or equal to the number of values in each category in column A. It then returns the value of the category in each cell.
Because I wanted to put symbols in the cell like these examples.
Talking Heads waffle chartBombs waffle chart
I took that monster formula and made it into a named formula.
This made building the conditional formatting rules much easier to do(simply because the conditional formatting dialog is so cramped).
Lastly, I built a series of conditional formatting rules to change the background colour of the cell based on the value returned by the formula. For the waffles using symbols, the rule formats the colour of the font, instead of the background.
A couple of additional pointers
To create a perfect grid, switch the view in Excel to Page Layout View. Page Layout View uses the same measurement scale for both row height and column width. Set your measurements here.
For the symbol waffles, use the File> Options>Advanced> Display Options for this worksheetand turn off the display of gridlines. That way when you copy the waffle, the gridlines will be invisible.
This post is originally from 2018. If you want help with the newest and classic features in Excel & PowerPoint drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
Simple or complicated? It’s been my observation that anyone can make a subject sound complicated – but it takes real understanding of a topic to simplify it in a way that is meaningful.
This is why, when I saw this sample slide below from designer Julie Terberg, I sat up and paid attention. Here is a wonderful example of a chart that is simple in a beautiful and useful way. Immediately, you can see that an audience would find this chart easy to read and understand
Julie Terberg’s Button Bar Chart from her #SlideADayProject project
I paid even more attention when I saw the way that Neil Malek put together an Excel version of the chart. Neil introduces a clever technique using shapes in data labels.
Unfortunately, Neil’s clever technique was only available in Office 2016. I wanted to build the chart in Office 2010, for the benefit of my clients still using 2010.
Button Bar Chart Slide, in PowerPoint 2010
I think that in the end, I succeeded. If you are interested in building this chart, and like me you are restricted to Office 2010, then I have a few pointers for you.
Button Bar Chart Pointers
Data Labels in 2010 can not use shapes. Instead, I tweaked the Shadow setting for the label, by setting the colour to match the fill on the label and the size to 150%. I left all other settings to zero. Shaping the label this way means that you can never achieve the circle that Julie used in her example. Instead, the best you can do is a lozenge shape. You can modify this when you change the font size in the label.
But once you’ve used the Shadow to enlarge your button, you can’t use it to shadow the data label. I solved this problem with an old fashioned solution. I made two charts (a 2016 and a 2017 chart). The two charts are grouped together. Each chart has a data label for the year and a data label for the shadow. In the example below those labels are using the 1 values. The column labelled 2016 value is the length of the bar.
Button Bar Chart Data layout
The Shadow column must proceed the 2016 column or your shadow will wind up on top of the 2016 label. Also format your labels in that order as well, or the shadow will temporarily be on top of the 2016 label.
Format your shadow and label to the same font size.
The Chart Element selector on the Format Tab of the Chart Tools ribbon is your friend. Its’ really the only reasonable way to select the shadow data labels once they are under the visible label.
Link the label text to the cell in in Excel by using the formula bar and typing in the linking formula to the cell. This allows you to update the chart, by changing the text in the cell. A bit finicky to set up; but it will save a ton of time in the long run.
The best way to take this chart into PowerPoint is by copying/pasting the chart – as an image. Which means that you’ll need to presize the chart in Excel, so that text is not distorted by resizing once it is pasted into PowerPoint. Again, its a bit finicky – but worth it.
In PowerPoint, I created a layout, with text placeholders on the left and bottom of the slide.
Layout has text placeholders on left and bottom of slide
All in all, a pretty reasonable version of Julie’s stellar design.
If you want to follow Julie Terberg and Neil Malek on Twitter, you’ll find them here.
I’ve just been working on a PowerPoint template for a Jeopardy style game. I inherited this template, and as frequently happens a little cleanup is necessary to ensure the PowerPoint template works as desired.
To help you visualize the problem – a picture of the game board
The Game Board
Each square hyperlinks to a separate slide with the question (and answer).
I felt there were a number of improvements I could do to make the presentation easier to use and maintain. I won’t go into every change today, but a couple of changes involved hyperlinks
(shortcut key Ctrl + K, if you are editing 25 hyperlinks, then the reason for using a shortcut key becomes obvious).
The first maintenance problem I ran into was that the previous designer had applied the hyperlink to both the shape ANDthe text on the shape (now there are 50 hyperlinks – if you are counting).
Shape with text on top
They did this for a very good reason; that the text on a hyperlinked shape does not change state like normal hyperlink does (the state change shows if the link has been visited or not).
So if the slides the shapes are linked to are reordered or edited, the links have to be painstakingly tracked down and edited and since essentially the links are layered one on top of each other it is a real pain.
I had a better plan. Move the button shapes to the Slide Master (after creating a layout designed for the Game Board slide). Then insert text placeholders (yes, 25 of them) for the dollar values. Position the placeholders over each button. No hyperlinks here.
Now moving back to the Game Board slide in Normal View, I can hyperlink the text box. Text boxes behave differently from shapes, and do change state to show the link has been visited.
Another advantage of the text placeholder is that if the user inadvertently moves the text boxes, the Reset command will snap them back into position. (A definitely plus when editing 25 text boxes).
The other visual difficulty I had, was with the colours of the hyperlinks themselves. They didn’t have a strong contrast with my (new) button colour, and the visited colour was still (kinda) visible. I wanted a strong link colour and once visited I wanted the link to disappear. I could add animations, but why bother when I could solve both problems easily by changing the link colours in the Color Theme.
Theme Colour Panel PowerPoint 2016
Here is the theme colour panel after I adjusted the Hyperlink and Followed Hyperlink Colours.
The colours in the theme were picked after playing with the free https://coolors.co/ app I also got some good advice from this article. The image at the top of the article is the colour palette created by the Coolors.co app – translated into RGB. I usually add this information as a layout in the slide master.
This post is originally from 2018 If you want help with the newest and classic features in PowerPoint drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
Creating a mask effect in PowerPoint is easy, once you’ve located the Shape Combine command. You can add this command to the Ribbon or the Quick Access Toolbar.
Below, you see it being added to my toolbar.
Adding the Shape Combine Command to the Toolbar, alternately look for the Combine Shapes command as more options are available.The command will not be active until there are two shapes selected. Below, I’ve created a blue rectangle and a red oval. The oval shape will be cut out from the rectangle.
Blue rectangle with red oval positioned for the cut out. You may prefer to add the Combine Shapes command instead. More options are available as you can see below.
The result of the Shape Combine command, a rectangle with an oval “hole: in the center.
The result of the Combine Shapes CommandOnce the mask is created, you can dress it up. Below, I’ve changed the fill to an image of a leafy forest floor.
The forest floor has a hole in it. Now I can layer whatever image I wish (in this case a frog) under the mask. You can animate the layer underneath the mask. Can you image a wheel of creatures rotating into the viewpoint in the center of the mask? That would be great for a talk about ecology!
This post is originally from 2016. If you want help with the newest and classic features in PowerPoint drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
Frog image via Wikipedia
Normally, people save their PowerPoint presentations in the default format. However, once you are on the final version of you presentation consider using the PowerPoint Show format. Saving your PowerPoint presentation as a show is easy. Use the Save As command and use the Save As Type list to show all the possibilities. Select PowerPoint Show and save as normal.
PowerPoint 2010 Save as Dialog. Not many changes here.
The screen shot above is from PowerPoint 2010, but you should see a similar list in subsequent versions. The show will be saved in a different file format, using the .ppsx or .pps file extension.
The result is a change in behaviour when the file is opened. Double-click on the file and it will launch immediately into Slide Show view. Much slicker than starting the presentation, allowing the audience to view your notes, finding the slide show icon and starting the presentation. If you have a presentation that uses timed transitions and you are worried about the presentation running away on you, remove the timing from the first slide. Use a mouse click to advance to the rest of your timed slides once you are ready to start. I think you’ll find this a smoother way of launching your presentation.
If you need to edit your presentation, start PowerPoint and use it to open the show. You can edit the file as you would normally. If you wish to convert it back to a regular presentation, use the Save As command and save it in the normal file format.
I help people create dynamite presentations. Drop me an email at catharine@mytechgenie.ca and we can do amazing things!
This is a reissue of an article I originally posted on March 7, 2019 on the WebGenii Consulting website. I think it will continue to be relevant for some time to come.
Last weekend I attended the Southern Alberta Library Conference. I really enjoy this conference, the speakers are great and the topics really relevant to my volunteer work with the Redcliff Public Library. So what does this have to do with presentation mistakes? It was interesting to see the kind of presentation mistakes that speakers who are good at presenting make.
Mistake Number 1
Our old friend – too much text on the slide. Even good speakers do this, even though they shouldn’t. I suspect because they worry about leaving something out of their presentation.
All the text, nothing missing. (Dummy text courtesy the Bacon Ipsum generator)
Once again, I’d like to join my voice to all the presentation experts telling you NOT to put all your text on the slide. But, I know it will happen anyway, so what can we do to improve a slide like this?
Remove Bullets
Same slide – fewer bullets
If you are going to write full sentences with punctuation, then bullets are completely unnecessary. They take the viewer’s eye away from the content of the sentence. Save bullet points for sentence fragments, which is what they are designed for.
One Sentence Per Slide
Give each Sentence its’ own slide
Help the audience focus its’ attention by restricting yourself to one sentence per slide at a time.
Position Sentence Text
Control text wrapping to effectively position your message
There is no rule in PowerPoint (or any presentation software) that requires you to use the default text wrapping. Add line breaks to force text to wrap for greater readability and easier recall. Notice how the ham jumps out from the rest of the text, when it is forced onto its’ own line. Think about the part of the sentence you wish to emphasize and add line breaks accordingly. Also, if the sentence is on its’ own slide, there will be room to do this.
Mistake Number 2
Smart Art can cause problems of its’ own. In particular, the seductive way it shrinks text to fit into the graphic makes people forget to edit. (See mistake number 1)
Smart Art isn’t as smart as you think
Also, the default colour schemes means a lovely rainbow of colours. How is this a bad thing you ask? Well, inevitably you get a colour combination like point three in the graphic above. White text on a yellow background. That’s readable on a computer monitor, but when projected onto a screen it doesn’t have enough contrast.
The rainbow effect above, does something else as well. It wastes the potential usefulness of those colours. Colour is a great way of adding organization and hierarchy to a presentation. In the slide above, perhaps green refers to free-range meat, blue to fish, yellow to poultry, red to spicy foods, and I have no idea what pink would refer to. Because there is no organization being used here, just the random default applied by Smart Art.
Ignoring the organizational impact of colour, is like leaving money on the table.
Mistake Number 3
This last mistake is a little bit of mistake 1 AND mistake 2 combined, and it comes from using Smart Art process graphics like the one below:
Here is a process with multiple steps and a lot of text.
Every time, a process graphic like this leads to the speaker saying “I know this is hard to read, but”. Hmmm, yes it IS hard to read, but I can understand the desire to help people understand the flow of a process. So why not introduce your process in a series of slides like this:
Introduce your process in a series of slides.
In this sample slide I’ve taken the process and reduced to a smaller graphic in the top left corner. Here it will act as a map to show people where we are. I’ve toned down the colours of the steps that are not being talked about on this slide. I’ve left the bright blue alone, because we are talking about the blue step on this slide. I’ve cut out the blue step and enlarged it, so the text will be easier to read. It is easy to imagine each step in turn being featured on a separate slide and highlighted on the map.
Once again, thanks to everyone who spoke at the Southern Alberta Library Conference. I learn a lot about how to be a better library board member every time I attend. And, if you are a resident of Alberta; consider volunteering in your local library. It really is the best volunteer gig around. Such a positive environment that really makes a difference in the community!
I offer presentation design services and coaching. Feel free to send me an email.
My updated (November 2019) email address is: catharine@mytechgenie.ca
