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The most common way to turn your rectangular picture into a perfect circle is to create a circle shape and fill it with an image. I came up with a quicker method earlier this week. How did I not discover this before?! This method works in PowerPoint 2010 and 2013. Insert your picture onto your slide. (Insert | Picture) Select the picture. On the Picture Tools Format tab, click the bottom of the Read More
I spent part of last week onsite at a client’s office helping the in-house presentation specialist (let’s call her Rhonda) with a huge pitch deck. As so often happens, the content wasn’t quite finished, so the slides were still in flux and a 4:00 am print deadline loomed. (Yes, I said AM.) Slide review was slated to Read More
In previous versions of PowerPoint, you could save a default template so that when you started PowerPoint or a new, blank presentation, you’d get the template of your choice rather than the default (blank white) Office template. This can be very helpful if you are required to use a corporate template, for example. (Here are Read More
I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about these new slide sizes folks are starting to see. PowerPoint 2013 uses a 16x9 dimension as its default, but it’s not the old 10” x 5.63” size we’re used to. Why does PowerPoint 2013 use 13.33” x 7.5” as its default size? If you think about it, Read More
My latest book, Building PowerPoint Templates: Step by Step with the Experts, was released last October. (Get it here or here.) Co-author Julie Terberg and I spent the better part of a year working on it, and it’s exciting to see all our hard work finally come to fruition. One of the chapters I did covers Read More
Well, now that PowerPoint 2013 has released to manufacturing, it's time to publish my big list of new features. This is my list of new stuff in PowerPoint 2013, definitely not the same list Microsoft marketing publishes. So here we go... Start UI. PowerPoint 2013 gives you a whole new experience from the get-go. Choose from Read More
Microsoft released a preview version of Office 2013 last week. In addition to the interface Metro-ization and Cloud cover that all the applications got, PowerPoint also has some very cool new PowerPoint-only features. Here are some of my favorites: Page turn transition! (Users have been asking for this one for a long time. Glad to see it’s Read More
Lately I’ve been seeing lots of questions around the web asking how to change a presentation’s template. Or is it a theme? Or maybe it’s a slide master? There seems to be a lot of confusion around this. The truth is, it doesn’t really matter if you apply a template or a theme – they’re pretty Read More
Clients and others occasionally ask how to open an Excel file by clicking on it from within a presentation. Of course, they can always open the Excel file in the background and use Alt+Tab to switch to it. Or they can add a hyperlink to the Excel file and click the link when they’re in Read More
All-round excellence
Echo did outstanding work on our latest presentation.
Steve Hards
November 16, 2012
PowerPoint Guru
When my clients have challenging needs for their PowerPoint templates and presentation projects, I can always count on Echo Swinford to deliver perfect results. Her knowledge of the program is beyond compare and she is gifted with the ability to explain difficult concepts so we can all understand. She cares about PowerPoint users and is always considering their experience with the templates that she builds. I’m grateful for her talents!
Echo's revision of my recent PowerPoint project
I love working with PowerPoint, and my homemade presentations always looked fine for my locatl talks. But recently I had to present at a national meeting, and I thought I would see how Echo could improve the presentation. The result was like night and day. The fee was very reasonable, considering I got a beautiful and professional presentation, general advice about powerpoint, and a template I can use for future talks. The service is highly recommended!
John M. Clarke, M.D.
March 19, 2013
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(c) 2012 Echosvoice
