PowerPoint 2013 introduced a color picker to the interface (finally!), but I keep reading and hearing that you can’t choose colors outside your current slide – for example, that you can’t choose a color from a website. This is absolutely. not. true. You can use PowerPoint’s color picker to choose colors anywhere on your screen. To use the color picker in PowerPoint, select the object you want to color, then choose the eyedropper 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 instructions to save a default template in PowerPoint 2010 and prior.) It’s not quite as simple 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, this actually makes a lot of sense. If your typical slide is 10” wide by 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 editing PowerPoint’s XML. I swear, that was the hardest chapter for me to write – 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 much the same thing. The only real difference is a template contains content and a 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 slide show view. These will both work but they’re not always perfectly seamless, so my favorite 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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