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 from the fill color, line color or font color dropdown.

Move your mouse to the color you want to use, then click the mouse to pick the color. Pause for a second before clicking and the RGB values will appear in a tooltip.

To choose a color outside the slide workspace, click the eyedropper tool, then press and hold the left mouse button while you drag the mouse to the color. (It helps if you arrange the PowerPoint window and the other window side by side.) Release the mouse to choose the color and apply it to the selected object.

Insert your picture onto your slide. (Insert | Picture) Select the picture. On the Picture Tools Format tab, click the bottom of the Crop button and choose Aspect Ratio, 1:1. This crops your image to a perfect square.

Now change the perfect square to a perfect circle by clicking the bottom of the Crop button again. This time use Crop to Shape and choose the oval shape. Because the aspect ratio is 1:1, the oval is actually a circle.

Voila!

Sneaky little Cropping refinements:

If the image isn’t positioned correctly, you can easily move it inside the circle shape – or within any crop, for that matter. Click the top of the Crop button to activate crop mode, then just drag the picture around within the frame. If the edge of your picture is right at the edge of the crop frame like it is in this example, press Shift while you drag. This keeps the picture from becoming mis-positioned within the frame, leaving you with blank pixels near an edge.

If you want to resize the picture within the frame, activate cropping mode and drag the corner of the picture to resize it. Make sure you grab the white circle at a corner of the picture and not the black crop handles, which control the cropped frame itself. Also, even though you’re dragging a corner, be sure to press Shift when resizing a picture so you don’t distort the image.

(Big thank you to Julie Terberg (terbergdesign.com) for letting me use her polar bear picture.)

Slide review was slated to start at 2:00 pm. Rhonda and I knew it would run long, and when it didn’t start on time we were even more panicked. Luckily we’d decided on a game plan earlier that day: we’d upload the PowerPoint file to my SkyDrive account and take advantage of the simultaneous editing capability it enables.

So that’s what we did. I opened the file in SkyDrive, which initially opens it in the PowerPoint Web App. Then I chose Edit in Microsoft PowerPoint so I could take advantage of the superior editing capability of PowerPoint on my computer.

Rhonda did the same on her computer, so we both had the same file open in PowerPoint 2010, each on our own laptop. Mine was also hooked up to the conference room projector and I drove the slide review, making changes on the fly so the presenters could see the content changes they requested. Rhonda cleaned up behind me, performing more extensive formatting as needed. We synchronized at regular intervals.

Slide review ended around 10:30 pm. Working simultaneously on the file via SkyDrive, we were able to finish our work and prep the presentation for print with two hours to spare! Yes, it was 2:00 am when we finished. But we did finish, and to be completely honest, I’m not sure we would have met that deadline if we’d worked in a more traditional manner.

What we learned

We did figure out some best practices.

The first is, save often. Saving is how you synchronize changes made on the individual systems to the master file on SkyDrive. After you synch, the changes show up on the individual systems. The more changes you’ve both made, the longer it takes to synch the file. If you’ve got a bunch of presenters waiting for you to show them their next slide, you don’t want to have to sit there and wait for the thing to save. So hit that Ctrl+S combo frequently.

The second is also save often. This lessens the chance that you’ll have conflicting changes to resolve. Hassling with those while an audience looks on is kind of a pain, but it’s a necessary pain. (Luckily our presenting colleagues were very patient with us because they knew we were pulling a rabbit for them. Not everyone will be as understanding.) For example, we had some hidden slides in the back that Rhonda had gone ahead and formatted. When the speakers determined they definitely didn’t want one of them, I deleted that slide. PowerPoint wasn’t sure whether we wanted to format the slide or remove it altogether, so this was marked as a conflict, prompting us to review those specific changes and make a decision. Saving often seems to minimize these types of conflicts. (Communication helps, too, of course.)

The third is, take turns when you save. PowerPoint and SkyDrive seemed to be more responsive when one of us would save and then the other, rather than both of us saving at the same time.

The fourth is, use a wired connection. This speeds up saving and synching and is generally more reliable than a wireless connection.

The fifth is, be prepared. We pulled this off pretty much on the fly, but if you plan to build simultaneous editing into your workflow, my advice is exactly that – plan ahead. Make sure everyone who will access the PowerPoint file has a Windows Live ID, knows its password, and has logged in and accessed SkyDrive ahead of time. Make sure they know how to open the file in the PowerPoint Web App and choose Edit in PowerPoint. If you can, upload a test file and have everyone make a few practice edits and save to synch. Intentionally create some conflicting changes and practice resolving them so you’re not caught flat-footed in front of an audience.

It’s not quite as simple in PowerPoint 2013, but it’s not difficult, either. You still have the same two requirements as always: it must be in the right place, and it must have the right name. Here’s what you do.

First turn on Hidden Folders in Windows.

To do so in Windows 7, open a folder and click Organize | Folder and Search Options.

On the View tab, click Show hidden files, folders and drives.

To do so in Windows 8, open a folder (on the desktop – if you don’t have one, make one by right-clicking on the desktop and choosing New | Folder),

Click the View tab at the top of the folder.

Check Hidden Items

Once hidden folders are showing, do the following to set your default template:

1. Open the presentation or template that you want to use for your default template.

2. Choose File | Save As | Computer | Browse

3. At the bottom of the dialog box, choose PowerPoint Template (*.potx) in the Save as Type dropdown menu.

4. PowerPoint no longer takes you to the correct folder when you choose POTX as the file type. So navigate to C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates. This fulfills the “right place” requirement.

5. Name the file Blank (or Blank.potx). This fulfills the “right name” requirement.

6. Click Save.

Test by going to File | New or by re-starting PowerPoint. Your default template will be the first file listed on the start screen, where it will be labeled Default Theme – but it’s actually a default template, complete with any sample content slides you included.

Note: PowerPoint also lets you set a default theme, but you can only have one or the other. If you’ve already set a default theme, then your default template won’t appear as described above. Biggest difference between a theme and a template? A template has sample slides. A theme doesn’t. (Well, there are other differences, but that’s the most important one in this situation.)

If you want to set a default theme, go to the Design tab, right-click the theme you want, and choose Set as Default Theme.

If you think about it, this actually makes a lot of sense. If your typical slide is 10” wide by 7.5” tall (4×3 dimension), then making it a little wider –13.33” wide by 7.5” tall means that content copied over from old 4×3 slides will easily fit onto the new 16×9 slides. Before, when the 16×9 dimension was 10” x 5.63”, everything had to be resized after it was copied in.

Note that I’m not talking about copying *slides* from a 4×3 deck to a 16×9 deck. Doing that will distort your content (circles become ovals, people in pictures get fat, etc.), and that’s a subject for another post. I’m talking about what happens if you copy a shape or diagram or picture from a 4×3 slide and paste it onto a 16×9 slide.

Maybe this series of visuals will help.

Here’s an example of the new wide-screen size in PowerPoint 2013. It’s 13.33” wide by 7.5” tall.

The next picture shows the new slide size relative to the typical 4×3 aspect ratio slides (10” x 7.5”).  See how the new 16×9 dimension is really just a bit wider than the typical 4×3 slides?

Now check out how the old 16×9 dimension compares to these.

See how much smaller it is? So, after you paste something from a 10” x 7.5” slide onto a 10” x 5.63” slide, you have to make the object smaller, otherwise it falls off the bottom edge of the slide. That no longer happens with the new 13.33” x 7.5” size.

Make sense?

One thing to be aware of: this new widescreen size is longer than the standard 11×8.5 paper that’s in our printers, so the end will often be cut off when you print. To prevent this, in the Print dialog choose “Scale to Fit Paper” under the options for what type of page to print (full page slides, handouts, etc.). This option is turned on by default in PowerPoint 2013, but it’s not in 2010 and prior.

One of the chapters I did covers editing PowerPoint’s XML. I swear, that was the hardest chapter for me to write – in fact, I think I completely redid it at least three times! And of course, as so often happens, some of the information is already out of date.

In this case it’s the information about XML editors. In the book I recommended using Visual Studio LightSwitch to edit PowerPoint’s XML because it’s free and because it supports an add-in (Open XML Package Editor ) that lets you access PowerPoint’s XML guts without going through the trouble of manually unzipping and re-zipping the file. Since the book’s publication, Microsoft has discontinued Visual Studio LightSwitch and has released Visual Studio 2012. VS 2012 does NOT support add-ins, so if you’re using it and trying to follow my instructions to access PowerPoint’s XML, well…it won’t work.

Visual Studio Express is available, but unfortunately it also doesn’t support add-ins, so it won’t work either. So what’s a fledgling XML geek to do?

I recommend that you grab 7-Zip and set it up to use Visual Studio Express (2012 or 2010, it doesn’t matter) as its XML editor. Both are free. Install both, then use the following steps to set yourself up for easy XML editing.

1. Open 7-Zip and choose Tools | Options

2. Click the Editor tab, then the … (Browse) button to navigate to the veexpress.exe file. For reference, mine’s in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\vbexpress.exe. Your path might be slightly different depending on your version of Windows and the edition of Visual Studio you installed.

3. Select the PPTX or POTX (or other Office file) you want to edit and choose File | Open Inside.

4. Now you’re inside the file and you can view the guts just as described in the XML editing chapter of the book.

5. Navigate to and select the XML file you wish to edit and choose File | Edit. This will open the XML file in Visual Studio for you to edit as described in the book.

6. When you close the XML file after editing, you’ll be prompted to save the file (in Visual Studio) and update the file in the archive (7-Zip). No need to use Windows Explorer to unzip the file and put it all back together again Humpty-Dumpty style, yay!

Start UI. PowerPoint 2013 gives you a whole new experience from the get-go. Choose from a bunch of new templates and variants and see previews of a few slide layouts before you begin your presentation.

16×9. This is the new default slide aspect ratio. (The old one was 4×3.) Don’t worry, you can still set your default template to 4×3 if you want.

13.33″ x 7.5″. This is the new default slide size. (The old 4×3 was 10″ x 7.5″, and the old 16×9 was 10″ x 5.76″.) Personally, I think this is a very good thing.

Before I forget, Scale to Fit Paper is now ON by default in the File | Print dialog. I’m sure this is directly related to the 13.33×7.5 slide size feature above. (So the whole 16×9 slide will print on the page.)

Slide Size tool. There’s a new tool on the Design tab to help you switch your slides from 4×3 to 16×9 and back without completely wrecking all your content. Yay!

Variants and SuperThemes. We now have variations of a theme that are built-in. Most variants are very similar to the “base” theme, with changes to the color or font set. Themes that include variants are called SuperThemes.

Format panes. Instead of having a Format dialog, we now have a Format pane that is docked to the right side of the work space.

Insert Online Pictures. The Office programs now distinguish between inserting pictures from your hard drive and inserting them from online. Similar settings exist for Video and Audio.

Logging in. Log into your Microsoft.com account, and you’ll see more content and have more options. For example, if I’ve logged onto my MSFT account, my SkyDrive will show up (along with office.com, Flickr and Bing image search) when I click Insert Online Pictures.

Saving. When you save, online locations such as SharePoint team sites and Skydrive are in the forefront. Don’t forget to click Computer before browsing to a location if you’re saving to your hard drive!

Present Online. This is really the equivalent of Broadcast Slide Show, but the presenter has the option of letting people download the presentation as well (or not). Be aware — if you allow the audience to download, then they’ll also have the ability to navigate through the broadcast presentation at their own pace while you’re presenting.

Save as Video. By default this now creates an MPEG-4 Video. WMV (Windows Media Video) is still an option.

New Slide button. They finally added this to the Insert tab! (Only took three versions, sheesh. Unfortunately it’s still in the wrong place — it should be on the other side of the Images group, but nobody listens to me!) Don’t worry, it’s still on the Home tab also.

Popup menu in Slide Show View. The buttons that show in the lower left corner during slide show view have been tweaked for a better touch experience. They’re not as subtle as they could be, but they’re not as bad as they could be, either.

See All Slides. When in a slide show, we now have a view that looks kind of like Slide Sorter View. (There’s no longer a Go to Slide menu with an option to navigate by slide title, though.)

Presenter View. This is all kinds of new and all kinds of cool. And if you only have one monitor, use Alt+F5 to see and practice with Presenter View!

Page Curl transition. Yes, you heard (read) me right — we finally have a page turn transition! It’s actually called Peel Off, but what’s in a name? Actually, we have quite a few new transitions, including Page Curl, Curtains, and Fracture (among others). Also, while we’re on the subject of transitions, the bounce has been removed from the end of the Pan transition.

Play From. The animation pane now lets you play from the selected animation.

Motion Path End. A ghosted object now shows up to show you the end position of a motion path. Very, very helpful!

Animation Zombies. Some of the old animations (Stretch and Collapse, for example) are baaaaack!

Threaded Comments. Comments have been enhanced with a Comments Pane that shows the comments thread and avatars for those commenting.

Enhanced Smart Guides. Those whisker things that showed up in PowerPoint 2010 to help you align and position objects on a slide? Well, they got even better in 2013 because now they also help with distribution.

Enhanced Guides. We now have the equivalent of lockable, colorable guidelines, people! Wahooo! Put one set of guides on your slide master (to indicate margins, for example). Add others to any layouts that might require different guides. And add even more to the regular slides as you’ve always done. When you’re in Normal (editing) View, only the guides on the slides will be selectable — otherwise you’ll need to go to Master View to move them. Oh, and did I mention that you can recolor all of these? Just right-click a guide…

Color Picker. We now have eyedroppers to pick up and apply fill, outline and font colors. All together now: Thank you, PowerPoint Team!

Merge Shapes. These tools, which are similar to the Pathfinder tools in Illustrator, are now on the Ribbon (on the Drawing Tools Format tab). The group is called Merge Shapes instead of Combine Shapes. There is also a new tool, Fragment, to complement the other four.

Semantic Zoom. We can zoom and pan in Slide Show View now.

Charts. Charting is a lot better in many ways and a lot worse in others. Now a small Excel datasheet opens above the chart instead of Excel opening and taking up half your screeen. The interface is vastly improved. They added a combo chart to the types of charts (yay!). They added new chart styles (good) but removed the 2007/2010 chart styles (bad). They made the default chart font size 12 points (good or bad, depending if you like it or not) and the default chart font color a tint/shade of Dark 1/Light 1 (horrible if Dark 1/Light 1 is anything besides black or white).

PowerPoint Web App. This has lots of new features. We can now add, edit and format shapes, apply a new theme, and use animations and transitions. We also have audio and video playback in both Reading and Slide Show views. It still supports co-authoring, but now it supports co-authoring with regular ol’ PowerPoint, too. And if you embed your presentation into a web page or blog, it’s no longer just static pictures — it’s actually like a regular presentation with animations, transitions, audio and video. (Old embedded presentations will automatically update to behave this way, too.)

Default Office Theme is a bit different. The colors are different and the default effects set is way more subtle.

SmartArt graphics. We got some new SmartArt diagrams.

Backstage. Along with the overall interface overhaul to a newer, flatter look, Backstage has been reorganized once again.

WHAT’S MISSING (WELL, KIND OF…)

Save as HTML. Gone. Done. Kaput. It’s not in the interface, and it’s not accessible with VBA either.

Insert ClipArt. This has been replaced with Insert Online Pictures. No clipart or picture collections are installed with Office 2013.

Not missing, just moved. Theme Colors, Fonts and Effects dialog are no longer on the Design tab, but they are available in Slide Master View. Background Styles are available in Slide Master View.

Broadcast Slide Show. This isn’t really gone — it’s just morphed into Present Online.

Outline pane. Again, this isn’t actually gone, it just doesn’t show up any more next to the Slides pane in Normal (editing) View. Go to the View tab to turn the Outline pane on and off.

Combine Shapes. For those of you who used these, they’re not gone. They’ve been promoted to the Drawing Tools Format tab of the Ribbon and are now called Merge Shapes.

In Slide Show View, there’s no longer a Go to Slide menu with an option to navigate by slide title. Instead, we have the new See All Slides view, which looks similar to Slide Sorter view.

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 finally here.)

Color picker! (Again, folks have been asking for this one forever. Find the eyedropper on any of the color galleries – shape, outline or text – and be sure to press and hold the left mouse button to select a color off of the slide or outside of PowerPoint.)

16×9 default slide size. Surprisingly, I haven’t seen many people commenting on this one. I thought it would get a lot more buzz. It’s a good move, but it’s going to be painful for awhile. Luckily the PPT team included a slide resizer to help folks manage this transition. (If you need a more robust slide resizer, check Resize or Aspects).

Guides. Omigosh, we have way more guidelines! Guides on the slide master, guides on the layouts, guides on the slides. And they’re color-able!

Smarter SmartGuides. Not only do the whiskers kick in to help you align objects as you drag them around on the slide, but now they also define equal spacing between objects. So, so helpful.

Theme variants. These are cool – an easy way to add variations to your template or theme and make it easy for users to select. Can’t wait to create some of these super-themes!

There are a bunch more. If you want to check it out for yourself, you can learn more about (and download) the preview here:  http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en

Here’s my obligatory warning: Don’t use the preview for anything mission-critical, and be sure to read the EULA and/or pre-release terms. Here are a couple of important parts:

17.2  TERMINATION.  Microsoft may suspend or cancel the Services, or terminate this agreement at any time for any reason. Upon cancellation, suspension or termination, Customer’s right to use the Services stops immediately.  There is no guarantee that Data and applications will be retrievable.   Customer understands and agrees that it will not use the Service for anything that is mission critical to its business operations and will only use Data that Customer has backed up.   Customer may stop using and accessing the Services at any time without further obligation, whether or not it deletes or extracts its Data.

27.4  TIME-SENSITIVE SOFTWARE.  The term of this agreement is until June 30, 2013, or commercial release of the software, whichever is first. The software will stop running on June 30, 2013. You will not receive any other notice. You may not be able to access data used with the software when it stops running.

Enjoy!

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 theme doesn’t. Oh, and a theme can be applied to any Office file (Word files, Excel files and PowerPoint files), but a template is for a specific program (Word, Excel OR PowerPoint).

As you can see in the diagram, a theme includes colors, fonts, effects and the slide master. Every template is based on a theme, so a template also includes colors, fonts, effects and the slide master – and you can add dummy data (sample slides) to a template.

So, if you have a THMX, you can use it to apply or change a slide design. If you have a POTX with or without dummy data, you can also use it to apply or change a slide design. For that matter, if you have a PPTX you can use it to apply or change a slide design, too.

Applying a theme or template

There are a number of different ways to apply a theme or template to change your slide design. How you do it depends on what you’ve got to work with.

Apply a theme (or template) from the Ribbon

1. Open your presentation.
2. On the Design tab of the Ribbon, click the More button to expand the theme gallery
   
3. Click a theme to apply it to all slides OR right-click a theme and choose Apply to Selected Slides
   
   
4. If your theme or template does not appear on the Ribbon, choose Browse for Themes at the bottom of the themes gallery and navigate to your theme (THMX), template (POTX), or PowerPoint file (PPTX, PPSX, etc.).
   

Note: When you apply them from the Themes Gallery, templates (POTX) and PowerPoint files (PPTX, etc.) behave like themes – no dummy content is included.

Copy and apply a design (theme or template) from another slide or presentation

1. Open both files – the presentation you’re working on (target presentation) and the one you want to copy the formatting from (existing presentation)
2. On the View tab, click Arrange All to position the two decks side-by-side
3. Select a thumbnail in the existing presentation and double-click the Format Painter on the Home tab
4. Click the window of the target presentation to activate that deck, then click on any slide thumbnails you want to apply the formatting to
5. When you’re finished, click back on the existing presentation window to activate it and press ESC on your keyboard to exit the Format Painter
   

If you want your theme or template to show up in the Themes Gallery on the Design tab so you can use the first method to apply it, save it here: C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes

If you’d like to learn more about PowerPoint templates and Office themes, check Stephanie Krieger’s blog post. If you need the real nitty gritty, check out my book!

 

]]> http://echosvoice.com/choose-a-slide-design-for-your-presentation/feed/ 1 http://echosvoice.com/activating-an-excel-workbook-during-a-presentation/ http://echosvoice.com/activating-an-excel-workbook-during-a-presentation/#comments Mon, 25 Jun 2012 14:07:20 +0000 Echo Swinford http://echosvoice.com/?p=369 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 way to do this is to use an OLE Action animation to activate the workbook on top of the presentation. Here’s how to do it.

Insert the Workbook
The workbook can be embedded or linked – it doesn’t really matter. If you’re linking, it’s generally better to keep the Excel file in the same folder as the PPT file, and of course you must have the Excel file available when you present.
To insert the workbook, do the following:

1. Choose Insert | Object.
2. In the dialog box, choose Create from File and click Browse to navigate to the workbook.
   
3. Tick the Link box if you wish to link to the file as opposed to embedding it. Click the Display as icon box if you want.

(This process and dialog box is the same in all versions of PowerPoint.)

Apply the Animation
In PowerPoint 2010, do this:

1. Select the worksheet or Excel icon on the slide
2. On the Animations tab, click the More button to expand the animations gallery
   
3. At the very bottom of the gallery, choose OLE Action Verbs, then choose Open

In PowerPoint 2007, do this:

1. Select the worksheet or Excel icon on the slide
2. On the Animations tab, click the Custom Animation button to open the Custom Animation pane
3. In the Custom Animation pane, click Add Effect | Object Actions | Open

In PowerPoint 2003, do this:

1. Select the worksheet or Excel icon on the slide
2. Right-click and choose Custom Animation
3. In the Custom Animation pane, click Add Effect | Object Actions | Open

Set up a Trigger Animation
You can skip this step if you want. If you do skip it, then the Excel workbook animation will work like most other animations – it will start when you click the mouse. That means the Excel workbook will open when you click the mouse.
Creating a trigger animation means you must click on the spreadsheet to activate it. A random mouse click – that is, one that doesn’t click on the spreadsheet – will simply advance the slide as usual.

In PowerPoint 2010:

1. On the Animations tab, click Trigger | On Click of | <the Excel Object>



In PowerPoint 2007 and 2003:

1. Right-click the Object Animation in the Custom Animation pane and choose Timing
2. On the Timing tab of the OLE Action dialog, click the Triggers button
3. Choose Start Effect on Click of |<the Excel Object>

Test
Be sure to test the animation. Run your presentation and then move your mouse over the spreadsheet or Excel icon. If you set up the trigger animation, your mouse should turn into a hand when it’s ready to activate the Excel file. Click, and the workbook should open so you can add data, explore the pivot table, whatever.

 

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