Blog
You need this hotfix if you are working in PowerPoint 2010
Last night I was working on a client-provided file. I saved it from Outlook to my hard drive (not SkyDrive/OneDrive, not Dropbox, not a server drive -- this was actually on my computer). Then I opened it, deleted most of the slides, and did a Save As to rename the...
Extract Pictures, Video and Audio from Your Presentations in 3 Easy Steps
Every year at the Presentation Summit, it seems that all of us speakers randomly end up on a similar theme. It must be something in the air or water – or maybe it's a vibe the Help Center puts off – because it's completely unplanned. For example, one year we were all...
Picky, picky, picky about colors
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...
Crop Circles in PowerPoint
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....
My SkyDrive Leap of Faith
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...
How to Set a Default Template in PowerPoint 2013
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...
SIZE MATTERS
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...
A NEW BOOK! (and an update on XML editors)
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...
Big List of New Features in PowerPoint 2013
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...