Blog
No, PowerPoint did not ruin GM
I'm already tired of hearing how PowerPoint is at fault in GM's failure to act on defects in its cars. This is a slide. Conclusion: Don't blame the tools. It's not PowerPoint's fault. (Thanks for the inspiration, Ellen Finkelstein! "If you prefer stupidity, lies and...
4 best practices for powerpoint handouts with send to word
PowerPoint handouts leave a lot to be desired. You can print slide thumbnails 3 per page. You can even print notes pages – which have one slide per page plus its notes. But if you want to print multiple slide thumbnails per page and include the speaker notes, you’re...
Dock windows to speed your workflow
Turns out a lot of PowerPoint folks don't know this -- which has become one of my favorite Windows 7 tricks! Try this: Open two PowerPoint presentations. Press the Windows key and the left arrow key on your keyboard. The active window will resize itself to take up the...
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
TL;DR To create a default template, do the following. Make whatever changes you need to your template. Save it as Blank.POTX Copy Blank.POTX to C:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates In previous versions of PowerPoint, you could save a...