Author: Dave Paradi

1. PPT – Save Prep Time If there is one thing that I see more than anything else when reviewing PowerPoint presentations it is the failure to use the proper tools in setting up a master slide to make creating and editing the presentation easier. So many times I see each slide having the background,…

1. PPT – Hyperlinking Sometimes in a PowerPoint presentation you will want to run a file from another application. This may be a video or a file from an application like Excel or Word. PowerPoint does allow you to create hyperlinks from text or other objects, but to activate them, you usually need to move…

1. PPT – Template Searching It amazes me how popular it is to search for a pre-made PowerPoint template. In fact, searching for a template or background is second only to searching for the term PowerPoint! There is a whole industry now dedicated to creating and selling PowerPoint templates. This obsession with templates disturbs me…

1. PPT – Control Audio Playing When you insert an audio clip on a PowerPoint slide, it will ask you if you want the clip to play automatically or not. If you click YES, it will start playing the clip when the slide is first displayed. This may be exactly what you want. But in…

1. PPT – Easily Duplicate Object When you are drawing a diagram, do you spend a lot of time reformatting each object? I have found a way to save a bunch of time when creating similar objects. Let’s use a common example. I am drawing a process diagram that has 8 boxes, all should be…

1. PPT – Recolor Photos One of the tutorials on the Using Images video tutorial is on changing the coloring of a photo. I think that this is a largely unknown feature, so I thought I’d profile it today. It allows you to take any photo that you have inserted on a slide and change…

1. PPT – Excel screen shot If you have to show numeric data from Excel on PowerPoint slides, you will be interested in this tip. Many times we want to use a table of data from Excel on a slide. If you simply select the cells in Excel, copy the selection and paste it into…

1. Selecting hidden objects When drawing a diagram or using images, many times we layer items on top of each other for a number of reasons. You may have two photographs placed on top of each other, one of a young person and one of how they look today. The animation is set to display…

1. PPT – Media file names I recently ran into a problem on a consulting assignment that I think serves as a good lesson for anyone using audio or video files in PowerPoint presentations. The client had a video clip that had been converted to the Windows Media video format (which is the preferred format,…

1. PPT – Play Audio over many slides A number of people have asked how they can get an audio segment to play over a number of slides. What they are usually trying to do is have background music play while they go through a series of slides. By default, when PowerPoint inserts an audio…