Issue #89 July 26, 2005

1. PPT – Power On Sequence With the advances in laptop design, I thought it did not matter any more what order you turned on your presentation equipment. But a recent experience proved me wrong. It used to be that you needed to turn on the projector before your laptop so that when the laptop…

Issue #88 July 12, 2005

1. PPT – Turn Off Wireless For those of you who have a wireless connection built in to your laptop (which is anyone who has purchased a laptop in the last two years probably), beware of a problem I saw recently during a presentation. While the presenter was setting up, he commented that he had…

Issue #87 June 28, 2005

1. PPT – Feedback Forms If you do presentations that include a feedback form or other paper that you want returned after the presentation, don’t include it as the last page of your handout. In the past, I have had my feedback form copied as part of my handout. The form was stapled to the…

Issue #86 June 14, 2005

1. PPT – Delivery Tips During the delivery of a PowerPoint presentation, there is a lot you can do with the keyboard that will enhance the audience experience. Here are some of the keystrokes that you can use while in Slide Show mode. Ctrl+H – this key combination will prevent the pointer from coming up…

Issue #85 May 31, 2005

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,…

Issue #84 May 17, 2005

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…

Issue #83 May 3, 2005

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…

Issue #82 April 19, 2005

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…

Issue #81 April 5, 2005

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…

Issue #80 March 22, 2005

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…