PowerPoint Tips Blog

Using PowerPoint’s cartoon people

One of the newer features of PowerPoint is cartoon people. They’re fun! They are SVG files, like icons. You can resize them and recolor them. You can also ungroup them and edit them like other PowerPoint shapes. Here you see the original black along with a version in which I changed the outline color to […]

Which version of PowerPoint should you buy?

By Ellen Finkelstein

Not long ago, I created a presentation for a client that included a video with text on top. My client asked why she couldn’t see the text. After rechecking that other people could see it, I asked which version of PowerPoint she was using. It was Mac version 2008! Only 14 years ago… And yes, […]

Add a customizable, live web feed with Cameo

By Ellen Finkelstein

What if you could present with a resizable webcam of you on the slide? And what if you could then export the presentation as a video? PowerPoint now offers a way for you to add a customizable, live web feed that appears on the slide, as you can see here. It has more features than […]

Get a designer look with abstract images to create backgrounds for slides and shapes

By Ellen Finkelstein

You can use abstract images to create interesting, textured backgrounds for slides or shapes. For example, Nancy Duarte’s signature slide uses a textured image background. You can see an example here. Here’s an example, using abstract images as a fill for the shapes of a diagram. First, you have to find an abstract image. That’s fairly […]

Creating and using a strong call-to-action slide

By Ellen Finkelstein

At the end of a presentation, what do you want your audience to do? You should know! I often see presenters make similar mistakes at the end of their presentation: They don’t have a call-to-action slide at the end They have a call-to-action slide but follow it up with a “Questions?” slide, so that the […]

3 ways to use images

By Ellen Finkelstein

From my perspective, you can use images on a slide in 3 ways: As a background, behind text: The purpose is to make a slide that is essentially all text look better As a supplement to text: The purpose is to help people understand and remember the text As the main focus of the slide, […]

Interview with Barry Shore on the Joy of Living

By Ellen Finkelstein

Barry Shore is here to show you how to live with joy and without stress. He had been studying joy for many years and then suddenly became a quadriplegic due to a rare disease. After months in the hospital and a long recovery, he is now a paraplegic and can function with some help. Yet […]

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Use icons to create a list

By Ellen Finkelstein

Research shows that people pay more attention to images than to text, but sometimes you want people to focus on the text, not on an elaborate or complex photo. A nice compromise is to use icons and they are VERY common on slides these days. PowerPoint 365 includes icons in its collection of images (choose […]

3 techniques for putting less text on your slides

By Ellen Finkelstein

You probably know that creating slides with lots of text on them is a sure sign of “Death by PowerPoint.” Even if your content is valuable and interesting, the text makes it LOOK boring. Also, research has shown that images attract more attention. So the solution is almost always to replace text with images and […]