2 PowerPoint 2013 secrets

I just gave a webinar on upgrading to PowerPoint 2013, explaining all the new features and how to use them. During the webinar, I discussed 2 features that I realized are so hard to find that I really should share them with everyone.

Find only photos

In PowerPoint 2010 and earlier, when you chose Insert > Clip Art, you could specify that you wanted only photographs. You did that in the Clip Art task pane from the Results Should Be drop-down list, as you see here.

But in PowerPoint 2013, you choose Insert> Online Pictures and get a dialog box instead. (It’s funny– in PowerPoint 2013, the Format Shape dialog box became the Format Shape task pane, but the Clip Art task pane became the the Insert Pictures dialog box.)

There’s no place to screen out line art (clip art).

Instead, you can just type the word photo in the search box. That does the trick! (Thanks to Steve Rindsberg, a fellow PowerPoint MVP, for discovering this! You can find a world of PowerPoint resources at his website.)

Pick up a color from anywhere on your screen

PowerPoint 2013 has a new eyedropper, which lets you pick up a color and apply it to an object, let’s say a rectangle‘s fill. But while it’s easy to do this within the slide pane, when you move the cursor outside the pane or outside the PowerPoint window, you lose the eyedropper cursor and it doesn’t work.

The trick here is to click and hold the mouse button as you move the cursor outside the slide pane.

You can find the eyedropper in a number of places where you can apply color. An obvious place is by going to the Format tab, then choosing Shape Fill.

When you click the Eyedropper item, keep holding down the mouse button as you drag off the slide pane until you get to the color you want–anywhere on your computer’s screen. Then release the mouse button.

Presto! Your shape is filled with the new color!

Do you have any secret PowerPoint 2013 tips? Leave a comment!