Episode #104: How Are the Remote Presentations Going? is up!
This week it’s a casual conversation about how all of our remote presentations and meetings are going.
Take a listen!
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your Podcasts, and check out the show notes for more info.
Episode #103: Presenting With Your Voice (with Jackie Gartner-Schmidt is up!
Troy, Sandy and I welcome Jackie Gartner-Schmidt of Voice Now to chat all about how to use and not misuse our voice when presenting.
Take a listen!
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your Podcasts, and check out the show notes for more info.
Episode #102, It’s 2020, Does PowerPoint Co-authoring Work? is up!
Google has long been ahead of PowerPoint in terms of collaboration and simultaneous editing of presentations, but Microsoft has done a lot of hard work on catching up. How smooth is the process of co-editing and collaborating on a PowerPoint deck these days? Let’s find out as Troy, Sandy and I do just that and tell you all about our experience.
Take a listen!
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your Podcasts, and check out the show notes for more info.
Episode #101, Slide Design for Remote Presenting is up!
We’re continuing our conversation on presenting in a remote world, this week inviting on PowerPoint MVPs Richard Goring of BrightCarbon, Mike Parkinson of Billion Dollar Graphics, and Cliff Kennedy. We have a spirited conversation about the differences between live and remote slide design.
Take a listen!
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your Podcasts, and check out the show notes for more info.
PowerPoint has a new and long asked for feature up its sleeve that could save you a ton of money if you’re in the market for stock imagery. Until just recently, there were only two ways you could insert high quality stock imagery from within PowerPoint:
1) Insert Online Pictures performs a Bing Image Search for you. But as we’re all aware, that’s the Wild West, and while you might find a decent Creative Commons image (the default search criteria which can be changed), the quality is limited, and who knows if it’s actually Creative Commons.
2) Office Add-ins such as those for Pickit, Pexels, AdobeStock and Shutterstock, allow you to search and insert imagery from 3rd party sites, but often these require paid accounts.
But now, under the same Insert menu where you have Online Pictures, you’ll notice an option for Stock Images.
This brings up a new window with four categories: Stock Images, Cutout People, Icons and Stickers. Icons is simply the icon collections we have had for a while, but the other three categories are new and curated by Microsoft. Stickers is cute, but might have limited usage in a business context. Cutout People is a collection of transparent poses categorized by the model themselves, so you can get 50 shots of the same model to use throughout a presentation.
The real prize though is in Stock Images, where you can search and insert high quality professional stock imagery from places like Getty and iStock, and as long as you use them within the context of Microsoft Office (the feature is available in all Microsoft 365 applications), there is no cost to you. Microsoft doesn’t tag the images with their origin, but a little reverse image searching reveals that you can use a particular image without cost OR if you’re so inclined, you could go to Getty and pay a lot. For example, searching “Laptop Japan Man” in PowerPoint returns the images below. You can use that cool shot in the second row for free in your presentation (provided you’re a Microsoft 365 subscriber)…
..or I suppose you could also go to Getty Images and pay upwards of $500 for it.
There are a few caveats here—mainly that you can’t extract Office’s stock images for use outside of Microsoft Office. So, while you can use them in presentations all you want, you can’t use them on your website or in a marketing brochure—unless you design the marketing brochure in PowerPoint or Word, I suppose. Also, the feature is currently not available on the Mac. Anyway, we’ve come a long way from ClipArt!
Microsoft’s introduction of cloud fonts was a huge step forward in finally moving beyond Arial and Calibri and bringing more elegant typography to Office and especially PowerPoint. Users can now make use of fonts like Avenir, Gill Sans Nova, Source Sans Pro and Neue Haas Grotesk.
But, of course, the implementation was not ideal. Users not on O365 or PowerPoint 2019 can’t make use of these fonts and will not have them when sent a file designed with them. (You can embed cloud fonts, however, which might be the safest route when using them.) And Microsoft provides no indication of whether a file is making use of cloud fonts. Also, once you download and begin using a cloud font, the little cloud icon disappears, and you no longer know which fonts in the dropdown are cloud, system or local fonts.
Here’s a tiny bit of help:
Microsoft provides an up to date list of cloud fonts here. And the list is slowly being added to (although Microsoft to date has provided no pushed information to users when the list changes as it did late last year.)
The forever awesome Julie Terberg has an excellent rundown of cloud fonts along with a visual guide.
And if you ever want to “reset” your cloud font downloads to see all those little cloud icons again, you can do so by deleting the cloud font files here:
Episode #100, 100 from 100: Our favorite tips and moments from the first 100 episodes is up!
I can’t believe we made it 100 episodes, but we’re still going strong. Every couple of weeks, I get to spend some time with two great friends and co-hosts talking about this kind of weird and definitely niche industry we all find ourselves working in.
Troy, Sandy and I look back at over four years of memorable moments, episodes and guests in this week’s podcast.
Take a listen!
Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.
The The Let’s Hear It! Podcast is covers the world of foundation and nonprofit communications, and I have known Eric Brown, one of the hosts for more years than I can count. So I was excited to be asked on as a guest to talk about effective presentation design with a particular bent towards the nonprofit world which I have been working in for as many years as I have known Eric.
It’s a great and funny conversation that has covering a lot including why you want to “make your content like a Twinkie.”
Take a listen!
Episode #99, Being a Remote Presenter (with Ken Molay) is up!
We’ve got a rather timely conversation in this edition of the podcast as we talk to online meeting and webinar expert, Ken Molay of Webinar Success.
As communications so quickly and completely moved online in recent weeks, everyone is scrambling to “do it right.” Ken, Troy, Sandy and I discuss best practices for slide design, hardware, audience management and connecting with our audiences across screens.
Take a listen!
Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.
The ability to import SVGs into PowerPoint was a huge and long-awaited improvement to the software. A logo or illustration in SVG format—which is a vector format—will be crisp and perfect at any resolution or zoom level and will generally be much smaller in file size than a JPEG or PNG. Additionally, SVGs can be recolored within PowerPoint and even converted to PowerPoint shapes for editing or further control.
For all these reasons, we generally now use the SVG format for logos and icons inserted into PowerPoint. But if you’re thinking about using SVGs to help control file size, be aware of this gotcha: In order to maintain backwards compatibility with versions of PowerPoint that do not support SVGs, PowerPoint will automatically create and save a PNG of your SVG upon import, and will do so at an appropriate size for how you have sized the SVG.
If you inset a 20KB SVG logo into PowerPoint and size it up to full screen, PowerPoint will create a companion PNG that is much, much larger than 20KB just in case someone with a legacy build of PowerPoint opens up your file. Additionally, that 20KB SVG may also have been resaved by PowerPoint and may have increased in size.
Here’s an example where I inserted a 46KB logo (“BirdStudio”) and sized it to almost full-screen.
By breaking open the PowerPoint file through an UnZip trick, we can look at the media files. And what we see is that PowerPoint has resaved and renamed the SVG as Image2.svg and it has increased to 61KB. And, PowerPoint has created an image1.png file that is 361KB!
This may not seem like a big deal, but if you’re in one of those situations where a client is insisting on getting a file under 5MB or even 1MB (I’ve been there!), for purposes of emailability, this is something to keep in mind.
