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Info-things on PowerPoint usage including tips, techniques and tutorials.
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An Indezine reader, whom I met in person described the PowerPoint double-byte font scare as a poisonous king cobra snake! Although this sounds like an exaggeration, this thought has lingered with me for many years. Let’s take this dramatic approach further. Sooner or later, you will see PowerPoint look at you like a cobra that’s showing its fangs, and is ready to bite. You want to make sure you are not bitten, and wouldn’t it be nice if the cobra quietly goes back to its hole and rests there in peace and leaves you alone?
Yes, there’s some play happening here between the words ‘byte’ and ‘bite’!
Image: Pixabay
Filed Under:
Guidelines
Tagged as: Double-byte, Fonts, Guidelines, PowerPoint, Single-byte
Comments Off on Single and Double-Byte Fonts in PowerPoint
You all know that you can easily change the font for any selected text in PowerPoint, by choosing any installed font on your system. But did you know that you can use fonts that don’t exist on your system!
This is either a trick or a bug and is similar to the analogy of a glass, half full. Some would complain about the glass being half-empty while others would be satisfied with the glass being half-full! In other words, this is a two-edged sword.
Filed Under:
Techniques
Tagged as: Fonts, John Wilson, PowerPoint, Steve Rindsberg
This has been a frustrating issue for many PowerPoint users, and also users of other Office programs. You type some text that is sentence case, but the results are all capital case! Yes, you can use the Change Case option, but why should you have to do so for each slide?
One reason why you may get all capital letters is that you may be using a font that has no lowercase. Some fonts such as Castellar, Copperplate, and Engravers MT don’t have lowercase letters at all. And these fonts are installed by some versions of Microsoft products such as Office.
But let us assume that you are not using any such font. Then why do you get all uppercase? The answer is not too obvious, and to understand why this happens, you must know that there are two ways to add capitalized text in Microsoft Office programs:
Filed Under:
Techniques
Tagged as: PowerPoint, Text, Tutorials, Uppercase
Comments Off on Difference Between UPPERCASE and All Caps
Being a PowerPoint designer and presentation attendee at the same time can be a difficult task, especially when you come across so many bad slides, and you know that these slides could have been so much better! But this approach of looking at someone else’s slides with the eye of a designer is an evolving process. Why? Because what is acceptable today may not work tomorrow. Also, many “rights” end up creating one big “wrong,” as you can see in the slide below!
Figure 1: Many rights make a wrong
Filed Under:
Makeovers
Tagged as: Makeovers, PowerPoint, Techniques, Tutorials
Comments Off on PowerPoint Makeover 01: Don’t Use Icons and Pictures Together
Did you know that PowerPoint 2003 and previous versions provided an option to create pattern fills for shapes that had transparency? For example, you could end up with horizontal lines that were 50% transparent, 20% transparent, or transparent with any percentage value.
Look at Figure 1, below and you can clearly see what I am trying to explain. This slide has a fairly multi-colored background. Now notice the rectangle placed over this background. This one has a Pattern fill, which is 50% transparent. See how this transparency plays with the different background colors.
Figure 1: Transparent Pattern fill in PowerPoint 2003 for Windows
Filed Under:
Techniques
Tagged as: Pattern Fills, PowerPoint, Transparency
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