Backgrounds & color

I’m redesigning ellenfinkelstein.com! What does rebranding mean for my presentation design?

September 28, 2015 by Ellen Finkelstein 1 Comment

Yay! I just hired a great website designer and I’m already excited. We’ve almost settled on 4 colors plus tints (we’re still discussing the dark blue shade) and we’ve chosen a WordPress theme. There will also be a new header. While this blog has been done in WordPress for years, the home page and a number of other important pages are written in HTML, which makes them harder for me to manage. It’s a big project and I’m only doing the HTML portion now, so it will take some time for this blog to look the same.

Do you like the colors?

While I don’t get a lot of mobile traffic on this website (less than 10% including tablets), it will be good to have these HTML pages finally responsive to the size of your screen.

Look for the new website in 3-4 weeks!

What does rebranding mean for my presentations?

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Apply a slide master to a presentation

May 18, 2014 by Ellen Finkelstein 28 Comments

I recently received this question.

“I have a power point presentation (created in 2007 and recently moved into 2010) that I want to change the master slide with a new one my designer gave me. It was given to me as a regular slide and I want to make it a master slide so all the slides will change using this new background.”

What do you receive from a designer?

The basic question is how to apply a slide master to an existing presentation.

When you receive a “regular slide” from a designer, you need to figure out where the design is.

If the design is actually on the slide itself, you need to make some changes — and your designer doesn’t know very much about PowerPoint. That’s because in order for you to easily apply the design to other presentations, the design should be on the slide master.

It’s easy to check. Follow these steps:

Choose View tab, Slide Master.
In the left-hand pane, scroll up to the first, larger thumbnail.

If the design is on the Slide Master, you’re in good shape. If not, you need to find some way to transfer the design from the slide itself to the slide master. Often all you need to do is to select all of the objects on the slide, cut to the Clipboard, and paste on the first, larger thumbnail (the “Master”) in Slide Master view. Then save the presentation.

The wrong way

You should keep the presentation you received unchanged, so save a copy to use as a basis. Then open both the designed copy and your original presentation — the one that you want to apply the design to.

In the original presentation, select all of the slides. You can click the first slide, press and hold the Shift key, and click the last slide. You can do this in the left-hand pane or in Slide Sorter view. Then copy them to the Clipboard.

Display the designed copy, click in the left-hand pane, and paste. By default, the slides will take on the destination design.

A better way

Ideally, you should create a theme file. This makes applying your design easy and you don’t have to worry about copying over your original presentation. Here are the steps:

In Normal view, click the Design tab.
At the right end of the Themes gallery, click the More button, as you see here.
At the bottom of the themes gallery, click Save Current Theme.
You’ll be in the default Themes folder. Don’t change the folder! Type a descriptive name for your theme and click Save.

To use your theme to an existing presentation, this is all you have to do:

Click the Design tab.
If you don’t see your theme, click the same More button at the right end of the Themes gallery and choose your theme from the Custom section, as you see here for a light-blue gradient theme that I created.

Do you have any questions about applying a design to a presentation? Leave a comment!

“101 Tips Every PowerPoint User Should Know” is for everyone who never took a course or read a book about PowerPoint! These tips will fill in the gaps, speed up your work, make presentations easier, and help you get better results. Now updated through PowerPoint 2016 and Office 365. Learn more at http://ellenfinkelstein.com/pptblog/101-tips/

Create a quick texture background

April 1, 2014 by Ellen Finkelstein 2 Comments

You can use Artistic Effects to create some cool effects for your pictures. You can convert a shape to an image and then apply an effect to that image. You can use the texture as a slide background or as an object on your slide. Here’s an example.

Here’s how to create this texture:

Insert a rectangle. You can drag it to cover the entire slide (or slide master) but you don’t have to — you can enlarge it later if you want. Unlike most images, textures are quite forgiving if you need to resize them because they’re so abstract.
With the rectangle selected, click the Format tab and choose Shape Outline, No Outline.
Copy the rectangle to the Clipboard.
Right-click and choose Picture under the Paste Options. Alternatively, go to Home tab, Clipboard group and choose Picture from the Paste drop-down list. Now, instead of seeing the Drawing Tools Format tab, you have a Picture Tools Format tab and you can use tools that apply to images instead of shapes.
On the Format tab, choose Artistic Effects and choose one of the options. I chose Pencil Grayscale for the above slide.

Here are some other changes you can make:

Change the color: On the Format tab, choose Color and choose an option from the Recolor section.
Soften: To mute the texture, choose Corrections. In the Sharpen/Soften section, choose the Soften: 50% option.
Lighten or darken: Choose Corrections and choose one of the options in the Brighten/Contrast section.

There are other possibilities as well; poke around the settings to see what gives you the effect you like. Here’s another slide that uses these settings.

I’m working with a colleague to get you a great price on a whole library of textures — I think you’ll love them!

Customize the default theme to instantly get the look you want

September 21, 2013 by Ellen Finkelstein 4 Comments

Do you open a new presentation and constantly change the font, font size, font color, alignment and more? Does your organization have difficulty getting everyone to use the right theme, so that presentations are not consistent? One of my readers asked this question because the organization wants presentations to use the Arial font, but the default always comes up using Calibri.

If you’re in this situation, then customizing the default theme in PowerPoint 2007, 2010 or 2013 will solve your problems! When you first open PowerPoint, you’ll get exactly the look you want.

Follow these steps:

Open PowerPoint. In 2007 and 2010, you’ll see the default, blank theme. In 2013, choose the option marked Default Theme.
To go to the slide master, click the View tab, then click Slide Master.
Click the top, larger master thumbnail in the left-hand column. You may need to scroll up to see it. Make the changes that you want. For example, select the slide title and change its font, font size, font color and alignment.
From the Slide Master tab, click the Close Master View button or just click the Normal view icon at the lower-left corner of the screen.
Click the Design tab. In the Themes group, click the More button on the right and choose Save Current Theme at the bottom.
In the Save Current Theme dialog box, accept the default location, type a new name for the theme, and click Save.
Again click the Themes gallery More button and look in the Themes gallery’s Custom section. Find your new theme. To distinguish it from others that look similar, hover your cursor over a theme to see its name in a tooltip. Right-click the new theme and choose Set as Default Theme.

To test the theme, close PowerPoint without saving changes and re-open it. In PowerPoint 2007 and 2010, you’ll automatically see your new default theme. In PowerPoint 2013, you’ll see your new custom theme in the top-left position labeled Default Theme.

See Geetesh Bajaj’s article on setting the slide size to standard 4:3 size as the default in PowerPoint 2013 here. He uses a similar procedure.

Have you customized your default theme or created a custom theme? Leave a comment!

Hide background graphics for design flexibility

June 17, 2013 by Ellen Finkelstein 1 Comment

I have a client whose organization requires a watermark logo on every slide. It’s awful and he knows it.

So he cheats. (I’m keeping his name private so he won’t get into trouble.)

Instead of using the given background which includes the watermark, he reproduced the background — a simple gradient — without the watermark. Then he adds the watermark to the slide master. It’s there, but as a separate image.

Then, on any slide where the watermark interferes with clarity, he hides the background graphic.

You can do this with any type of graphic that you might want on some slides but not on others. Here, you can see that the blue shape on the left looks fine for the first 2 slides, but not on the 3rd slide.

As long as the graphic you’re trying to hide is on the slide master, you can hide it. So, for the 3rd slide, you can hide that blue shape. Here are the steps:

On any slide, right-click and choose Format Background.
In the Format Background dialog box or task pane, check the Hide Background Graphics check box.

That’s all there is to it! Here’s the slide with and without the blue shape. When you use big graphics that go to the edge of the slide, many background graphics just look clunky. So, get rid of it!

Do you use this feature of PowerPoint? Leave a comment!

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