Helping you with presenting, PowerPoint, and speaking
Microsoft is actively working to make the user interface and features of PowerPoint easier to use. This is good news!
One new feature is the Edit Picture dialog box.
With a selected image, you get to it by clicking the Picture Format tab and then choosing the Edit Picture icon.
However, two of the features in the Edit Picture dialog box have their own icons: Remove Background and Erase.
Here is the full Edit Picture dialog box…
[Read more…]
Sometimes, you may be in a situation where you have a complex background that includes graphics that cover part of the slide.
Maybe you were given a template by your company. Maybe you used one of PowerPoint’s templates or you bought a template.
The problem is that this type of background can interfere with adding large images that can make your slides more powerful.
In this video, I explain several ways to manage complex backgrounds. After the video, I briefly summarize the techniques.
The video is about 17 minutes long. (Note: This is a video I created quite a while ago, so the PowerPoint interface may be a little different from what you see, but the principles and instructions are still valid.)
[Read more…]
AI has gotten a lot better at creating images.
At first, you had to deal with 6-fingered hands and gobbledy-gook for text, but the results are much improved.
In fact, you can now create images that rival the ones you find from stock photo sites.
Sometimes you need to show a head shot of several people, such as a departmental team or the presenters for a presentation. The problem is that you ask them for a head shot and they all look different, like this. What are you going to do?
Don’t just resize them to make them the same size. Instead, you need to crop them so that they include approximately the same view, the same amount of head, shoulders, and body.
Here’s the result after cropping. [Read more…]
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 blue.
While many of the cartoon people are complete like the one you see here, there are also “parts” so that you can combine them to make your own. I’m especially intrigued with the facial expressions that you can insert into a face.
