Month: December 2011

Have you watched the movie Inception? Well, if you had (or even if you hadn’t), here’s a Christmas gift in the form of PowerPoint! In this PowerPoint, a presentation is embedded within a presentation which is embedded in yet another presentation and it goes on. Don’t get it? Well, open up the presentation and go deeper into the presentation by clicking on the center of the slideshow till you reach the final state! You will see then see snow, greetings and.. Merry Christmas! Press ‘Esc’ to kick yourself out of each presentation. Have fun 🙂 For PowerPoint 2010: Download nowFor … Continue reading Inception, in PowerPoint!

If you need to perform a countdown or break timer during your presentation, PowerPoint does the job. In fact, there are many ready-made PowerPoint timers out on the web that you can easily access to and the methods of executing them range from the use of PowerPoint animations to VBA. Here’s another neat way you can try out if you are new to PowerPoint and want a quick and easy way to create a timer in PowerPoint. In traditional timer using animations, editing the numbers manually can be cumbersome. Imagine you are going to do a 1 minute counter or … Continue reading Create timer with PowerPoint

For all Hong Kong movie lovers out there, remember Golden Harvest, the production company that produced martial arts films starring actors such as Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan? Well, you might not remember the company name, but you will definitely recognize its prominent opening animation! Here’s a tribute of the Golden Harvest intro animation dedicated to all the HK movie lovers out there, done entirely using PowerPoint. Download the Golden Harvest animation now! Note that there might be slight animation issue if you are using PowerPoint 2010. In this case, you can view the animation on YouTube instead:

Few years back, I have provided a sample for Bevel and Shadow effects on balls using PowerPoint 2003. The sample includes Ball Effects variations (5 variations, 4 colors each) accompanied by 6 examples on how you can make use them. If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the link: http://msmvps.com/blogs/tohlz/archive/2006/06/13/100958.aspx Today, with the newer versions of PowerPoint (from 2007 and onwards), you can create these effects more easily and realistically without the need of multiple layering. Manipulating the properties under 3-D Format, you can now create spheres that looks much better than the default ones provided by Shape Styles. But by saying easy, it … Continue reading Realistic Ball Effects with PowerPoint 2010 Revisit

We have come to the last image. The fifth one is slightly complicated. The concept is to do a moon-like curve that cover about 3/4 of the background while leaving 1/4 of the top, the left and bottom, and 1/4 of the right as the background. It uses Basic Shapes > Tear Drop. Now you may ask, why not simply use an oval shape to do it? The reason for not doing so is due to the top right corner, which cannot be covered completely if you use an oval shape. Likewise, increase the size may not get the result … Continue reading Creating Templates using PowerPoint III

Occasionally, pre-made PowerPoint templates design may not be what you are looking for or there simply isn’t any available that fits a specific theme/topic. In this case, you may want to create one yourself. So what we have previously are couple of sample template slides created in PowerPoint (apart from the background, which can also be created using Freeform if you have the time to do so). The first image shown below is a sample title slide. For the background, there are many royalty free or stock images (for a small sum of fee) that you can find on internet. The … Continue reading Creating Templates using PowerPoint II

Professionals tend to make use of graphical editing tool such as Photoshop to create their templates. However, if you are not familiar with these software, PowerPoint comes with many great features, and some of them include ready made shapes and shape styles that are really useful in creating your own templates. Below are some sample screenshots. Can you figure out how these are done? Find out more in the upcoming article.  

Many people will agree that it is good to have an agenda or table of contents in a presentation. Reasons can include laying out clearly by telling your audience what topics are being covered and knowing what you are going to unfold next, length of the presentation and acting as a guidance for your audience. But are they really necessary? Probably not in all situations. Here’s a couple of thoughts: 1. True that without an agenda, audience may sit through a presentation lost in a maze and not knowing when it will end. However, it is also true that in … Continue reading Agenda or Table of Contents, a necessity in presentation?