by Geetesh Bajaj, April 9th 2013

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Handmade Slides: Pushpins for PowerPoint - 04

Here's another set of pushpin graphics that look like real pushpins on your slides! These ready-made pushpin graphics are contained within the presentation you will download and can be used within your slides to create a look that makes a picture, shape, or anything else appear as if it has been pushed onto a surface, notice-board, or wall with a pin! You'll see them in five colors. Just copy them and paste them on the edges of pictures in your presentation.

This product is priced at $5+.

Buy and use these pushpins in your slides

MagPointer: The Indezine Review

Many times, we create slides with content of several types. For example, you might create a chart on the left part of your slide and then add some supporting data for the same chart as a table on the right side. While showing this particular slide, you may want to alternatively highlight both these content types so that you can help focus your audience's attention to the topic you are discussing. This sort of highlighting is possible if you design your graphics or slide content that way -- and are prepared to use a fair amount of animation. Fortunately, we are reviewing an add-in for PowerPoint that achieves predictable results without graphic jugglery or added animations. MagPointer automatically detects slide objects and enables you to interact with those objects in real time.

MagPointer is a PowerPoint add-in that helps you keep your audience's attention focused on where you want

Designing Science Presentations: Conversation with Matt Carter

Matt Carter received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Stanford University and his B.A. in biology from Whitman College. His research focuses on how the brain regulates innate, homeostatic behaviors including sleep and food intake. Dr. Carter has received numerous awards for his scientific teaching and poster presentations, including the Walter Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching from Stanford. In 2011 he won the Young Investigator Award from the Sleep Research Society. In addition to publishing primary research articles and reviews, he is also the coauthor of Guide to Research Techniques in Neuroscience. In this conversation, Matt discusses his new book, Designing Science Presentations.

Read the conversation here

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

Gradient Outline for Text
Text outline, the border that spans the perimeter of the font characters, is mainly used to make the slide titles or other text appear prominent. Taking this concept little further, you can make these outlines look fancier by using an attribute that's rarely associated with text outlines but can provide a surprisingly different look, especially when applied to the text with thicker outlines. This is the Gradient Outline, and is not accessible from within the Text Outline gallery, but has been included within the Format Text Effects dialog box that we will explore later in this page.

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Text Effects
Text is best left alone most of the time -- plain text with a solid color can look so clean and understated that it really does not make any sense playing too much with its appearance. Yet there are times when you want a single word or phrase to stand out -- it's for those few times that you should explore stylizing your text in PowerPoint. Among these stylizing options, we have already explored Text Fills and Text Outlines -- and we have also learned how to apply various WordArt styles in PowerPoint. Now let us learn how to apply and edit various text effects such as Shadow, Reflection, Glow, 3-D Rotation, Transform, etc. to your text.

Learn PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

Slides Area
Many new changes have happened within PowerPoints 2013 -- but the tri-paned interface has still not changed a lot for the last 20 years and successive PowerPoint versions! So why is the interface called tri-paned -- are there three distinct regions within the PowerPoint 2013 interface? Yes -- the Slide area is one of three principal regions in PowerPoints 2013 -- the other two are the Slides pane and the Notes pane. The Slide area is where you work the most -- typically though adding and editing slide objects.

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Notes Pane
PowerPoint 2013's tri-paned interface has three regions: the Slides pane, the Slide area, and the Notes pane. The Notes pane is placed right below the Slide area. The Notes pane provides space to add speaker's notes that can be so helpful to the presenter while presenting -- you can also write any sort of information about the presentation or individual slide.

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Rulers
When working with multiple slide objects, you should have a visual cue about where you are placing slide objects. You can get exact coordinates of your slide objects using the positioning options in PowerPoint -- but most of the time, you just need an approximate idea of where your objects are placed -- and this can be easily obtained by using the Rulers available option in PowerPoint. By default, the Rulers may not visible, but when made visible -- they are located on the top and left parts of the active slide.

Digital Anarchy Beauty Box Photo 3: The Indezine Review

Beauty Box Photo is a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop that digitally erases skin blemishes and wrinkles, evening out skin tones, and reducing shine, etc. The plug-in gives a very professional output -- when the plug-in is summoned, it automatically uses its algorithm to identify skin areas in your picture and then applies skin smoothing. Therefore, use further adjustments to fine-tune results.

Read the review here

I have partnered with my fellow PowerPoint MVP Ellen Finkelstein to bring you a fantastic offer: 2 great PowerPoint products at a 33% discount.

1. Concept Slides: Organic Shapes, from Indezine



The entire Organic Shapes collection contains 8 shape types -- each type has 10 variants - so you end up with 80 hand-drawn shape options!

Since these Shapes look scribbled, they attract more attention from audiences.

2. Slide Design for Non-Designers, by Ellen Finkelstein



Discover how to design high-impact PowerPoint slides with step-by-step instructions and clear color illustrations. 100+ pages. Covers PowerPoint 2003, 2007 and 2010.

Priced at only $19.97 for both great products together. Get the details now!