by Geetesh Bajaj, April 21, 2015

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One of the most clichéd pictures you will find within presentation slides, web sites, and even billboard banners is that of the handshake! There are all sorts of handshake pictures, from those shaking hands between opposite genders to those of handshakes between people of different races and ages. And yet they all seem clichéd! Why is that so? To understand the answer to this question, we have to first understand what a handshake symbolizes.

Learn why using pictures of handshakes is a cliché, and how you can find alternatives

Sometimes you may wonder why PowerPoint does not provide options for the shapes that you want to use! The other day someone wanted to create a shape resembling Pacman! How many of you remember Pacman, the lovable character from the computer game? Well, lovable or not -- it is still easy to draw a Pacman shape in PowerPoint as long as you know what to start with! And the answer is to start with the Pie shape!

Explore how you can draw variations of the Pie shape in PowerPoint

We already learned about Public Domain, and the pictures available as part of Public Domain. While you will be able to find a huge amount of visual content that is available within Public Domain, there is another option called Creative Commons that you should be aware of. Unlike Public Domain, where content belongs to all mankind - the content within Creative Commons still belongs to the person who created it. For pictures such as camera photographs, any content classified as Creative Commons would still belong to the photographer or the entity that commissioned the photographer.

Learn about Creative Commons, and the different licenses provided

After suffering endless hours of torment enduring encyclopedic slideshows, long-suffering audience are trying to find new ways to defend themselves. Their two well-established forms of expressing displeasure with such excess - interrupting the presenter and turning on mobile devices - have failed to stem the tsunami of what has become known as "Death by PowerPoint." One new approach is "PowerPoint Karaoke." The Wall Street Journal reported that some corporations now organize events at which employees are asked to gather a set of irrelevant slides and ad lib a comic narrative. Although these occasions are intended to disparage excessive slideware, they serve only as entertainment because the mockery does not address the problem directly.

Read more in this guest post by Jerry Weissman

The more pictures you find online, the more difficult it gets to decide whether this picture can be legally used or not. And yes, it's not too difficult if you are ready to pay for high quality images -- then there are some awesome stock photo sites that have you covered. But in case your pockets are not too deep, or even if you are doing something on a shoestring budget for a pro bono cause, then you will want a source of pictures that's high quality, and also not expensive at all. And Pixabay.com, the site we are reviewing today actually exceeds those requirements because not only are the pictures high quality, but they are free as well!

Learn about Pixabay.com, an amazing resource of shared pictures that can be used easily

Text Fills

Most of the time, text in PowerPoint is filled with either a black or a white solid fill, or any color that contrasts with the color of the slide background -- this color info is contained within the Theme applied to the presentation. There may be times when you want to change this default text fill to some other particular color. Or, perhaps you applied a WordArt Style to your text -- and you are happy with everything else within that WordArt Style except the text fill. PowerPoint's Text Fill option provides you with plenty of fill options for your text -- fill options include solid colors, gradients, textures, and also pictures.

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Picture Fills for Text

PowerPoint's Text Fill gallery provides you with plenty of text fill options which work similar to the fills for shapes within the Shape Fill gallery. However, a basic color fill is not the only option available for text fills in PowerPoint. In this tutorial, we will explore how you can use a picture as a fill for your selected text. Although picture fills can look awesome on text and make it stand apart, you must use some caution.

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Gradient Fills for Text

By default, all text that you add within PowerPoint may be filled up with a solid color. And while that's predictable and good, there are some other options that you may want to explore, especially for title text or anything that uses text in a larger point size. One alternative is text filled with a gradient -- this can look contemporary and classic, or even ghastly and gaudy! It all depends on the type of gradients you use to fill your text!

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Texture Fills for Text

Although you can fill your text so that it appears textured within PowerPoint, the final result depends upon the texture you use for the fill, and how well it contrasts with the slide background. For reasons of readability, make sure that the texture used is not too crowded or even multicolored -- and as already stated, choose a texture that contrasts with your slide background.

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Using Custom Textures as Fill for Text

When you consider using textures to fill up your text, you need not limit yourself to the default textures that PowerPoint offers. You can always explore some third party custom textures including our own Scribble Custom Textures that provide your text with an organic look, as if someone scribbled lines with a pencil to fill them! You can also try some more custom textures from our Ppted Background Texture Collection. In this tutorial you will learn how to use custom textures as fills for your text in PowerPoint 2013.
 

Viewing Sections

If your presentation has a large Section, containing plenty of slides, then it is quite possible that this Sections may make it difficult to view the other remaining Sections -- the reason here is that content slides of this huge Section cover up so much screen area that it becomes difficult for you to see the slides in the other Sections. And if you want to drag a slide from one Section to another, you may be at a loss to comprehend what you will end up with -- and where your slide will move to? So, to counter this problem, you can collapse and expand single and multiple Sections.
 

Adding Clips to the Clip Organizer

Although it is easy to insert pictures from the Clip Art task pane, it is still a good idea to save the pictures you use locally so that you can use them anytime you want. This is important because the same picture may not show up again in the future since nowadays the pictures you retrieve via a search are those that are on web sites -- and they use Bing's search technology. Such searches are dynamic, and results can vary, even after a few hours! So it is important that you save a picture you want to use often locally, in case you want to use it in the future. PowerPoint 2010 allows you to save pictures locally by adding them to a small program called the Clip Organizer.
 

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