Get Your Presentation Game Ready

PowerPoint Stress Relief from eSlide

Issue 63

Get Your PowerPoint Presentation Game Ready

March Madness Inspires eSlide's Designers This Month

We turn to the basketball court this month as it's March Madness time again. So whether you're a fan of Duke, Kentucky, Kansas, Syracuse or UCLA, or you've got your eye on one of the teams slated to be the NCAA Tournament's 2016 Cinderella Story (Valparaiso, Evansville or Belmont anyone?), you'll know that no player performs in isolation.

The best teams draw on the strengths of all of their players, a lot like the components of the best PowerPoint presentations. So when you are tasked with bringing large amounts of data to life, e.g., the results of a 64-team tournament (68 if you're counting the two 'play-in' games), the best way to ensure a big win is with a PowerPoint presentation that pools the talents of all its players. Read more.

eSlide's Quick Tip of the Month

Optimizing Screencaps

You can create a screen capture by pressing the PrtScreen button in the upper right corner of your keyboard, which copies the entire screen, and then pasting (CTRL + V) into PowerPoint. You can then resize and crop using PowerPoint's image editing tools.

1) To Resize, select the image and drag from the small white circle on any corner

2) To Crop, right-click on the image and select "Crop".
3) Drag on any of the black bars around the edges and on the corners to crop

The problem is that the crop tool doesn't actually crop the image; it only masks it. This means the entire full-screen image is still embedded in the file, which can add a lot to the file size. Additionally, any subsequent user can use the crop tool to reveal the hidden parts of the image, which could be a problem if it contains sensitive information.

An easy way to permanently delete unwanted portions of an image is the use of the "Compress Pictures" tool.

1) Select the cropped image

2) Select the "Picture Tools/Fromat" tab from the menubar

3) Then select "Compress Pictures"

In the Dialog box that appears, check "Delete cropped areas of pictures" and then click OK. You can also set the resolution level to further reduce file size. "Screen (150ppi)" is usually the best trade-off of file size vs. image quality. "Use document resolution" will apply no extra image compression.

Now your image will contain no extra hidden information and will have a much smaller file size to boot.

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