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March 06, 2020 in eLearning, PowerPoint | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: PowerPoint's Fragment tool: The best way to create letter icons.
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November 13, 2014 in Microsoft PowerPoint, PowerPoint | Permalink | Comments (0)
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What came first, the chicken or the egg? Wait... before answering that, let's rework that classic question with this: what comes first, the eLearning or the PowerPoint presentation?
September 03, 2014 in Adobe Captivate, Adobe's Technical Communication Suite, Articulate Storyline, Camtasia, Captivate, Documentation, e-learning, eLearning, Microsoft PowerPoint, mLearning, PowerPoint, TCS5, TechComm, Technical Communications, TechSmith Camtasia Studio, training, UA, User Assistance, User Experience, UX | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Previously I shared some tips for creating your own great looking flat design eLearning. A recurring trend in flat design is the use of simplified icons in lieu of detailed drawings, images, or photos. Many icons can be found by inserting symbols or certain Clip Art images from within PowerPoint. Creating your own icons from scratch is also not terribly difficult. As an alternative, I'd like to share a fun (and free!) tool for quickly creating and customizing icons for use in eLearning.
Iconion is a free download that is still currently in Beta. After you've downloaded Iconion, you can choose from a large array of icons from four different icon font sets: Typeicons, Linecons, Font Awesome, and Entypo.
To create an icon, simply select an icon from the left of the Iconion window, preview it in the center panel, and then add a style from the right panel. The styles are many and varied and, in addition to looking great in your eLearning, would blend seamlessly with Windows and iOS. After you've chosen a style, you can make stylistic tweaks to fills, background colors, gradients, blurs, etc. From there you can save your icon to your desktop in a number of fully scalable sizes. Fast, easy, and great looking!
Here's an example of how I incorporated some icons from Iconion into the slide deck for an online training course here at IconLogic:
August 01, 2014 in Design, e-learning, Microsoft PowerPoint, Online Training, PowerPoint, Technical Communications | Permalink | Comments (2)
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There are many reasons you may want to globally change every instance of a font in a PowerPoint presentation. Maybe you inherited a presentation from someone else and it needs a little work. Maybe you've had a change of heart about your own design choice. Maybe a client would prefer a different font. Whatever the case, manually changing every occurrence of a font could become a time-consuming task. Luckily, PowerPoint comes with a quick and easy tool to handle the heavy lifting for you. Here's how to use the Replace Fonts tool:
Just like that, you've replaced every instance of the original font!
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June 23, 2014 in Microsoft PowerPoint, PowerPoint | Permalink | Comments (0)
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If you are sending your PowerPoint presentation off to be viewed on another system that is not yours, you may be concerned that this other system won't have the same fonts. No need to lose any sleep over what your final design will look like. If you've used TrueType fonts, you can embed them into your presentation and send them along with it.
TrueType fonts can be identified by a TT next to the font name in the font drop-down menu of PowerPoint. The fonts outlined in red below are all TrueType fonts.
Here's how to embed TrueType fonts in a PowerPoint presentation:
Now you can rest assured that your fonts will survive the trip to another computer system.
See also:
June 23, 2014 in Microsoft PowerPoint, mLearning, PowerPoint | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Want more free images for your eLearning or PowerPoint presentations? How about over a MILLION more? In December of last year, the British Library released into the public domain a huge collection of scanned images from more than 65,000 books spanning the 16th to 19th centuries. Yes, that's right, I said public domain. That means these images are free to use, share, and modify in any way that you see fit. The library asks only that you help to populate the metadata for the images to help make them more easily searchable--and to help spread the knowledge.
The project is called the Mechanical Curator and is housed on a tumblr page that purports to post a randomly selected small illustration or ornamentation from these antiquated books. All of the images can be found on the British Library's flickr feed.
Think these images are a little too old school for anything you'll be designing? Think again. Just for funsies I threw together a little eLearning layout by using the British Library's free images. Here's what I came up with:
The great thing about these images is that most all of them go together cohesively. And that "B" I used? I was able to find every letter I searched for, in a variety of styles. That could lead to endless designs... for free! Design on, friends.
See also:
April 11, 2014 in Adobe Presenter, Adobe's Technical Communication Suite, Camtasia, Captivate, e-learning, eLearning, Microsoft PowerPoint, Online Training, PowerPoint, Storyline, TCS5, TechComm, Technical Communications, Technical Writing, Technology, TechSmith Camtasia Studio, training, UA, User Assistance, User Experience | Permalink | Comments (2)
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IconLogic's Kevin Siegel has been named the manager of Adobe's new eLearning Community supporting eLearning developers living in or around DC, Virginia, and Maryland.
Kevin and the IconLogic team will be hosting regular meetings featuring tips and tricks on creating effective eLearning using such tools as Adobe Captivate and Adobe Presenter.
Join the group on LinkedIn to keep up to date on meetings and share your experiences with other developers.
March 25, 2014 in Adobe Captivate, Adobe Presenter, Adobe's Technical Communication Suite, e-learning, eLearning, mLearning, PowerPoint, Responsive HTML5, Responsive Layout, Responsive Layouts, TCS5, TechComm, Technical Communications, Technology, training, UA | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Last week I shared a method for creating a table with rounded corners in PowerPoint. While that method did have its benefits, it could be a bit time consuming and there was no easy way to uniformly adjust the slope of the curved edges. Here's an alternate method for creating tables with rounded corners using PowerPoint for Windows. It's a bit faster and allows for easy corner editing.
Insert the Table as an Image Fill
Your table is inserted and has easily adjustable rounded corners thanks to the yellow handle on the top left corner.
To make edits to the table, you'll need to return to the original table, make edits, and then re-save and re-insert as a shape image fill.
Do you prefer the Paste Special method or the Shape Image Fill method? Do you have another method you like to use? Feel free to post comments below.
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March 20, 2014 in Microsoft PowerPoint, PowerPoint | Permalink | Comments (0)
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You've created a PowerPoint slide with a table showing quarterly service subscriptions for your three regional divisions.
You feel good about it, but when you show the higher ups they say, "That's great pal, but we want to take the company look in a more rounded direction. Go ahead and round out those corners." You of course say "No problem!" but when you get back into PowerPoint you realize that there is no option to round out the corners of a table.
There may not be a direct way to insert a table with rounded edges, but there are two easy ways to get the job done. I'll cover one method this week and the second next week.
The first option is to edit the pieces of the table.
The top right cell is now nice and rounded, but the other three cells' shapes are facing the wrong direction. You'll fix that next.
The benefit of going this route is that you can easily edit the text and colors on the table. The downsides are: 1) this method is a bit time consuming and 2) if you want those corners rounded more, it will take even more time to ensure that all of the corners are rounded the same. I'll cover a second method to get the job done next week, so check back then!
UPDATE: Click here for a second method for creating tables with rounded edges in PowerPoint.
March 14, 2014 in eLearning, PowerPoint, TechComm, Technical Communications, Technology, training | Permalink | Comments (0)
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