We are proud to announce a new feature to PresenterMedia. Today we released an update to our Presntation Clipart Customizer. You now have full control over the colors in any of our cliparts.
We get several suggestions and requests asking for different color variations of our presentation clipart. We’ve tried to honor all of those requests as we get them, but this is a much better solution. Wish that stick figure was red instead of blue? It’s now just a quick adjustment away and you can download it right away.
Here is a video showing the color changer in action:
Click the play button to see how our color changer works.
Give it a try, and we’d love to hear your feedback. If it looks like our subscribers like the new feature, we’ll roll it out to the animations as well.
All our clip art images can be downloaded as a PNG with a transparent background. We have already done all the hard work of isolating the image for you.
Our animated templates for PowerPoint 2007 require that your Office 2007 install be updated with Microsoft’s Office 2007 Service Pack 2. This service pack also fixes several bugs and stability issues with PowerPoint 2007 and other Office applications like Outlook and Word. This is a free update from Microsoft and installs automatically if you are using Windows Update to keep your computer up to date.
Here is a quick way to check if you have the Office 2007 service Pack 2 installed in PowerPoint 2007.
Find PowerPoint Options at the bottom of the menu that appears when you click the Office Button in the upper right corner of your screen. See screen shot below.
Find PowerPoint 2007 Options by clicking on the Office Button
Under PowerPoint Options, Click on resources. The exact version number of PowerPoint 2007 you are using will be listed on at the bottom of the window that appears. See screen shot below.
Finding the exact version of PowerPoint you are using.
In the version number if you see SP2 indicated, then you are currently have Office 2007 Service Pack 2 installed. If SP2 does not appear, you should update your installation by clicking “Get Updates” at the top of this window.
I was recently asked the questions about how to remove elements from one of our animated PowerPoint templates. Specifically, our subscriber wanted to remove the globe and keep the rest of the animation from this template. But she also wanted to keep the globe animation in other slides.
This is a great question, and it gives me an opportunity to better explain how the slide master works.
This tutorial applies to PowerPoint 2010, 2008(mac) and 2007.
The Slide Master Explained
The heart of a PowerPoint template is the Slide Master. To view the slide master – choose View>Slide Master.
Slide Master View in PowerPoint
It controls all the default layouts and various pre-designed slides that are included in our templates. Each Slide Master can have any number of layout pages beneath it. Think of the Slide Master as the template for the template. You can have multiple Slide Masters, and each Master can have multiple layouts attached to it. It’s powerful but a bit confusing at first.
Take a look at this screen-shot, the slide at the top is the Master, everything beneath and indented is a layout attached to the Master.
The Slide Master and the attached Layouts
Adding and Subtracting Items from the Slide Master
An element or image placed on the Slide Master is copied to any layout page attached to the Master. (There is a way to hide Slide Master graphics on the attached layouts. This is explained at the end.) So in our example, if you remove the globe from the Slide Master, the top slide in the illustration above, it is also removed from all the layout pages of the template.
That’s great if you don’t want the globe to appear anywhere in the template, but the original problem was we wanted the globe animation to appear only on select slides, not get rid of it completely.
There are a couple of things you could do at this point.
1. Cut the animation from the Slide Master and then Paste it into the individual layouts where you want it to appear.
Any element you place on a layout slide, will only appear in your presentation when you choose that layout. This is a fine, but if you start adding elements to the layouts, it can quickly get confusing where the final resting place for that element is. Is that picture on a actual slide, on a layout, or is it on the Slide Master?
2. Duplicate the Slide Master
This is my favorite option. Because you can have multiple Slide Masters in your template, you can duplicate the Slide Master.
Choose ‘Duplicate Slide Master’ from the menu after you right click top of the Slide Master. Now with this new Slide Master, in our example, you can have a complete set of new layouts without the globe animation, and a complete set with the animation.
A second Slide Master is created with the globe animation removed.
Now after exiting the Slide Master view, you have a completely new set of layouts available to you in the normal PowerPoint view.
Your new Slide Master layouts now appear when you select Layouts
Hiding Graphics Used on the Slide Master
You may notice that by deleting the globe from the slide master that the globe still exists on the Title Slide Layout. This is because the Title Slide Layout has its own graphical elements and all the elements from the Slide Master are hidden.
The Title Slide Layout is hiding the graphics from the Slide Master.
If you right click on the layout you wish to edit, you can choose ‘Hide Background Graphics”. This effectively removes all the graphical elements from the Slide Master. In this example a different version of the globe animation has been added directly to the Title Page Layout so the template has another look.
Hide Background Graphics to remove Slide Master graphics from layout pages.
One note of warning, if you hide the background graphics you will need to copy and paste any images or videos you wish to continue to use directly into the layout you are modifying.
In Closing
It can be confusing, but once you have worked with the Slide Master and it’s layouts it gets pretty easy. Just remember when editing our templates, first start editing on the Slide Master. If you cannot remove or change what you want there, then move on to looking at the attached Layout slides. If your still have questions, feel free to contact our customer support.
Animated .GIFs are a quick and easy way to add a bit of life to a PowerPoint slide. Plus they are so easy to use. Simply insert them as a picture and they will animate when you view the slide show.
Animated GIFs work great in PowerPoint for Mac
This is all great unless you’ve been running PowerPoint 2008 for Mac. The original version of PowerPoint 2008 didn’t have good support for the venerable animated GIF format. But Microsoft has come to the rescue with an update to PowerPoint 2008. The update is called the Office 2008 Service Pack 2 and it was released in July of 2009.
This free update fixes various issues and adds complete support for animated .GIFs. If you’ve been updating your software all along, you likely are already running this patch. But if you are experiencing difficulties with our animated gif animations in Mac PowerPoint 2008, it’s likely that you need to update your software.
Update PowerPoint 2008 to use animated gifs.
Here is a link to the Office 2008 Service Pack 2 for Mac. You’ll want to browse for downloads at the bottom of the page to find the appropriate download.
This blog is managed by the creative artists and owners of PresenterMedia. We'll show you how our templates work and give you reviews of new PowerPoint features and applications. We'll also share our PowerPoint knowledge through tutorials and examples.
