Introduce Your Possee in a Presentation

We are all vain and like to see our face or our friends' faces. Take a look at Twitter Mosaic or the pictures of friends in Facebook or MySpace. You can do a professional version of this in your PowerPoint presentations. Here's an example...

Uploaded on authorSTREAM by ranellem

First, I find it easier to break the slide up into parts with a grid. You can turn on the default guides or make adjustments for the number of pictures you have. I right-clicked a blank area of my screen in PowerPoint 2007 for the context menu and selected Grid and guides... I chose to display the drawing guides. You'll get guides for a vertical and horizontal center. Hold [Ctrl] to drag a copy of the guide to a new location. Once I had my custom guides, I was ready to add the pictures.

1. Insert the first picture. Size and/or crop the picture to fit the first box. Continue adding the remaining pictures. You'll see in my example that I only had 10 headshots, so filled the other two grids with text.
2. Apply an appropriate animation to the first headshot. I chose the Wipe animation. Be sure to modify the start of the animation to After Previous. In necessary, you can also change the direction of the animation. Continue for the remaining headshots. I chose to have them randomly appear, but you can do it in order if you prefer.
   

Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. My pick for this year is the Crabby Office Lady. If you haven't read her blog yet, you must. She's a great resource for me and a fun read. Not your typical tech-blogger with a lot of tech talk. She presents information, good and bad, in a very fun way. I always learn something from her when I read her posts. Even though she writes as the Crabby Office Lady, her real name is Annik Stahl.

#1 Most read article online at Office.Microsoft.com, two versions running

#1 Most read article online at Office.Microsoft.com is "Turn on or off automatic bullets or numbering in Word 2007." I've kept an eye on this for a while, and back in the Office 2003 days, that was still the most read article online. It's probably the most asked question of me, too.

ARTICLE: Microsoft's 2019 scenario has everything but Windows

"Microsoft's 2019 is the latest entry in the genre of future product dramatization videos. There's a five-minute version, but I recommend the tightly-edited two minute excerpt below.
The imaginative videos were created by Microsoft Office Labs, a group inside the company that "tests ideas by building prototypes and gathering usage data." At the end, a related video list contains longer versions of each scene -- retail, manufacturing, education, health care and more." [Read the full article...]

PowerPoint 2007: Convert a Bulleted List to a SmartArt Diagram

Need to update those old list to a new SmartArt diagram? Right-click anywhere in the bulleted list, point to Convert to SmartArt, and then click the diagram layout that you want to use. If you don’t see your preferred diagram layout, click More SmartArt Graphics to choose a layout from the Choose a SmartArt Graphic dialog box. After your list converts to a diagram, the SmartArt Tools Design and Format tabs appear when the diagram is active. Use those tabs to apply formatting or even change the diagram layout.

Thanks to Bridgette for pointing out that this does not work in Word.