In the last post, I showed how to turn a photo into a stencil. This time, we’ll be adding a lace effect to this photo.
Wedding Kiss – Courtesy Pixabay and Peter Klaus
Using this photo:
Chrysanthemum from Windows 10 default photo set
After inserting the photo and changing the background colour, go to Picture Tools>Format>Picture Corrections. Set Sharpnessto 100%. The picture may look worse at this point, but don’t worry.
The photo has had Sharpness applied to the maximum
Now, set Contrastto 100%. Yep, it definitely looks worse.
Photo with 100% Contrast applied
Select Picture Color and adjust Saturationto 0%
Photo with Saturation reduced to zero
Things are looking up again. Select Picture Tools>Format>Color>Set Transparent Color. Click on a black portion of the picture.
The photo with black portions removed
Now is the time for a little cropping and copying that will make the lace effect stand out.
Cropping and mirroring the photo, makes it look more “lace like”
And finally, layer the lace over the Wedding Kiss photo for the result.
The combined photo
Next week, I show how a variation of these techniques creates a duotone photo.
Duotone photos are the current thing online and you can buy software or use a service to convert your photos into duotone photos. But did you know that you can easily create duotone photos in PowerPoint?
Along the way to this technique, I’ll show you how to make stencils and lace out of your photos as well.
Stencils
Windows 10 default penguin photo
I’m going to use this photo of penguins to make a stencil type image. I’m using Office 365, but this can be done in PowerPoint 2010 as well. I’ve also changed the background colour of my slides. This isn’t necessary, but will make the images easier to understand.
After inserting the photo and changing the background colour, go to Picture Tools>Format>Artistic Effects. You can use either the Photocopy effect or the Cutout effect. The main difference will be the amount of small detail retained by the photo. I like the Cutout option with this photo.
The first step in creating a stencil, applying the Cutout Effect
Reduce the number of shades to 1
The Cutout now has a the number of shades reduced to zero
Select Picture Corrections and adjust Contrastto 100%
The contrast on the picture is now 100%
Select Picture Color and adjust Saturationto 0%
Saturation on the picture is now set to zero, removing the small blue highlights that were visible before.
Even if you are on Office 365, you’ll need to use the Ribbon. The Set Transparent Color command is not on the Picture Color Tab. Select Picture Tools>Format>Color>Set Transparent Color. Click on a black portion of the picture. Voila! A stencil of Penguins that takes on the colour of the slide background.
After the black portions of the picture have been removed, the slide background is visible.
Next, I’ll show a variation on this technique to make a “lace” overlay.
For those of you who haven’t had one of my seminars on using PowerPoint to create powerful image quotes for your social media feed; now’s the time to get out into the garden with your camera phone and take a few photos.
Chrysanthemum
You need to create a stockpile of good background photos that you can use for fresh quotes. And summertime in your garden is a great time and place to do this.
Closeups of plants and flowers make a great background for a variety of quotes – like this one I found on the Olds Municipal Library Facebook feed.
A wonderful quote from Jo Walton.
You can see how they use a transparent overlay over part of the picture to help the text stand out.
You may not have an immediate need for those pictures, but you can set them aside for later use, like this image of purple pink chrysanthemums (my chrysanthemums are looking particularly lovely this year, due to the fact I’ve just bought them).
The colour of these flowers, will do nicely for a different Valentines’ Day image quote.
You don’t need a fancy camera to get these pictures, the camera on your phone will do just fine. But do make sure you take your pictures in both horizontal and vertical orientations to make sure you have more layout options later on.
When you don’t know how you’ll be using those photos, options are very good.
Don’t just focus on flowers (hehe, see what I did there), leaves and foliage are useful too.
Hey! I think I see a face in there!
Don’t forget that the same picture can be used multiple ways, once you start throwing colour filters and special effects at it.
Left is original photo – the right has the saturation cranked up.
Oh, and that image has been flipped, since I like the leaves appearing on the right side of the photo better.
A final tip, when saving your image quotes, use the PNG format, it creates fewer artifacts (small jiggly lines that make text harder to read) than JPEG.
Finally, be sure to create your image quotes in the right dimensions Facebook, Twitter etc. I have have some pre-sized templates that you can use.
In a previous post, I discussed making a Button Bar Chart. That whole process really inspired me to think about simplified charts for presentations.
Which got me thinking about Waffle Charts.
Note how the smallest group stands out
Waffle charts are excellent for looking at data sets where the smallest numbers are the important ones. You can use colour (as I have above) to make those numbers stand out.
But oddly, I don’t see people using a lot of waffle charts in their presentations. And there is no template for a waffle chart in Excel.
You can find some interesting ideas about building Excel waffle charts for dashboard purposes and I recommend this article to you: Interactive Waffle Charts in Excel
However, I was looking for something different. Something that wouldn’t have me counting and colouring cells manually (shudder).
Building the Waffle
I chose to build the waffle chart using a series of conditional formatting rules. The first step was creating the formula to count the cells of the waffle.
Counting the cells in a 100 grid waffle
In case the picture is a bit small, the formula used here is:
=(MOD(ROW()+8,10)*10)+(COLUMN()-2)+1
This uses the row and column position of the cell to count from 1 to 100 in a 10 by 10 grid.
I then built on that base formula with this monster formula:
The formula checks the position number of the cell generated by the base formula and sees if it is less than or equal to the number of values in each category in column A. It then returns the value of the category in each cell.
Because I wanted to put symbols in the cell like these examples.
Talking Heads waffle chartBombs waffle chart
I took that monster formula and made it into a named formula.
This made building the conditional formatting rules much easier to do(simply because the conditional formatting dialog is so cramped).
Lastly, I built a series of conditional formatting rules to change the background colour of the cell based on the value returned by the formula. For the waffles using symbols, the rule formats the colour of the font, instead of the background.
A couple of additional pointers
To create a perfect grid, switch the view in Excel to Page Layout View. Page Layout View uses the same measurement scale for both row height and column width. Set your measurements here.
For the symbol waffles, use the File> Options>Advanced> Display Options for this worksheetand turn off the display of gridlines. That way when you copy the waffle, the gridlines will be invisible.
I’m often asked my opinion about Prezi as an alternative to PowerPoint. My answer – meh.
I can’t even get worked up enough about it to dislike it. Except now, after having seen a number of Prezi presentations I do have a Pavlovian nausea response to Prezi’s default swooping motion animations.
From my point of view; watching a naive user (my son) using Prezi for the first time really exposes all its’ faults. The intense focus on the visual. There is apparently no way of storyboarding a presentation in a text only view. This makes presentations that tend to not have logical flow. It is also difficult repurpose content from Prezi. At least without moving to the paid subscription model.
And while Prezi does have attractive templates, it squanders its’ most obvious asset – motion transitions; by not guiding users on how to use them effectively. Its’ other obvious positive features, shared collaboration and its online workspace/storage are also available in other products like Google Slides.
I might look to Prezi for visual inspiration, but if I had real work to do I’d chose a different presentation package.
Simple or complicated? It’s been my observation that anyone can make a subject sound complicated – but it takes real understanding of a topic to simplify it in a way that is meaningful.
This is why, when I saw this sample slide below from designer Julie Terberg, I sat up and paid attention. Here is a wonderful example of a chart that is simple in a beautiful and useful way. Immediately, you can see that an audience would find this chart easy to read and understand
Julie Terberg’s Button Bar Chart from her #SlideADayProject project
I paid even more attention when I saw the way that Neil Malek put together an Excel version of the chart. Neil introduces a clever technique using shapes in data labels. Here is the YouTube video:
Unfortunately, Neil’s clever technique is only available in Office 2016. I wanted to build the chart in Office 2010, for the benefit of my clients still using 2010.
Button Bar Chart Slide, in PowerPoint 2010
I think that in the end, I succeeded. If you are interested in building this chart, and like me you are restricted to Office 2010, then I have a few pointers for you.
Button Bar Chart Pointers
Data Labels in 2010 can not use shapes. Instead, I tweaked the Shadow setting for the label, by setting the colour to match the fill on the label and the size to 150%. I left all other settings to zero. Shaping the label this way means that you can never achieve the circle that Julie used in her example. Instead, the best you can do is a lozenge shape. You can modify this when you change the font size in the label.
But once you’ve used the Shadow to enlarge your button, you can’t use it to shadow the data label. I solved this problem with an old fashioned solution. I made two charts (a 2016 and a 2017 chart). The two charts are grouped together. Each chart has a data label for the year and a data label for the shadow. In the example below those labels are using the 1 values. The column labelled 2016 value is the length of the bar.
Button Bar Chart Data layout
The Shadow column must proceed the 2016 column or your shadow will wind up on top of the 2016 label. Also format your labels in that order as well, or the shadow will temporarily be on top of the 2016 label.
Format your shadow and label to the same font size.
The Chart Element selector on the Format Tab of the Chart Tools ribbon is your friend. Its’ really the only reasonable way to select the shadow data labels once they are under the visible label.
Link the label text to the cell in in Excel by using the formula bar and typing in the linking formula to the cell. This allows you to update the chart, by changing the text in the cell. A bit finicky to set up; but it will save a ton of time in the long run.
The best way to take this chart into PowerPoint is by copying/pasting the chart – as an image. Which means that you’ll need to presize the chart in Excel, so that text is not distorted by resizing once it is pasted into PowerPoint. Again, its a bit finicky – but worth it.
In PowerPoint, I created a layout, with text placeholders on the left and bottom of the slide.
Layout has text placeholders on left and bottom of slide
All in all, a pretty reasonable version of Julie’s stellar design.
If you want to follow Julie Terberg and Neil Malek on Twitter, you’ll find them here.
As you can see from the elegant cat supervising the work, the gift bags for the Youth Benefit Golf Tournament have arrived! The proceeds of this Best Ball Tournament will go directly the Medicine Hat Youth Action Society & Redcliff Youth Centre. Both organizations provide a safe, substance free environment for local youth; with free educational and recreational programming.
A Bag, a quiz, some tips and a prize
Each bag has is covered in the entire alphabet of shortcut key combinations (around 55) for Microsoft Word. You can test your knowledge! Some of my favorite Word shortcuts are on the attached card. Plus, I’ve tucked in a little bit of WebGenii swag into the bag as well.
The tricky part of designing this bag is that there areso manykeyboard shortcuts for Word. So, I decided to limit myself to only the letter shortcuts.
For the list of my favorite shortcuts on the card I made sure only to pick my non-letter favorites. Maybe you’ll find a new favorite here too!
Close up of Quiz & Tip card
Clearly, keeping our box loving friend out of the boxes was an incentive to quick work; because the bags have all been stuffed and prepared for drop-off at the Redcliff Youth Centre.
Box with Shortcut key bag
I hope that you or your company have signed up for the Youth Benefit Golf Tournament. Its going to be a great time for a worthwhile local cause.
It’s that time of year again. Tax time. Now that I’ve made you sad, lets check out a formula which is very useful when adding up long columns of numbers (deductions anyone?)
Put the sum of the column at the TOP of the page, making it easy to find
When you have long columns of numbers of irregular length, it is often easier to have the totals display at the TOP of the page. That way, you don’t have to scroll all over the place to find them. The other advantage of this formula is that you can use it to keep an eye on your total as it accumulates, since you don’t have to know how many rows long the column will be.
The formula here is =SUM(OFFSET(A1,1,0,COUNT($A:$A),1))
Where the OFFSET & COUNT functions are used to create the range that will be summed.
The syntax for OFFSET
OFFSET(reference, rows, cols, [height], [width])
OFFSET(A1,1,0,COUNT($A:$A),1)
A1 is the reference cell,
Rows – the range begins 1 row down from A1,
Cols – the range begins in the same column 0,
Height – the number of rows to be included are counted using the COUNT function, COUNT($A:$A) counts the cells in Column A with numbers in them
Width – is set to 1 column (column A) wide
I have to say there is something very satisfying about seeing that total increase as each number is entered in the column.
