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PowerPoint, Excel Chart Data Templates

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 17:47:18 +0000

While various charts are added easily to Microsoft Office PowerPoint or Excel, it is not guaranteed that the resulting charts look visually appealing. Especially the axis labeling and scaling is often causing readability problems.

Chart Chooser is a free service by Juice Analytics that offers 17 new Powerpoint and Excel charts that are provided as data templates. Templates are listed with their name and a thumbnail of how they look like. A filter on the left side can be used to hide unneeded templates, but since there are only 17 it is not really necessary, as all are easily accessible on the frontpage.

The filter may however help in finding the correct template for the data that needs to be put into chart form.

A click on any thumbnail opens a larger preview image and download options of the Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint templates.

The template comes in the native format of the application, either xls for Microsoft Excel or ppt for Microsoft PowerPoint. They need to be loaded just like any other document and become fully editable after they have been loaded into the Office program they have been designed for. It is possible to change the title and values to create a custom chart based on the information entered.

Protected View is enabled under Office 2010 for all documents that have been downloaded from the Internet. A click on Enable Editing makes the document writable. Most users should remember to save the document under a different name once they finished editing it to avoid writing on top of previously created charts.

All 17 charts are available free of charge for both PowerPoint and Excel.

Microsoft Office Live Workspace Add-in

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:59:48 +0000

Microsoft Office add-ins add a wide variety of features to Microsoft’s Office. Most are designed to add functionality to specific programs like Microsoft Word, Excel or Outlook. The Office Live Workspace add-in is an official add-in that is being developed by Microsoft. It provides Microsoft Office users with the ability to upload their documents to the Microsoft Office Live Workspace on the Internet.

This does mean that an account at Microsoft Office Live Workspace is required before the add-in can be used. The service is free on the other hand and it takes only a few seconds to signup for it. Windows Live account users can use their account to signup for Microsoft Office Live Workspace. The service is currently in beta and provides access to 5 Gigabytes of storage space for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents that can also be edited on the website.

Office 2007 users find the option to upload their documents to the Microsoft Office Live Workspace and to open documents from the online storage space under the Microsoft Office button in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Office 2003 and XP users get a new Office Live toolbar that provides access to three buttons that offer the functionality to open documents that are stored at Microsoft Office Live Workspace, save documents so that they are stored online and to open the Office Live Workspace website.

The Office Live Add-in itself is compatible with Microsoft Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP.

5 Tips To Reduce The Size Of Microsoft PowerPoint Presentations

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 18 May 2009 09:03:15 +0000

Microsoft PowerPoint presentations can take up lots of hard drive space. The size of the presentations depends largely on the multimedia content – that is pictures, videos and audio – that has been added to the presentation by its creator. While this usually is not a big problem for presentations that do not have to be distributed it could become one if the document has to be distributed to other users. The following five tips will help uses to reduce the size of their Microsoft PowerPoint presentations so that their distribution does not put as much weight on the network infrastructure than before which saves costs and time.

1. Use the new pptx format instead of ppt where possible. Saving a blank Microsoft PowerPoint presentation as pptx instead of ppt decreases the size of the presentation by about 70 Kilobytes. The new PowerPoint format handles multimedia content – especially pictures and photos – much better than the old format. Dragging a 1.2 Megabyte image into the blank PowerPoint presentation resulted in a pptx file size of 1.25 Megabytes instead of 5.62 Megabytes which the old ppt format occupied.

2. The biggest size reductions can be achieved by optimizing multimedia content in PowerPoint presentations. It usually comes down to images that have been added to the presentation but also other forms like videos or audio content.

You can compress all pictures that have been added to Microsoft PowerPoint by clicking on Format > Compress Pictures in PowerPoint 2007.

Selecting Screen or Email in the advanced options will reduce the size of the PowerPoint presentation further. It might however degrade the quality of the picture.

3. Please note that it is sometimes not possible to compress an image further especially if it already has been in a compressed picture format. It might however help to decrease the size of the image to reduce the overall size of the PowerPoint presentation. Many users add images that are to large to the PowerPoint presentation instead of reducing the height and width before adding it. It is always a good idea to optimize images in height and width before adding them to the PowerPoint presentation.

4. Use hyperlinks to multimedia content if possible. Not all video and audio content has to be embedded into the PowerPoint presentation. It sometimes make more sense to upload the content to a server (for example Ovi)on the Internet instead of embedding it directly. This will reduce the size of the presentation so that it becomes easier to distribute.

5. Save the PowerPoint presentation in a different format. Saving the same PowerPoint presentation (that uses 1.25 Megabytes of space in pptx format) as pdf reduces the file size to 352 Kilobytes. While it is not always feasible to distribute a presentation as pdf (or flash) it might be the optimal in most cases

Google Docs Adds Office Excel 2007 XLSX Support

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:04:15 +0000

While Google Mail (Gmail) is already able to process Office 2007 file formats such as xlsx, docx or pptx by converting them to html format so that they can be viewed online Google Docs could not until now. This is kinda strange as one would think that Google Docs would be the primary application to display the Office XML formats. Google’s priority seemed to have been different. The developers have finally started to begin adding support for the new Office 2007 file formats beginning with the Excel 2007 format xlsx.

Not all pages have been updated in Google Docs with the information about the added Excel 2007 xlsx support. The upload page for example is not listing the new format as supported. The two other Microsoft Office 2007 file formats, that is Word 2007 with docx and PowerPoint 2007 with pptx, are not yet supported but it is very likely that the Google Docs team will add support for those file formats eventually.

The data transfer of the xlsx files produces good but not excellent results. The color highlighting of a test Excel 2007 file was for example not displayed on the Google Docs page of the document. The main information on the other hand were all displayed the way they looked in the real Office Excel document.

Open Office Presentation Minimizer

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:00:12 +0000

Looks like it is Open Office day here at Ghacks. We bring you another cool plugin for Open Office after the incredible useful Presenter Console plugin for Open Office. Sun’s Presentation Minimizer is available as a plugin for all supported operating systems like Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It can be used to minimize the size of Open Office presentations to make it easier to transfer the presentation.

The plugin will remove unnecessary data from the Open Office presentation and compress images automatically. This can be for instance useful before transferring a presentation for print so that it can be presented on screen which usually does not require the same quality of the images and can reduce the size of the presentation a lot. The Presentation Minimizer can also replace OLE objects with images.

It can also remove notes or hidden and blank slides (slides that are not used in the presentation) to further minimize the size of the presentation and prevent that confidential information are distributed with the presentation. This feature alone might make it useful even without reducing the size by compressing images.

The user can pick between jpeg and lossless compression. The former allowing to select the quality level of the images. A wizard will display the size reduction in the end with the option to open the resized presentation afterwards. It is also interesting to note that the Presentation Minimizer will work with both Open Office presentations and Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.

Merge Microsoft PowerPoint Presentations

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:08:46 +0000

There is no obvious way to merge several Microsoft PowerPoint presentations and while many users probably could not think of a reason why someone would want to merge PowerPoint presentations some might find that it can improve the manageability of a set of presentations. Say you received several presentations during a meeting and instead of storing them independently you might find it easier to maintain and access if they all were saved in one file.

PowerPoint Join (via Friedbeef) is a small HTML Application (HTA) that can merge several PowerPoint documents into one. The use is not overly complicated but it requires some work on part of the user. The Microsoft PowerPoint presentations that should be joined have to be in the same folder. The user needs to create a text document that lists the names of all PowerPoint files that should be merged which also has to be in the same directory.

That text document is then loaded in the HTML application. A click on the link here in step 2 of the process will merge the PowerPoint documents and display a blank PowerPoint window afterwards.

That window can be closed. Step 3 will display links to the combined file directly and to the folder were it has been created. The name of the file is combined.ppt. It contains all slides of all PowerPoint presentations that have been merged in the order selected by the user. (All slides of file 1, then file 2 and so on.)

PowerPoint Joiner

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:57:24 +0000

If you have ever felt the need to join multiple Powerpoint documents then you might want to take a closer look at PowerPoint Joiner which is currently available as version 0.2 from the Google Code website. Using PowerPoint Joiner can be useful if a series of charts or documents are available that are used to create presentations regularly. In other words, if charts are picked regularly that cannot be put into order because their order changes depending on the presentation at hand.

It might also be useful if a user wants to merge several PowerPoint presentations into one which is beneficial for keeping an overview of the presentations on the computer.

PowerPoint Joiner provides an interface that requires almost no interaction. It works by using a text document that lists the PowerPoint document that should be combined. The use of the text file for that purpose seems superfluous as there is not really any added benefit of using the text document. It would have been easier if the user could add PowerPoint documents to a list, sort them the way he wants them and let the application do the joining.

PowerPoint Joiner is a portable application that was tested fine on Windows XP Service Pack 3 and should be compatible to most other Microsoft operating systems.