I don't use nofollow, so your comment links will be followed by search engines. This will help increase traffic to your own blog/website. Copy and paste shape format
By Tim Hards | May 23, 2008
New in Perspector 4.1 is the ability to copy and paste shape formatting. This is a really useful feature so I wanted to write a little about it. It also works in PowerPoint, Word and Excel to copy text formatting.
If you have a shape with formatting properties (e.g. fill, line and font colors) that you want another shape to have, what are your options?
You could manually set each of the formats. This is slow and prone to errors.
Better is to use the Format Painter. With this you click the first shape, then the Format Painter button, and then click the second shape. This copies all of the formatting properties over. This is quick and easy to use, but there is now an even better option:
The new format clipboard is more powerful. Click the shape you want to copy the format from, and press Ctrl+Shift+C. Then at any time during the edit, press Ctrl+Shift+V to “paste” the format to the currently selected shapes. Because it is easy to select multiple shapes and transfer the format to them using this, it is more versatile than Format Painter.
For a step-by-step of these techniques, see this FAQ.
Topics: Perspector, PowerPoint | No Comments »
Past newletters now available online
By Tim Hards | May 15, 2008
Last September, the Perspector newsletter was re-launched as a monthly source of tips, news, notification of new library images, and the occasional offer (two so far). Until now, you had to sign up to receive them…
From today, all of the newsletters are available online.
The newsletter archive already includes November 2007’s comprehensive coverage of Perspector 4.0:
December 2007’s fusion of PowerPoint 2007 and Perspector:
And several other newsletters explaining Perspector in more detail: shape handles, toolbar customization, shape color, alignment and distribution.
If you like the look of these, sign up and get future newsletters sent to you.
Topics: Perspector website and info | No Comments »
Perspector 4.1
By Tim Hards | May 8, 2008
The latest update to Perspector was released earlier today. Owners of Perspector 4.0 can upgrade for free.
Perspector 4.1 includes a few fixes and enhancements, including the “Save as Picture” feature I discussed here in this blog a couple of weeks ago.
You can see a full list of the changes on the Perspector website.
Topics: Perspector | No Comments »
Alignment in 3D
By Tim Hards | April 30, 2008
This month’s Perspector newsletter discusses how to use the alignment and distribute commands. If you missed it, sign up to make sure you receive future issues.
The shape alignment commands are accessed via the Draw menu on the Perspector Drawing toolbar. Perspector offers horizontal alignment, vertical alignment, and alignment according to the 3D depth position.
Although the alignment commands appear to line shapes up correctly, they are not always lined up exactly. For example, after using Align Bottom on a set of spheres, you will get this:
The bottom of the spheres aren’t lined up exactly:
What’s going on? The reason for this is that the alignment commands use the bounding boxes that surround the spheres:
This happens with any shapes, not just spheres. There’s currently no way around this, but I’ll keep you informed if this changes.
Topics: Perspector | No Comments »
Save as Picture…
By Tim Hards | April 24, 2008
The next version of Perspector (free to v4.0 users) will include a new command: Save as Picture.
With this new command you can save Perspector images directly to picture files.
Previously I described how you could use PowerPoint’s “Save as Picture” command to do this. The downside of this technique is that you had to finish editing your image and drop back into PowerPoint. But now you’ll be able to do this from inside Perspector without leaving the editor. Another advantage of the new command is that you can specify the size of picture you’d like.
Images can be saved using any of these picture formats: BMP, PNG, GIF, JPEG, and TIFF.
Are there any other formats you would like Perspector to export to? Picture format or otherwise. You can email me, or leave a comment here.
Topics: Perspector | No Comments »
Professionelle 3D-Grafiken ganz easy
By Tim Hards | April 11, 2008
Continuing the German theme, I have now uploaded a German version of the overview presentation I blogged about earlier this week.
If you are reading this on the perspectorinsider.com website, you should see be able to see the presentation here:
As before, the areas around the 3D images from slide 6 onwards aren’t displayed properly - download the presentation if you want to see them as they were intended.
Topics: Perspector, PowerPoint, German | No Comments »
Perspector on PowerPoint-TV
By Tim Hards | April 10, 2008
The latest installment of PowerPoint-TV (in German) discusses Perspector. They highlight the variety of library images that are available.
The presentation of Perspector starts at 10:10 in programme 19.
Topics: Perspector, Reviews, PowerPoint, German | No Comments »
Easy 3D Business Graphics
By Tim Hards | April 8, 2008
I have uploaded an overview of Perspector to the presentation sharing website, SlideShare:
(If the presentation isn’t displayed above, see the presentation on SlideShare.)
From slide 6 onward, the backgrounds of the 3D images aren’t properly shown. Download the presentation to see it correctly.
If you upload any of your own Perspector presentations to SlideShare, please tag them perspector. Here are all the perspector-tagged presentations so far: http://www.slideshare.net/tag/perspector
Topics: Perspector, PowerPoint | No Comments »
Using 3D images on a website
By Tim Hards | April 1, 2008
In the March newsletter sent out last week, 4 new images were added to the library: Wind Left, Wind Right, Common Item, Bars (Left).
Because of their look, the Wind images (as in “wind the clocks” rather than “the wind is strong”) are ideally suited to be used outside of a presentation. For example, they would make great images to use on a website page to illustrate the range or variety of services offered:
The above image is simply a Wind Right list, with an arrow added at the top.
To save a Perspector image as a picture so that it can be used outside of a presentation, right-click the finished Perspector image and click “Save as Picture…”.
Topics: Perspector | No Comments »
Create new Perspector list styles
By Tim Hards | February 6, 2008
I previously wrote about changing the properties of existing Perspector lists. Useful to adjust the form of a list selected from the library, but you might want to create a new style of list. Here is how you can create a list from scratch not based on any of the existing list styles.
The first thing to do is insert all of the shapes of the first list item. This could be a single shape or multiple shapes.
One of the shapes will be the main text shape of the list item. Select this shape and type “._[Text]”, i.e. period, underscore, [Text]. This changes the shape into a text placeholder.
Then select all of the shapes that will form the first list item, and choose Tools, Create List.
You will now be shown the Format List dialog box. See the list properties blog posts for a description of each of the properties. Set all the properties for the new list. The list properties can be changed at any time in the future in the same way as any other list.
When you are done setting the list properties, the new list is ready to use. Click the text placeholder shape and press Enter a few times to add some new list items.
If you are using the Professional Edition, you can add the new list to Perspector by opening the Perspector Panel from the Perspector add-in toolbar in PowerPoint, and clicking Add image to User’s Images. After doing this, the list is available for insertion from View User’s Images. The Convert Bullet List command will now also be able to use the new list style.
Topics: Perspector, 3D lists | No Comments »