About Me (Tim Hards)

I am the Chief Software Architect of Perspector. Here you can read about the latest developments from a Perspector insider!

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Perspector is a 3D add-in for PowerPoint, designed to make your presentations stand out.

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Posts filed under Newsletters


Adding 3D to flat designs

By Tim Hards | June 8, 2011

In the newsletter I sent out a bit over a month ago, I described how to go from a flat PowerPoint design like this:

Flat design in PowerPoint

To a 3D design with Perspector:

3D design with Perspector

The edges of the sun shapes have zero depth. This can easily be set in Perspector using the Size tab of the shape properties dialog.

The centres of the shapes have been overlaid with Ball shapes to give them 3D centres. These have been accentuated with a bit of shine.

You can download the presentation from here.

The next newsletter will be sent tomorrow or Friday. Sign up.

Topics: Newsletters, Perspector, PowerPoint | No Comments »

Emails are back

By Tim Hards | May 27, 2011

Last month I gave subscribers to the Perspector mailing list a little surprise. After a year’s absence, I have started sending “newsletter” emails again. According to my count this is the 3rd restart! Here’s hoping I’ll make it stick 4th time around.

Notice that I put “newsletter” in quotes. As is fairly common for product newsletters, the content will be tip-heavy, with just the occasional notice of some news. It’s really a “tips and occasional news email”, but “newsletter” is easier.

What’s the difference between this blog and the newsletter? The newsletter will be semi-regular, i.e. I won’t send out one newsletter so soon after another (at least a month or so apart), whereas blog posts will be made when I have something to say.

Because many Perspector users only see the newsletter, I will make this fairly focussed. That’s not an issue for the blog, so I’m going to be posting bits of things as they come.

As an example, I’m currently working with a user on creating a tube-map style image. This will be written up for the newsletter, but I hope to be posting bits of it here as I go. For example, I will include detail about the options that were dropped.

The next “newsletter” will be sent next week. If you want to catch it, sign up.

Topics: Newsletters | No Comments »

August newsletter

By Tim Hards | August 26, 2008

The August newsletter is now online.

It talks about the new Perspector Lists tool that has already been covered in this blog post and this one.

How the newsletter image was created

The newsletter features this illustration of using Perspector Lists:

Illustration of a slide with a PowerPoint bullet list, and with a 3D list created with Perspector Lists.

This newsletter image was created using Perspector Professional Edition. It was quite easy to do: first create the PowerPoint bullet-point slide, then duplicate the slide and use Perspector to convert the list (3 clicks!), then on a third slide use Perspector Professional to arrange images of the 2 slides in 3D and add the arrow. Then the image file was created using the “Save as picture” command within Perspector.

Topics: Newsletters, Perspector website and info, Professional Edition | No Comments »

June and July newsletters

By Tim Hards | August 6, 2008

In case you missed them, the June and July newsletters are available online.

The June newsletter talks about the lighting options in Perspector. It describes how to use lights to create this image:

A sphere using Perspector lighting effects

The July newsletter talks about the various chart properties.

These are crucial to know about it if you want to produce particular effects with Perspector charts. For example, by using the Upper Value property, you can set the maximum value shown on charts to be more than the highest data value. This bar chart shows a range of values between 0 and 100 even though the highest data value in the chart is 30:

A bar chart showing values between 0 and 100

Topics: Newsletters, Perspector website and info | 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:

A 3D Perspector list being edited

December 2007′s fusion of PowerPoint 2007 and Perspector:

PowerPoint 2007 reflection of a Perspector 3D image

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: Newsletters, Perspector website and info | No Comments »