How to create a Christmas card in PowerPoint

You don’t necessarily need Adobe Photoshop to surprise your colleagues with a thoughtful Christmas card. With your MS Office skills, a little creativity and some basic knowledge of graphic design you can achieve quite a good result.
This post guides you through the process of creating a Christmas card that breathes the look and feel of your organisation, starting from a blank slide in PowerPoint…

Step 1: resize the slide to the format of a greeting card.
If you are planning to send it the old fashion way (which I personally love) do take the format of your envelop into account. A standard greeting card 100 x 150 mm fits a default envelop 114 x 162.

Go to the tab Design > dropdown menu Slide Size > Custom Slide Size… choose the proper width and height and decide on the orientation of your card: portrait or landscape.

Step 2: create your card
The logo of your organisation will help you to get started. It is your biggest inspiration to design your card. What are the colours, fonts and shapes of the logo? If you integrate the style elements and the general style of the logo in the rest of your card, the whole will look a lot more coherent. This is another example when a customized MS Office theme comes in handy.

Insert the logo(s) (in Master View) and position them as described in the corporate style guide of your organisation. Give each logo plenty of room to breathe! Go to the tab Design and choose the theme of your organisation. Work with a layout which has no placeholders.

I’ll get to work with the logo of Howest Industrial Design Center.

Now think of Christmas and everything around it: stars, snow, christmas trees and sweet wishes,… but don’t get too excited about decorating your card: Less is more! So keep your design simple.

The following video is an example of how a christmas card in PowerPoint can be made. I’ve found the picture of the cardboard paper on the background on www.freestock.ca

The video illustrates how to align, rotate, flip horizontal, group, make text transparant… these are a few graphic possibilities in MS Office, but there is much more!  You can make your own (background) pattern for example, as the following video illustrates.

Why not insert a picture in a shape that is related to christmas, a star for example. In the post How to get your favourite image in a shape I’ve explained how to do this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The feature Ink Annotations (only in PowerPoint 2016) makes it possible to add freehand pen and hightlighter strokes to your document. You can find it on the tab Review, Start Inking.

 I’ve used it to create snowflakes and some snow on the roof of Industrial Design Center.

Step 3: save the slide as a jpeg.
Once you’re done, save you slide as a jpeg. Unfortunately for some reason the quality of the image is not what it should be. You can fix this by following the instructions in this article by Motifolio.

Step 4: Print and/or share your Christmas card !

I hope you can use  some of the techniques I’ve illustrated to create one yourself. If you have an idea and don’t know if it’s possible in MS Office, let me know and we can figure it out.

And don’t hestitate to share your Christmas cards!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Merry Xmas!

 

Get rid of boring Word docs!

In the beautiful brochures – which are made by the communication department of Howest in the Adobe suite – text is sometimes surrounded by coloured frames. It is one of the ingredients for a fresh Howest look.

Luckily, this types of style elements are not exclusive to the Adobe suite. You can perfectly integrate them in MS Word to spice up long, dull documents. Though the method of working in Word may differ from the one in Adobe and is not always so obvious.

Take the coloured frames for example, you may think – just as I thought – to integrate them via the feature Text Box on the tab Insert. This is okay for normal text, but I noticed that text boxes do not work for numbering like in multilevel styles and footnotes. If you put such “special” text in a text box, the numbering of the list is no longer correct.

A solution to integrate this element without losing the numbering? Insert a
Rectangle (tab Insert > shapes) instead of a Text Box, give it a lively colour and put it behind the text via the feature Send Backward > Send Behind Text on the contextual tab Drawing Tools.

The document above is made in Word. Besides little style elements like the coloured frames, the page number in little triangles, the text balloons, … the document catch the eye by using a lot of colour and contrast!

By integrating these little style elements you are one step closer to a fun and readable document!

How to round the corners of several rectangles equally?

Aiming for a consistent look, you like to apply the same round corners for the picture as for the text box below. This seems logical, but it’s not so obvious in MS Office…

Both picture and text box are Rounded Rectangles: one with picture fill and the other one used as a text box.

When you select one Rounded Rectangle, a yellow diamond handle appears in the upper left. By dragging this handle, you can adjust the rounding of the corner.

But when both Rounded Rectangles are selected, no yellow diamond handles show up. In other words, it is not possible to round the corners of both shapes simultaneously.

Nevertheless, it is possible to resize several shapes, change the fill and the outline, the shape, the text fill, the position, the text wrapping,… of several shapes simultaneously. So why is it not possible in this case? That’s a shame.

If you want several Rounded Rectangles with the same size, copying one shape with the desired curvature is a good solution.
But when you resize a copied Rounded Rectangle, the radius of the corners does not remain the same. So this is not a solution for the given example, of which the text box is a lot lower than the photo frame.

Is there a way to resize a Rounded Rectangle without the corners changing?

Knowing the exact degree of the rounding would be a great help, as it would enable you to apply the same radius to all round corners, but such indicator does not pop up (cfr. the Adobe suite).

Trying to imitate the same curving by sight seems the only way to get equally rounded corners. It does not take much effort to do this once, but imagine this rounded corners are part of your corporate identity… adjusting each rectangle individually would take up a lot of time. Besides, this working method gives you no control on the exact degree of curve so consistency is virtually impossible.

Feel free to share any insight on this problem or another workaround!

Based on MS Office 2013

How to make coloured headings: PowerPoint versus Word

One of the most striking elements of the corporate identity of Howest University College West Flanders are the pink (magenta) text bars, as you can see in the folder below.

The layout of this folder is made by the communication department in the Adobe suite. But what about MS Office? In other words, how can lecturers of Howest implement this style element in a presentation or in their course material? I tried it out in PowerPoint and Word!

This post seems very much focussed on the branding of Howest, but similar headings are very popular in the world of graphic design. I collected a few examples on Pinterest.

In Word this style element can be introduced as a heading that you can add to the styles gallery if desired. Select the text of your heading and click on Shading on the tab Home. Choose the colour of the shading. (For your convenience you can install the corporate colours as theme colours, so you don’t have to set the RGB values of your corporate colours each and every time.)

Depending on whether you only select the text or the entire paragraph, this is the result:

HERE ONLY TEXT IS SELECTED

HERE THE ENTIRE PARAGRAPH IS SELECTED

In PowerPoint this style element can be used as the title of the presentation, to emphasize the central idea of each slide, to present a quote,… But unlike Word the feature Shading is not available for text in PowerPoint (if I am mistaken please correct me!) Also different from Word is that text in PowerPoint is always inserted in a text box or a placeholder (slide master)… So the way to achieve the same look is by colouring this boxes with the function Shape fill on the tab Home or the contextual tab ‘Drawing tools’. Resize shape to fit text ensures that the pink box corresponds to the length of the text (to do so: right click of the mouse on shape, format shape, size and properties, text box).

This is the result in PowerPoint:

If you take a look closer and compare the end result of the two methods, you can notice a tiny difference between the pink bars in Word and the ones in PowerPoint: the headings in Word look more cut off than the text boxes or placeholders in PowerPoint. This is because text boxes or placeholders have a left, right, top and bottom margin of which you can adjust the spacing. This does not seem possible via the feature Shading in Word.

    

Of course, it is also possible to introduce the pink bars as a text box with margins in Word, but since Word is a word processing program it is more logical to implement this style element as a heading style in the Styles gallery.

Based on MS Office 2013

How to implement house style elements in MS Office

Throughout various publications of Howest (which are made in the Adobe suite) texts who require special attention are presented in rectangular balloons.
Copying this balloons in MS Word, I notice this is not as simple as I thought.

In MS Office these balloons are called ‘rectangular callouts’. You can insert them by clicking on the insert tab > shapes.
After inserting, you can adapt the tail of the balloon and it is possible to edit the points of the shape as well (to do so: select the callout > tab drawing tools > edit shape > edit points).
To make sure text fits within the balloon, check the option ‘resize shape to fit text’ and if nessecary change the margins.

Once you did all your adjustments, you can save the customized callout to the quick part gallery (to do so: select the callout, insert tab > save selection to quick part gallery > gallery: text boxes, options: insert content only…)
So far, so good. But, when I insert text in the callout, the tail changes along with the length of the text: long texts get a sharp tail, short texts a stomp tail, as you can see in the example below.

 

I cannot find a way to keep the shape of the tail consistent. The Format Painter only copies the fill and outline, but not the exact shape of the balloon.
The same goes for setting the balloon as default shape (right mouse click on outline of the shape > set as default shape)

As I mentioned before it is possible to change it manually (one by one), but this is not very precise and very time consuming, especially if you have to format a document with a lot of balloons.
Hence plenty of reasons to pick an alternative “call out”, of course, still respecting the overal look and feel of the house style.

Moral of the story: try to find a workaround!
It is not always possible to implement a house style perfectly in MS Office, as there is not always an efficient workflow available. In that case it is better to compromise and save a lot of time which can be devoted in writing these blogs ;)

Based on MS Office 2013