With just a few simple add-ins, you can make your PowerPoint slide shine and also make your life a lot easier. So in this video I'm going to share with you 5 PowerPoint add-ins every user should know. Let's get started with add-in number one.
Add your own QR codes
And this has all to do with making it easier for people to go directly to a website or a URL. How often have you had a slide like this where you are inviting people to go to a particular form or a survey or a website?
And even if you create this as a link within your PowerPoint deck, it does no good to your viewers because they can't click on this when they are watching your presentation, whether it's in person or even if they're watching it online.
Well, if we come up to add-ins, we are going to make use of a tool called QR4Office, which makes it quick and easy for us to add a QR code to any of our slides.
So in this example, all I need to do is come up here and type in the name, or maybe I could copy and paste the name of the URL where I want people to go. So I'm going to type in Simpletivity.com/streamline.
Now, down below, we do have a few additional options. If I want to match my own branding or change the color, I can do so here, I can select that blue. And then I would recommend adjusting the size here, not the image that it's going to produce.
When it comes to working with QR codes, you want to make sure that these pixels, these shapes are as accurate as possible so that everyone can access it from their phone. When we're happy with our color and our size, all we need to do is select insert, and it will immediately be inserted into our slide.
Create amazing timelines with Office Timeline
Next on our list, let's take a look at making timelines so much better. Now, here within PowerPoint, you may be familiar with the ability to insert a simple chart or insert smart art. And, yes, there are a variety of different timelines which we could include, but they are all very, very basic.
And even once you've set up your timeline, like the example I've got here, if I want to adjust this review date, if I go to drag this over to the left, oh yeah, everything is separate. These are all just individual elements. I got to come down here and separately drag the text for that.
And this April 15th, if it's actually April 1st, I'm going to have to manually change that as well. Well, what if you could create a timeline that looked like this, that had a lot more detail, that was a lot more visually engaging, or maybe a timeline such as this?
To create these types of timelines, I'm using an extension called Office Timeline. And best of all, I can go into this timeline and start to adjust things any way that I like. Let's take a look at this executive decision here. And let's say I need to move the date into May. I'm going to click and drag it.
And not only is everything staying together, but do you notice that the date is changing as well? Even if I need to move it way over here closer to the executive review, it will automatically raise it up so it's easy to read. And best of all, I can do this with any element within that timeline.
Maybe I want to highlight this final release, but I want to bring it down here within the product development space. Everything is brought together, the text, the images, everything on screen. And if I want to dive into the data, I can come up here and select the data tab. And here I can change the text, I can change the shapes, I can change the colors.
I can come in here and change the dates. And better yet, I don't have to type it in. It gives me a nice convenient calendar as well. But perhaps the biggest time saver with using Office Timeline is that you don't have to create this at all. You can let it do the work when you upload your own spreadsheet or your own data.
I'm going to come up here and select Import. And here you can see a variety of tools which you can import and sync with directly. And if you don't use one of these tools, almost everything will export into Microsoft Excel. Meaning, that you don't have to continually update your data in two different places.
You can update it once in your spreadsheet and make sure that it is represented right here within your slides. To learn more about Office timeline and any of the add-ons in today's video, be sure to check the link in the description down
Build a presentation with ChatGPT
Now, the third add-in in our list today is going to help prevent you from staring at a blank slide. And for this, we're going to take advantage of AI. ChatGPT for PowerPoint allows us to give a particular prompt or just a few set of instructions and create slides in a matter of seconds.
To get going, we can either start from our own topic, or if we already have some text or an outline, we can go and paste that in here. But I'm going to use this create from topic in our example today. Here within the prompt area, I'm going to say "Highlight the pros and cons of waking up extra early and its effect on your workday."
Now, we have a limit of 250 characters, so I could put in a lot more description if I want to. And then down below we have two other choices available.
We can choose the language in which we want the slides to be produced in. And then we can also choose the number of slides. I'm going to leave it at the default of seven and select continue.
What it's going to do first is create an outline so I can review this before it goes ahead and produces the entire presentation. So here you can see here are the titles of each of the slides, early wake up pros and cons, this is probably going to be a title slide, the benefits, the challenges, the impact, healthy morning routines, tips for successful early rising.
Now, I can go in here and change any of these titles if I want. I can also come here to the left and change the order as well. So maybe I want healthy morning routines to come at the end before the conclusion, so I can add items if I want or remove them. But let's leave them as is, and I'm going to select Continue.
Lastly, we can choose a particular template. Now, the templates are fairly basic, but remember, you can swap these out with any of your PowerPoint templates here as well. I'm going to choose the first one and select Continue.
Now, it may take a few seconds depending on how many slides which you have asked it to produce, but really this will probably produce my slides in, oh, a little less than 15 seconds. Here you can see it producing it for me live on the left-hand side, and it's even incorporated pictures as well.
So I've got my title slide, here's the benefits, here's the challenges, appropriate images, appropriate bullet points. Of course, I would never just go ahead and produce this as is, but this gives me a great framework to go on.
So if you are stuck or want to get ahead just a little faster, you may want to check out ChatGPT for PowerPoint.
Create word cloud images from text
Next, let's take a look at how we can make our slides that much more engaging and useful for our audience. In this example, I've collected a number of responses. Maybe I surveyed my participants in advance, or maybe this is just some user data and I just have the raw outcome here.
These are the answers that people gave, but this isn't very engaging, and it's actually kind of hard to see what were the most popular responses. Well, I'm going to produce a word cloud in just a few seconds, and it's also going to give me a lot of helpful options along the way.
For this, we're using something called Pro Word Cloud, and all we need to do is select what kind of font we want to use. Maybe I'm going to use this telephoto font here. I can choose from a variety of different color schemes if I want. I'm going to keep things pretty simple here. I'm going to choose this celebration one.
I can change the case layout or my case preferences. I can even limit it to a number of words, If I have more than 100 in my list here. The one thing I would make sure that you do is actually increase the default pixel size I'm going to put 1000 by I think 800 in my example here, just so it takes up most of my slide.
And then the last thing that we to do before selecting this button is to actually come over and select the words you want to use in that word cloud. So I'm going to come over here, I'm going to select create word cloud, and instead of putting it directly within my slide, it's first going to give me that image up above here.
And this is helpful in case I want to tweak any of the design options down below. But when I'm happy with the result, all I need to do is click on the image, it copies it to my clipboard and now I'm going to say paste here within my slide.
Now, I've got something which is a lot more engaging, a lot more useful. We can quickly see that joy and peace were the two most popular words, and things like success and abundance were much less popular in this particular poll.
Add free stock images by color
Next, let's take a look at making it easier to add images to our slides without having to copy and paste from different websites or traveling to other tabs within our browser. For this, we are going to use the free Pexels add-on.
Now, Pexels has been a very popular site for getting free stock photos, but instead of minimizing and maximizing your PowerPoint slides, we can search all of those photos directly from within PowerPoint.
So, for example, maybe I want a picture of a computer. I can type in that search, and then I can preview all of those images here right from within my application.
But the feature that I like the most is that I can color match my images. So here on the left-hand side, you can see I've got this very dark background with this purple theme going on in the left and right lower corner.
So within the Pexels add-on, I'm going to select this color picker, and I'm going to select this purple, which happens to be the same purple as the one within my slides.
And maybe I want to look at something like a monitor screen or something along those lines. I'm going to type in the word monitor, and what it's going to do is bring back a number of images that are related to a monitor, but that have that type of shade or that type of tone within it.
So as I browse through these, I can see that all of these are going to fit very, very well with this slide on the left-hand side. I'm going to select this image here. I can choose from large, medium, or small. I'm going to go with medium. I'm going to say insert photo. And maybe all I need to do here is say send to back.
And that looks great, and it fits very, very well with the other colors and the other themes that I have on screen. So if you want to quickly find the right photo for you, be sure to use the Pexels PowerPoint add-on.
Now, I would love to hear from you next. Which of these five add-ons were your favorite? And do you have any that you would like me to feature in a future video?
Be sure to let me know in the comments down below. Thank you so much for watching today's video. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
