In recent years, Microsoft has released a lot of
cool new features that improve your PowerPoint experience. I mean, check out that Morph effect!
But aside from that, they have solved a lot of pain points that we were previously fixing
with the help of add-ins. Now, there are still a lot of great free items out there that many
people aren't aware of, let's check them out! First of all, how do you install an add-in?
You open PowerPoint, go to Insert, Add-ins, Get Add-ins, then you can browse by the different
categories or search what you're looking for, and then just click on "Add". The first one that
I want to show you is called "Pro Word Cloud". This gives you a visual representation
of text data, so words that appear more frequently in your text are going to be bigger and
bolder. This way, you can easily spot trends when you're dealing with a lot of text. To install
it, you just have to type "Pro Word Cloud", that's the one we want, and then
click on "Add" and continue. Now, if you've already installed an add-in, you
can easily find it if you go back to Add-ins, My Add-ins, click on this drop-down and you're going
to see it right here. So, I've already installed that, I'm just going to click on this and the side
pane opens here. Now, I can select the font that I want for my word cloud, the different color scheme
that I'd like, layout, maximum words, and so on, and then click on "Create Word Cloud". Obviously,
I don't want to create a word cloud based on this, but on this slide I have some feedback that
I've collected from multiple students and I want to analyze this so that I can easily see what
phrases or words the students have mentioned. To generate a word cloud based on this, I just have
to highlight the text and create the word cloud. This analyzes the text and creates a visual for
me. If you don't like the effect, you can update the settings here. So, let's go with Ariel and for
the color scheme let's go with something lighter, I'll go with Sky. With the text highlighted, I'm
going to regenerate the word cloud. To copy this, I just have to click on it and it tells me
the image has been copied to your clipboard. Now, let's go to an empty slide and let's use
Ctrl+V to paste this in and I get my word cloud as an image. And if you have Office 365
and you have the Designer on the side, you can change the layout of this and make
it a little bit fancier. Next free add-in is called "Break Time". Sometimes, you need to
give presentations that go over many hours, and you're going to want to add breaks in there.
Attention is precious and attention needs breaks, but the problem is sometimes the people don't
come back on time. A good way to keep everyone on the same page is to embed a timer directly into
your PowerPoint presentation. To get this add-in, go to Office Add-ins, look for "Break Time",
and add this in. You can then adjust the size and position of this just like with any other
object. Down here, you can select the minutes and the seconds. So let's just update this to five,
and you can decide on the theme that you want. None is this minimalistic look that we have. Let's
say I want a coffee break. I'm going to add this in, and I can expand this to fit my slide or
just to blend it in to my existing slide. Now, whenever you want to run this, just click on
"Start". It runs whether you're in edit mode or in presentation mode. This way, you can
set a timer to complete an exercise, an assigned reading, or use it as a countdown
before the start or end of the session. Next one is called "QR for Office". Let's say at the end
of your presentation, you want to leave a contact to your website or social media or the download
link for the presentation materials. Of course, you can show the URL just like this and trust that
the audience manages to write it down correctly, or you make it easier for them and include a
QR code that's going to take them directly to your links page or your website page. All they
have to do is use the camera on their phones with an add-in called "QR for Office". You can
easily generate such QR codes. I've already downloaded this. I'm going to go to my add-ins and
grab it from here. All you have to do is type the URL that you want, adjust the color background,
and the size that you want, and then click on "Insert," and then you can place it wherever
you want on your slide. Next up is Mentimeter. So often, online meetings can get boring, and
your audience can start dozing off. If you don't want that to happen to your presentation,
you can use Mentimeter. It allows you to create interactive polls and quizzes, and even word
clouds in real-time. It's a great icebreaker for any presentation. All you need to do is
sign up for a free account on Mendymeter.com, then you can among other things generate word
clouds. You can have your audience choose between or even rank different options, and you can have
them post questions that you can answer live. Now, once you save your presentation, you can share it
with a temporary voting code. The voting activates when you start presenting. Now I have a complete
video on this, and I'm going to add the link to the description of this video. So, if you want
to learn how you can set up these type of polls from scratch, make sure you check out that video.
Now, the reason we have it in our PowerPoint add-ins is that Mentimeter has a free add-in for
PowerPoint. All we have to do is go and grab it, it's right here. Click on "Add" and continue.
Now, you're going to need to log in with the same account that you created and then you just have to
add the link of the slide that you want to embed in your PowerPoint. To get that link, we're going
to go back to Mentimeter. I'm going to go to my presentations. This is one of the presentations
that I want to embed. That's the slide I want to embed. I want to ask my audience what they're
most confident in. Let's go to presentation mode. Go to the URL box here and copy this.
Now let's just go back and paste this in, and click on "Select." This is going to directly
embed it on my slide, and just like any object, I can position this as I need. Now, I'm going
to go to presentation mode. I'm going to tell my audience, go to Mendy.com and use this code.
They're going to bring up their phones, type the URL and type the code. Once they type in the code
on their phone, they're going to see this slide, and then they can interact with this. So let's
just add in some scores here and click on "Submit." The moment we do that, we can see this
presentation update. Each slide has a unique link, so if you want more interactive
slides, you need to repeat the process. If you want to delete a Multimeter slide, click
on your visual, select this tiny arrow on the top, and then select "Delete." Next one is Taurus the
Hammer. So the final item that I'd like to show you is from a fellow Microsoft MVP colleague,
Steve Rinsberg. The add-in isn't available in the Office Store, but you can download it from
Steve's website, Pptools.com. Taurus has a very simple purpose, it lets you position any shape to
a fixed position, and size. It's easier explained if I just show you. So you can download it for
free from here. Then just close PowerPoint, install it, and then open PowerPoint up again.
You're going to see a new tab on the ribbon called "PPTools." So, here on this presentation,
I'm planning to have different images, but I want all of these placed properly and
I want them to be placed on this corner here, and they should all have the same size. Instead
of doing this manually for every single slide, let's assume I have more slides, it's
just going to take up a lot of my time. What I can do is use the "Tour" add-in. This
memorizes the size and position of an object and then hammers it down on all the other objects.
It's a super simple add-in. First, just check your options. You can decide on your alignment, whether
you want the object to be resized or not, whether it should be distorted or not. I'm going to put
"Don't Distort" here and then click on "OK." This is the position I want the other objects to be in,
so I'm going to click on it and select "Memorize." Now I'm going to go to the next object, select
it, and hammer this down. It's going to put it in the exact same position as my first object. Then
go to the next one and hammer it down as well. In case you also want an image to fill up the
slide, what you can do is click on the side of the slide and then go to "Memorize" and click on
"OK" for memorizing the slide size. Now you can adjust your options here. In case you don't mind
the object being distorted, I'm going to uncheck "Don't Distort," click on "OK," and then select
my object and hammer this down. It's going to fill up my slide automatically. Now, "Tour" memory
holds one object at a time, but if the type of slides that you make include a lot of images,
this is really going to speed up your work. Before we wrap this up, I have a productivity
tip for you. If you use your add-ins frequently, you can add these add-ins to your quick access
toolbar. I'm just going to right-mouse click to show my quick access toolbar. Then let's go
ahead and right-mouse click and customize our quick access toolbar. Now, if you just click
on this drop-down and go to the "Insert" tab, you're going to be able to locate your add-ins.
Scroll down until you see my add-ins and add it to your quick access toolbar. Click on "OK." Now
every time you want to use one of your add-ins, just click on this drop-down, and
they're going to be available right here. Okay, so those are some items that I liked.
Are there any PowerPoint items that you're currently using and you recommend to others?
Please share these with us in the comments. So, do give this video a thumbs up if you liked it.
Do consider subscribing if you aren't subscribed, and I'm going to see you in the next video.
