Archive of entries posted by Kris Gielen

PowerPoint Quickie: Replace Fonts

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When I started this blog a few months ago, I promised myself I would not let it die after a few weeks, unlike many other blogs. But I have to admit, keeping it alive has been more of a struggle than I thought. It just takes a lot of time and energy to regularly publish something that is worthwhile reading. I’m not running out of ideas, I’m just having difficulties finding the time to put them into quality posts.

Anyway, at least this is another Quickie for you. Sometimes, when you receive a PowerPoint presentation or some Powerpoint slides that you want to reuse in your own presentation, the fonts of text boxes don’t match. The previous versions of PowerPoint had a nice feature to replace a specific font with another one for all slides of your presentation.

PowerPoint 2007 still has that feature, but I couldn’t find it. So I went to the Office website and looked at the Interactive Guide for PowerPoint that shows where to find a command in office 2007 if you know where it was in Office 2003.
It turned out it was surprisingly straightforward: it’s on the Home tab of the Ribbon, in the Replace-button.

Don’t click the button itself, but the drop-down arrow next to it, and you’ll be able to replace fonts quickly.

Dj stuff

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2 weeks without updates, I should be ashamed 🙂
My new toy (the Behringer BCD-2000) is partly to blame, because a new version of the B-DJ software was released.

So I played with it again for a while, and I ran into the issue of inconsistent volume levels of my MP3-collection: some mp3’s sound a lot louder than others.

After some ‘googling’, I found a fantastic open-source program to adjust mp3 files so that they have the same volume: MP3Gain. This little piece of software is super! The changes MP3Gain makes are completely lossless, because it adjusts the mp3 file directly, without decoding and re-encoding: the mp3 format stores the sound information in small chunks called “frames”. Each frame represents a fraction of a second of sound. In each frame there is a “global gain” field. This field is an 8-bit integer (so its value can be a whole number from 0 to 255). MP3Gain analyzes the song, and then adapts this value without touching the rest of the mp3 information.

Better yet, MP3Gain does not do a simple peak normalization but it analyzes mp3 files to determine how loud they sound to the human ear. It can then adjust the mp3 files so that they all have the same loudness. This is based on the Replay Gain algorithm (detailed information).

Probably best of all: MP3Gain is completely freeware. No registration, no time limits, no disabled features, no annoying pop-up messages, or anything like that.

Reason #4 why I like Office 2007: the new file format

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The new file format that Office 2007 uses is an XML-based file format, which is stored on the hard disk in a compressed format. A standard ZIP-compression is used, which means that you can open Office 2007 files in a zip-compatible application.

This opens a lot of possibilities, but what I really like about it is that you can easily extract images or other embedded documents out of Word, Excel or PowerPoint files.
Better yet, this (finally!) gives me an easy way to find out why a PowerPoint presentation has a huge file size, even though I used “Compress Pictures…” before I saved.

I could put this into practice today: a colleague asked for my help because he had a PowerPoint presentation with about 30 slides, some of which contained pictures, and the file size was 11MB. Too large to send as an e-mail attachment in our organization.

I first looked at the obvious things: no master slides that were not used, no pictures that were scaled down to 25% or less, all pictures compressed and cropped… nothing that would explain the 11MB.

So I opened the file in PowerPoint 2007, saved it as an .pptx-file, opened that with WinZip and sorted the list on file size. The result? The presentation contained 6 images in .wmf-format, which apparently take a lot of space.

I could not have seen that in PowerPoint 2003: the images themselves were less than 300×300 pixels and were scaled at 100%, so everything looked OK.

After replacing the pictures with a .jpg-version, the PowerPoint presentation shrank to a mere 3 MB!