Templates, Powerpoint Tips/Tricks (Part 2)

Yesterday, I discussed how typesetting your thesis and journal publications in LaTeX can make your work look much more professional than anything thrown together in MS Word. But there are instances (like my current one), where you have no choice but to use MS Word. This is either because you must submit it in *.doc format or because you need to work with track changes and things like that. If you’re working with MS Word and you need to trade text and figures with a colleague, then you’re probably going to use PowerPoint to make your figures. Below I’ve outlined a few steps that I take when making PowerPoint figures for documents to make them look professional, at least as professional as raster graphics can look.

1. Scale your figure right from the start

Typically, you know your size constraint right from the start. There’s nothing more annoying than resizing your figure, changing all of your font sizes on the fly. If you’re writing a two-column journal article, you probably have 3 inches of width or about 8.3 cm to play with. For single column journals (like Optics Express), the columns are a little wider 5.3”/13.3 cm. Each university thesis template varies but you generally have more space than that.

Start your figure by building a box a few inches tall with the maximum width allowable by your intended publication. In PPT, go to properties and check to make sure your set your figure width in inches (or cm). When drawing your figure, everything must fit inside that box. If you go outsides of the box, you have to resize on the fly, which screws up your text sizes. This gives you and idea of what you can fit within one column and if you need to make a figure that spans two columns. Remember, you can always go taller (to a point), so think about your figure layout and if you can make it taller than wider, as necessary.

2. Set your fonts and font sizes to match the template

Once you have your maximum box size, it’s now time to put something in that box. Most figures have some text, which must conform to publications standards. Probably, your text shouldn’t be smaller than 9 pt or 10 pt font and you should select a font that closely matches the main text font. Maybe I’m picky, but seeing a Times text font with figure labels in Arial just really stands out to me. This is especially the case when you can tell there was some effort put forth to make a good looking figure.

With the outline box and the right size fonts, you should have a better idea of how your figure needs to be displayed without making things too crowded.

3. Remove textbox borders in PowerPoint

A common problem when copying your figures from PPT into Word is the textboxes show up outside of your figures. You can see this below where the text box is extended outside of the outline.

When you have grouped your figure and copied it into your document, you get an overhang which makes your figure wider than desired. (FYI, Blogger scales the figure to "medium" so it doesn't exactly match the other two.)

To remove this, Right click on the Textbox, go to Format Textbox. Under the Textbox heading, make all of the internal margins zeros. If you want, you can make this the default setting by Right clicking on the Textbox again and select Set Autoshape Defaults. All of your properties for this box (font, fontsize, linestyle, fillstyle, etc) will become the new default for PPT objects. Once the margins are zero, you can reduce the size of the box to make it just bounding the text. This will remove the overhang.

4. Import your figures as BMP, JPEG, PNG, or TIFF.

That means never use “MS powerpoint object” or “Windows Enhanced Metafile”. MS Office likes to link all of your documents which, in principle, would be great if it wasn’t so bloated. But Office products have a hard time staying open on their own, let alone when linked between different files. I always paste special and select either BMP, JPEG, PNG, or TIFF (depending on how my figure was saved). Also, make sure that figure is “in line with the text”. If you still have overlap or disappearing figures, make sure your line spacing for that figure is set to 1. If it’s set to “exactly” or “multiple”, your figure might appear under the text.

Tomorrow, I’ll discuss some Matlab templates for figures. Do you have any additional tips for drawing figures in PPT? Comments?

How PowerPoint ruins America’s STEM Education

On Monday, I alluded to some things that could be changed about America’s Higher Education system, particularly focusing on STEM Education. One of those changes would be to wipe PowerPoint from every computer, in every university, and pass out some chalk.

Ok, well that’s not entirely fair. I do believe in fair arguments so there are times when PowerPoint is a great tool for teaching. PP is great when used as an accent. Having trouble describing a system on the chalk board? No problem. Show a picture of it in PP. Need to demonstrate a little gizmo? Build a small animation in PP. PP is also great for presentations. It’s the standard medium for most (all?) conferences. It helps keep you on track and gives your audience something to look at while you’re explaining how great you are.

The problem with PowerPoint is that it’s taken for granted. Everyone expects you to give a presentation and it is soooo common, that no one teaches you how to do it effectively. Luckily, at UGU, they stressed giving presentations so you learned how to convey your information in PP without getting lost in PP. I was one of the fortunate ones. A lot of people I talk with didn’t get that during their education. Making graphs? Be sure to change the axes and font sizes. That’s a common mistake that kills me every time I see it. You know when you’re standing in the audience that you hate not being able to read the labels, make sure to fix it for your own presentation. You spend more time trying to figure out if it’s “nm” or “mm”, rather than focusing on what’s important.

Equations + PowerPoint = Knife in my Temple. Sitting through PP lectures in STEM fields which rely heavily on math makes me want to kill myself. As the student, an equation *magically pops up and on the next slide, it’s *magically in the form you need it. Those 4 pages of derivation? Don’t worry about those. Most times math is presented in PP missing huge steps and little tricks/transformations/substitutions. That’s where some real learning occurs.

If you have the PP and the note, what’s the point of going to class? Read it on your own time. Students shouldn’t be reading the PP before the class. They should be reading the textbook, otherwise why assign it? It’s like looking at the Cliff’s Note before the class and saying you’ve read the book.

On the professor side of the equation (which I’ll have to deal with soon enough), I think PP makes you a less effective teacher. You are already stressed with proposals, papers, and students. Who has time for teaching? Oh, lecture at 1 pm today… hmmm.. there’s that presentation that I gave a few years ago… maybe that’ll work. That’s an unfair oversimplification but I think it gets my point across. Once you’ve made your PP slides and tweaked them after the first semester or two, you probably rarely go back and change them. And that leads into a downward spiral where you assume you’ll remember the lecture once you’ve seen the slides so you don’t need to prepare. I was the culprit for this once. I gave a guest lecture one year and was asked to give it again the following year. I assumed I’d remember the material once I saw it, but that wasn’t the case. It was one the worst presentations I’ve ever given.

When PP is not used as an accent and is the sole medium for conveying information, that’s when you have problems. And, as more and more distance learning/web learning is pushed at universities, you’re going to have more and more problems. Apparently, PP is a huge problem for the US military (albeit for different reasons). Let’s not make it a huge problem for education.