« Samples from Yesterday's Webcast | Main | Save Time with Temporary Links (Word and Excel) »

I can't believe I haven't yet written about this one! It has got to be one of the sharpest little features in all of Office. PowerPoint's Recolor tools adds so much flexibility with so little work ...

If you've never used PowerPoint's Picture Recolor tool to recolor a Clip Art or other Windows Metafile picture on a PowerPoint slide, you're missing out on some fun playtime with PowerPoint. BUT, the handiest, dandiest thing about this recoloring tool is that it also works superbly with embedded Word tables!

Has this ever happened to you: You embed a table from a typical Word document onto a PowerPoint slide that has a dark background ... so, you then edit the Word table to have white text, borders, and shading ... BUT ... then you can't see the table whenever you need to open the embedded object to edit its content. Talk about wasted time and convoluted workarounds!

Instead, you can leave your Word table perfectly in tact for any time you might need to edit its content ... and use PowerPoint's Recolor Picturetool to change the appearance of text, border, and fill colors only as they appear on the slide. It takes almost no time (and it's kinda fun). Here's what you do:

1. In PowerPoint, select the embedded Word table and go to Format, Object.

2. On the Picture tab of the Format Object dialog box, click the Recolor button.

In the Recolor Picture dialog box, you will see a list of available colors -- along with a preview of your table.

3. Select new colors from each available dropdown list, as desired. As you do, the preview will update to show you how the color change will be applied. Click OK twice to exit the Recolor Picture and Format Object dialog boxes when done.

And remember, if you don't like the results ... all it takes is a quick keystroke (Ctrl+Z) to undo those changes.

Posted by Stephanie

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.arouet.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/53