To a 3D design with Perspector:

The edges of the sun shapes have zero depth. This can easily be set in Perspector using the Size tab of the shape properties dialog.

The centres of the shapes have been overlaid with Ball shapes to give them 3D centres. These have been accentuated with a bit of shine.

You can download the presentation from here.

The next newsletter will be sent tomorrow or Friday. Sign up.

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Notice that I put “newsletter” in quotes. As is fairly common for product newsletters, the content will be tip-heavy, with just the occasional notice of some news. It’s really a “tips and occasional news email”, but “newsletter” is easier.

What’s the difference between this blog and the newsletter? The newsletter will be semi-regular, i.e. I won’t send out one newsletter so soon after another (at least a month or so apart), whereas blog posts will be made when I have something to say.

Because many Perspector users only see the newsletter, I will make this fairly focussed. That’s not an issue for the blog, so I’m going to be posting bits of things as they come.

As an example, I’m currently working with a user on creating a tube-map style image. This will be written up for the newsletter, but I hope to be posting bits of it here as I go. For example, I will include detail about the options that were dropped.

The next “newsletter” will be sent next week. If you want to catch it, sign up.

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It talks about the new Perspector Lists tool that has already been covered in this blog post and this one.

How the newsletter image was created

The newsletter features this illustration of using Perspector Lists:

This newsletter image was created using Perspector Professional Edition. It was quite easy to do: first create the PowerPoint bullet-point slide, then duplicate the slide and use Perspector to convert the list (3 clicks!), then on a third slide use Perspector Professional to arrange images of the 2 slides in 3D and add the arrow. Then the image file was created using the “Save as picture” command within Perspector.

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The biggest improvement in Perspector 4.2 is how colors are handled when inserting images from the Perspector Library.

Previously, Perspector would try and match your presentation’s color scheme. For example, if you inserted this list from the Perspector Library:

into your gold-themed presentation, it might have come out looking like this:

Perspector 4.2 will give you the choice to do this, or to use the original library colors:

This choice is now also provided if you copy your images to other presentations if your images use presentation scheme colors that are different from the ones in the new presentation.

See a full list of the Perspector 4.2 changes.

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You can also apply Perspector list styles to existing bullet-point lists on PowerPoint slides to transform them. These are the list styles in Perspector Lists.

Perspector Lists is available for an attractive $29.90.

If you already have Perspector Standard Edition or Professional Edition, you will already have the features of Perspector Lists. We decided to make them available in a separate tool to give our users more choice of Perspector tools.

Read more

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The June newsletter talks about the lighting options in Perspector. It describes how to use lights to create this image:

The July newsletter talks about the various chart properties.

These are crucial to know about it if you want to produce particular effects with Perspector charts. For example, by using the Upper Value property, you can set the maximum value shown on charts to be more than the highest data value. This bar chart shows a range of values between 0 and 100 even though the highest data value in the chart is 30:

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If you have a shape with formatting properties (e.g. fill, line and font colors) that you want another shape to have, what are your options?

You could manually set each of the formats. This is slow and prone to errors.

Better is to use the Format Painter. With this you click the first shape, then the Format Painter button, and then click the second shape. This copies all of the formatting properties over. This is quick and easy to use, but there is now an even better option:

The new format clipboard is more powerful. Click the shape you want to copy the format from, and press Ctrl+Shift+C. Then at any time during the edit, press Ctrl+Shift+V to “paste” the format to the currently selected shapes. Because it is easy to select multiple shapes and transfer the format to them using this, it is more versatile than Format Painter.

For a step-by-step of these techniques, see this FAQ.

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From today, all of the newsletters are available online.

The newsletter archive already includes November 2007′s comprehensive coverage of Perspector 4.0:

December 2007′s fusion of PowerPoint 2007 and Perspector:

And several other newsletters explaining Perspector in more detail: shape handles, toolbar customization, shape color, alignment and distribution.

If you like the look of these, sign up and get future newsletters sent to you.

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Perspector 4.1 includes a few fixes and enhancements, including the “Save as Picture” feature I discussed here in this blog a couple of weeks ago.

You can see a full list of the changes on the Perspector website.

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The shape alignment commands are accessed via the Draw menu on the Perspector Drawing toolbar. Perspector offers horizontal alignment, vertical alignment, and alignment according to the 3D depth position.

Although the alignment commands appear to line shapes up correctly, they are not always lined up exactly. For example, after using Align Bottom on a set of spheres, you will get this:

The bottom of the spheres aren’t lined up exactly:

What’s going on? The reason for this is that the alignment commands use the bounding boxes that surround the spheres:

This happens with any shapes, not just spheres. There’s currently no way around this, but I’ll keep you informed if this changes.

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