PowerPoint has a lot of nice tools for creating and designing slides. But if you’ve never had training to be a designer, it can be frustrating to try to figure how to use these tools to create good design. You know it can be better, but how to do it?

Here’s a quick tip that can make an immediate impact: use the Rule of Thirds to layout slides.  According to the rule of thirds, an image is most pleasing when it is organized along imaginary lines that divide the image into thirds. This rule is used by photographers to compose photos. Notice how points of interest appear at the intersections, and the horizon follows the top line.

You can set up guides in PowerPoint so you can follow this design tip in your own slides. Here’s how:

Click the View tab on the Ribbon and click the Guides check box in the Show group. By default the guides are arranged to the center of the slide. To rearrange them and divide the slide in thirds, just click and drag the guides. To add a guide, press and hold <Ctrl> as you click and drag.

A grid overlay appears on the slide, so that you can organize the slide into thirds. (The guides appear for all slides in the presentation.) For example, we’ve taken this slide, which doesn’t follow the rule of thirds, and then rearranged the items at focal points along the intersections of the lines, instead of just in the middle.

As you can see, simply rearranging the slide has made it much more interesting. And now you have the design tip you’ve been wanting for making your slides (and photos) better.

Do you use our instructor guides? Maybe you don’t use our instructor guides, but want to learn more about how to work with comments in a document? Then keep reading: this post talks about how to control instructor guides, which use the comments feature in Word.

We’ve created the instructor guides using comments because they are powerful and easy to use. They also make it possible to customize one document for instructors and students; just hide the comments for the student version. But sometimes the comments do not open as we intended on other computers. To fix this formatting and get things back in shape, here is a crash course on working with comments.

Viewing in the Margins
The easiest way to work with the instructor guides is to view the instructor guide comments in the margin of the student guide. The comments may not appear this way when you open the document on your computer however, so here’s how to move them into the left margin:

Word 2010, 2007: Click the Review tab on the Ribbon. Click the Track Changes button list arrow in the Tracking group and select Change Tracking Options.  Then click the Margin list arrow and select Left.

Word 2003, 2002: Select Tools > Options from the menu. Click the Track Changes tab. Click the Margin list arrow and select Left.

The comment balloons now appear in the left margin on the pages, instead of overlapping the lesson content.

Printing comments separately
Another way to view the instructor guide comments is to print the comments separately. Some people may prefer this method because the font renders larger than when the comments are displayed in the margin of the student guide. To print the comments separately, depending on your version of Word, open the Print settings or the Print dialog box. Click the Print what list arrow and select List of markup from the list. Now click Print and all the instructor guide comments will print out in a separate document.

Hiding comments
The last thing we’ll discuss is how to hide and show comments in the document. For example, if you want to customize the document and print one version for students and another that shows the instructor guide comments, you can. To hide comments in Word 2010 or 2007, click the Review tab on the Ribbon. Click the Display for Review list arrow and select Final. In Word 2003 or 2002, select View > Markup from the menu. The comments are now hidden in the document.

If you’ve ever felt like people aren’t answering your requests, it could be because no one knows what you’re trying to say. Your question is lost among explanations and background information.

Try this form for requests to ramp up your writing so that it is clearly communicated. Use it when you need to ask for information about a product or service, to ask a question, or to ask someone to do something.

Question: Ask specifically for the information you want. If you can put this in a question form, it will help indicate to the reader that you want them to answer your question.

Explanation (Optional): Give a background explanation of why you need the information.

List of Questions (Optional): Break your request into a list of specific questions. This will make it easier for the reader to respond to your questions.

Friendly Ending: A friendly ending will close the request in a positive light, leaving a good impression on the reader.