Creative Christmas Gift Ideas

If you’re looking for a Hail Mary and you’ve got some spare time, you could try one of these DIY gift ideas. People are usually so impressed that you spent some time on them that they won’t care that you deliberately spent next to nothing on them. WARNING: These projects might require A WHOLE HOUR to complete. For me, if I have to choose between making gifts for family and watching TV, I generally elect to do both. In which case, I generally injure myself and fail to complete the project. In which case, I go further into credit card debt buying a last minute CD Rack. Anyways, here are 4 DIY gift ideas that anyone can do:

1. The Photo Collage. Buy a piece of poster board , print out a bunch of photos (at school or the office or your best friend’s house), cut them up and assemble them on the board. Most people, particularly family members, will be touched by such a thoughtful gift. Also, they’ll be so starstruck by pictures of themselves from 5 years ago (“I used to have hair! Do you see this? Look at this!”, they’ll think it’s the best, most unique gift they’ve ever received.


2. Bead Necklace or Bead Eyeglass Holders. Roll over to your local hippie bead store (you’ve smelled that place before, admit it) and pick up an assortment of beads and a string. Slide them on the string and tie the ends. Whallah! Original gift. CAUTION: It’s a little tedious.


3. The Dreamcatcher. It’s a piece of wood with some feathers hanging off of it. Come on. Provided you’re not trying to watch TV at the same time you’re gluing it together, you probably won’t glue your fingers together. By the way, does anybody know how to unglue your hands?


4. The Family Video. If you can dig up your old family videos and put them together onto a DVD, it makes an amazing family gift. If you don’t have any old family videos, but you do have a video camera, you could start taping your family members at Thanksgiving and editing footage together during your spare time. If you don't even have a video camera, just pick up some daily photos from your phone,your computer or the Internet(I mean SNS,Flicr,blogs etc.).Then you can make a Slideshow with such warm and fragrant moments and burn the Slideshow onto DVD so that it can be played on a DVD-play TV.As far as Christmas gifts go, this one is very time consuming, but ultimately more rewarding than almost any other gift you could give.

Create a Christmas Greeting Card by Yourself

How to Create a Christmas Multimedia Greeting Cards with PowerPoint ?

Chistmas is coming soon, but are you tired of sending Christmas cards in any old ordinary way? So,this year you would like to send a special Christmas greeting card—something a little different—maybe for a special person in your heart. If you have a personal computer with Microsoft Office software, the creative Christmas cards comes: why not create a Christmas multimedia greeting card with PowerPoint? It would not be that hard to create such a greeting, and while you could use simple clip art, you could instead add videos, a movie, even sound.

One advantage of creating a Chritsmas multimedia greeting card is that you can save your card as a template. After saving your creation as a template, you can reuse the card many times. You can create many cards based on the original.

Step 1:Create a New Slideshow

Open PowerPoint, from the File menu, click new. You will then be given the chance to use an existing template, a blank presentation, or to use the AutoContent Wizard. For our purposes, click blank presentation.

Step 2: Adjust the page size to whatever you desire.

Click page setup on the File menu. You can adjust the size to anything you want, but for our purposes, change the width to 7.5 inches, the same as the height.

Step 3:Set up the layout for the slide show.

On the Format menu, click slide layout. You have a variety of templates to choose from, but for our purposes, choose the blank one.

Step 4:Set up the slide show and the speed at which the slides will move from one to the other.

Click slide show, then slide transition. In the advance slide section, click automatically after box. Change the delay time to 00:03, and close the slide transition pane.

Step 5：What this step is would depend on whether or not you want to create your card from clip art, to add a movie, or a picture you already have.

Add a picture to your Christmas multimedia greeting card:

Let us say you want to create a card from clip art. Click picture on the Insert menu, then clip art. Do a search for the type of picture you want
to add. Double click on the image you want to add. It will be added to the slide, unless you get a message that says you have to use a CD that came with your computer to use the image, in which case you will have to use the CD. You also can add download clip art to your computer from the Internet—sometimes for free—after doing a search for clip art. You will also find a link to a clip organizer, if there are any clips there on your computer and a link to clips online.

You can also format the picture, including the size of the picture in your multimedia greeting card created with PowerPoint. Click picture from the Format menu. Click size and then you can make the size of the picture however many inches in height or width that you want—at least if it will fit in your browser. Drag the image of the picture you inserted to the center of the screen.

Add a new slide to your Christmas multimedia greeting card:
If you want to insert a new slide, click new slide on the Insert menu. You can then follow the same procedures for formatting and adding clip art.

Add a movie to your Christmas multimedia greeting card:
You can add a movie to your multimedia greeting card which you make with PowerPoint, instead of clip art. Point to movies and sounds on the Insert menu and click movie from clip organizer. Click the desired movie—that is if your computer hard drive came with any movies to add, or if you have downloaded any off the Internet. You can format the movie the same way you would a picture.

Add sound to your Christmas multimedia greeting card:

You can add sound to your greeting card. Click movies and sounds on the Insert menu and then pick the sound you want to add from the Clip Organizer. You will also be given the choice to add sound from a file or any CD tracks you have saved to your computer. You may have sound elsewhere on your computer, but you should find sound files by clicking your C drive, then Windows, then Media. You should have a wide selection of sounds to add to your card.

Add text to your Christmas multimedia greeting card:
It is simple to add text to your multimedia greeting card made with PowerPoint. On the Insert Menu, click text box. Click and drag the text box below the picture, movie, or clip art you added. Drag the text box by the resize handles to whatever size you want. In the text box type your desired greeting, such as, "Merry Christmas." You can create a second text box below the first to add your name or the name of the recipient. You can size or format the text and the font color in whatever way you would like. Click on Format and then font. Choose your options.

Step 6:save your Christmas greeting card as a template.

Click new on the File menu, and then save as. In the save as dialogue box, choose new template. Name your template.

If you think it is too troublesome to make a powerpoint all form the beginning, you can also use some free Christmas PowerPoint Templates instead.
Many items such as photos, movies, sounds, background images, and border images are on the Microsoft Clip Art and Media Web Site and can be added to your multimedia card created in PowerPoint.

Step 7:Deliver your Christmas greeting cards.

Of course,you can send your elaborate Christmas greeting cards through e-mail as an attachment,but sometimes it is troublesome to send a Powerpoint file with sounds and movies.If you don't deal with the sounds and movies well, they will not play in the recipient's PowerPoint.Or the recipient has a different OS or he/she has not installed a PowerPoint app. in her/his computer,what will you do? Don't worry, here are the solutions:Convert the Christmas greeting cards to video.So you can easily send it with an e-mail,and make it playable on a different OS or even without PowerPoint installing computer.But if the recipient has no computer or he/she knows nothing about computer, I'm afraid that you have to convert the Christmas greeting cards to DVD,and send the DVD copy to he/she so that he/she will receive your warm Christmas greeting by watching TV. Really remarkable,isn't it? Why not start your own now?

Do You Know How to Create a Better PowerPoint Template?

PowerPoint's default blank template is annoying! It really needs work. And with more and more people using white backgrounds, you're probably using the blank template more often. Here's what to do to make a better template.

Here are the steps:

1. Open a new presentation file, which uses the default blank template. In 2007, it's the default blank theme.
2. Press Shift and click the Normal view icon to enter the slide master. Note: In PowerPoint 2007, to change the slide master for all layouts, click the larger layout at the top and format that. (Formatting an individual layout only affects that layout.)
3. Titles are usually centered by default; and because they are different lengths, their left side is different for each slide. It’s better to left-justify the titles and they’ll stay in the same place and give the magical appearance of changing without moving. Click in the title placeholder, and click the Align Left button on the Format toolbar. (In PowerPoint 2007, right-click in the title placeholder, and click the Mini toolbar’s Align Text Left button.) You may want to left justify the title slide also.
4. Some titles are 1 line and others are 2 lines. You’ll see the titles jump down when you display a 2-line title after a slide with a 1-line title. Instead, give them a vertical justification of bottom and that bottom left corner will stay steady. Double-click the placeholder to open the Format Placeholder dialog box. On the Text box tab, set the Text Anchor Point to Bottom. Click OK. (In 2007, right-click the placeholder and choose Format Shape. Click the Text Box category and set the Vertical alignment to Bottom. Click Close.)
5. By default, titles are in Title case, which means that the first letter of most words is capitalized. The initial cap slows down reading; I suggest using Sentence case, in which only the first word of the title is capitalized. This isn’t a setting; just avoid capitalizing all the words in the title.
6. When setting the font size for titles, if some of your titles will be long, make the text size smaller. The title text doesn’t need to be much bigger than the slide text. The default is 44, which severely limits the amount of text you can fit. I suggest using 40— or even 36 if your titles are very long. Select the text and use the Formatting toolbar (mini toolbar in PowerPoint 2007) to change the font size.
7. Another thing you can do if your titles are long is to make the text placeholders wider. You can drag one “notch” to the left and to the right.
8. Since you should have some idea of the color of your background, make sure that your title and body text is legible against it. Very legible. Use black or dark blue text against light backgrounds and yellow or white text against dark backgrounds.
9. Delete the 4 levels of sub-bullets; you should never use them.
10. Get rid of the footers, too, they just distract from your main point and are too small to read any way. Just select and delete. If you want slide numbers, though, leave the bottom right footer. Move it way over to the right. You now have room to make the slide text placeholder larger by dragging its bottom edge down.

Here you see the reformatted slide master.

When this is done, save the result as a template so that you won’t have to make these changes again. Here’s how:

1. Return to Normal view.
2. Click the Save icon.
3. From the Save as Type drop-down list, choose Design Template (PowerPoint Template). The folder should automatically switch to the default Templates folder.
4. To keep the default template, insert a name in the File Name text box. I use MyBlank.
5. Click Save.

Maybe you are also interested in:

PowerPoint to DVD Burner PowerPoint to Video Converter

PowerPoint to FLV Converter Burn PPT to DVD

PowerPoint to DVD for Education PowerPoint to Video for Education

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Back to School Fun: DIY Back-to-school DVD Movie with PowerPoint

Half fun, half fear. That is always what your kids feel in the first week of school. Fun in meeting new friends, and fear of the summer gone-by yet of what’s to come. As teachers and parents, you can plan a colorful series of back to school crafts and activities to shatter the fear and encourage your kids. You may throw a funny film shot at night of the first school day, but I assume it would be more interesting and inspiring to guide kids to DIY their own back-to-school DVD movies with PowerPoint. Since kids are curious to new things, a challenging movie creation may dig their inspiration of crafts, brush up their computer skills, drive out initial back-to-school fear, and rebuild confidence in them. So this new school year, teach your children to make an icebreaker back-to-school DVD movie with PowerPoint and make a shiny start.

What You Will Need:

• High-def Digital Photos

• MS PowerPoint on Your PC

• Mood Music or Video Clips

• Quality Blank DVD Disk(s)

• Moyea PPT to DVD Burner Edu

• DVD Player or Projector

What to Do:

Generally, this back-to-school DVD movie requires 2 processes - One is to mould in PowerPoint, One is to burn to DVD disc.

A. Mould back-to-school PowerPoint slideshow

I recommend MS PowerPoint because it is easy to use for young kids. You don’t need to be a genius to use and teach PowerPoint. Now the first step you are to take is to compose the shape of the back-to-school movie with PowerPoint. Have no idea of the "shape"? It indicates what kind of story you want to develop in the back-to-school movie. It can either be an immediate record of awesome activities on the first school day, or an exotic collection of each kid’s photo memories of the past summer vacation.

As to the movie story itself, you should associate it with your existing sources: the most basic factor digital photos, the effect accelerator mood music (also background music), or fitting video clips to give more of a touch. Be sure you have enough high-def photos in hand to support a back-to-school movie show (usu. 7-10 photos per minute).

When all the materials for the digital project are ready, it’s time to assemble them into PowerPoint. You can use Photo Album in PowerPoint 2003/2007 to add in and edit the photos in order, insert the ready video clip to an expected slide, title the scenes of your movie story, and give a music mood that hits the point.

After edition, it comes to the second process:

B. Burn back-to-school PowerPoint presentation to DVD disc

A slideshow is not enough. Your back-to-school PowerPoint presentation can be playback on a DVD player or projector like a real TV show. All you need is to burn it to accessible DVD with such a cheap but effective app as Moyea PPT to DVD Burner Edu, an e-Learning program that can burn PowerPoint to SCORM compliant DVD and video at on go. Here is a simple guide of burning PowerPoint to DVD disc.

a. Pop in a blank DVD disc to your PC if supportable. Otherwise, you will finally get DVD image files of the back-to-school movie that requires another burning app to burn to disc.

b. Install and launch Moyea PPT to DVD Burner Edu. Then import the back-to-school PowerPoint file.

c. Select the output to DVD (either Standard or High Definition). Personalize your back-to-school DVD movie with your individual logo. Also select a proper DVD theme from the Menu tab.

d. Click Start to burn the back-to-school PowerPoint to DVD (disc).

For illustrative details of burning a PowerPoint presentation to DVD, see in How to Burn PowerPoint to DVD

OK. Your back-to-school DVD movie is ready on a disc. Connect it to a DVD player hooked to a large-screen TV, or to your school computer with a projector. Turn the icebreaker movie on, sit back with your kids, and enjoy the fun school day project!

You may also need these how-tos:

How to Set Background Music in PowerPoint?

How to Insert a Video into a PowerPoint File?

Related:

PowerPoint to DVD PowerPoint to Video PowerPoint to FLV

PowerPoint to DVD for Education PowerPoint to Video for Education

PowerPoint for Web PowerPoint to PDF PowerPoint to DVD Burner

Convert PowerPoint to Video PowerPoint to DVD Converter