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Video Transcript

Hey, this is Bryan Jones from eLearningArt. Today I’m going to show you how to create a button set so you can have multiple states in a button. Now I’m just going to go ahead and show you the effect. See there, so if you hovered over or clicked it might change to that and we are going to show you how to do it all in PowerPoint. I will do another version here where it’s kind of the whole box that’s changing and here it is with the reflection there as well so it looks a little bit different.

Anyways, this is done all in PowerPoint. I will give you the source files so that you can play along and open up the file and see how I did it.

In a previous version I showed you how to build these icon boxes so you can check out the video there. But let’s go ahead and take a look at how I might approach this.

Now one thing when you are creating these button sets you need this sizes to be exactly the same so you want to duplicate. And you will actually run into a few problems and I will show you what you can do. The cleanest way to do it is just to select this whole thing; it will be exactly the way you want it to look. You are going to copy it and then you’re going to paste it as a picture.

And now there we have it and you see it has a lot of extra space. We want to get rid of that and that’s because the reflection is there. Anytime you use these PowerPoint formatting things, things can get a little bit wonky. But let’s go ahead and format. We will crop it. I will drag that up there and now we are good to go and now I can just duplicate by holding control, dragging off of it and now let’s go ahead and format that.

Go to format, then Color, then format as Gray and these will be my two different versions and now I can just go Save As Picture and we will just call that test and we will do this file – save as… sorry right-click, Save As and we will say “test2”. Let me just save that. And let me just show you what is going to happen. If I go to that folder and a look at test, it’s 340 x 464 and this one is 340 x 464 so they match up exactly and that’s why I like that method.

Then if you were to be toggling in a program now, it would look perfect. Let’s go ahead and look at this again. Let me get that out of the way.

Now if I removed the reflection and I just… I can actually do the format if I wanted things to remain vector, I can do that. I just moved this. I remove the effect which is the picture and if I saved each one of these now I would have to recolor each object separately here so I make that gray and hide that text box really quickly. Make this gray, put the text back in and then make the outline gray and if I save this as… if I saved it as a picture actually I don’t even… I already saved it so I will go ahead and show you what that looks like. But for no reflection you will see I had 341 x 479, 341 x 479. That worked out great.

And I will show you one where there is like a problem. This is really annoying so I just wanted to do this button and if I duplicate this, control and drag down and then let’s say I just make this color and let’s say I want the background to be maybe the gray color as well. And if I saved this as a picture and I will just do zzz and I will do this one, save as picture and I will go zzz2.

Now I think this one is because of the… or the shadow effect so there is zzz, 280 x 280 and then 280 x 281. Now that’s going to be really annoying when I build these button sets and that will happen a lot when you are dealing with the formatting. So it just won’t line up perfectly when you put it into whatever program with the rollover effect. It’s going to shift to slightly.

So again the way around that would be instead of doing it this way you are going to click copy and then you’re going to paste it as a picture and then you will duplicate that one and now they will be exactly the same size. So now let’s go ahead and format – color, we will make it this one and now if I said let’s name this one save as picture we will go yyy and we’ll go save as picture, yyy2. Now let’s go ahead and open those back up again and my button sets I see the yyy and we’ve got 280 x 280 and 280 x 280.

Anyways that’s a little trick you know you want to size it up to whatever size you want it to be before saving it as the picture if you are dealing with a vector first because it’s not going to be… you can end up with it being pixelated or blurred a little bit.

So just make it big enough that when you save it as a picture, you might paste it or copy and paste it is a picture, that you have it bigger than what you would need and that works really well. But you know you can do this in any graphic design program but I just find that working in PowerPoint is such an easy thing to do; you just have to work around kind of this odd effects that sometimes happen where you are off by a pixel and just make sure you look at the pixels and you preview the image.

Anyways hope you found that useful. I do have a special bonus for you here at the end so you can go ahead and download that or look at the show notes. The download link will be there as well.

I also put another couple other lessons that I think you might find useful in here and if you made it this far thank you so much and I would really appreciate if you would take the extra five seconds and like this video. And if you would like to receive more videos like this you can subscribe to the channel. I do a ton of PowerPoint design tutorials.

Thanks so much and you have a wonderful day.