Can't get rid of shadows

[Cat]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Power PC

I did not select the shadows option in Powerpoint 2008, but all my text (helvetica) has shadows--even though this option is not selected under Font Shadow. Thus, I can't get rid of these semi-transparent fonts.

No problem except when I animate text the shadows don't animate. That is, the shadows sit there while the text animates over and onto them. What's bizarre is my title text also has an unrequested shadow, but in this case the shadow does animate with the text.

I had this problem with the 2004 version--but only when I viewed the slide show on a PC. Now it's a problem on my Mac. I know PC's don't work with semi-transparent shadows and I'm happy to get rid of the shadows--but I can't (and I need to this to work on a PC).

Please help!
Thanks
Cat

 

[Phil_Brown_[MSFT]]

Hello, to disable the Shadow element, you also want to go to Format | Font, and deselect Text Shadow in the pane on the left. If these are hard shadows from 2004, you will need to enable the Formatting toolbar (View | Toolbars | Formatting) and make sure the Shadow button (next to Bold, Italic, etc) is deselected for the selected textboxes or placeholders.

-Phil

 

[Cat]

Phil

Thanks for your quick response. I think the second option would have worked for me. I did realize my PPT was from 2004. I solved the problem, but selecting a new slide theme without "hard" shadows.

Cat

 

[tkewokij]

any way to remove shadow from all powerpoint slides? Shadow is not fun for printing... and every slide has it... I only know how to remove it one at a time.

 

[Jason Andersen [MSFT]]

A quick manual way to do this is to go to a slide, use Cmd+A to select all
the objects on the slide, then in the Formatting Palette under the Shadow
pane, select the Shadow checkbox to turn all shadows off for that slide.

The downside is you have to do this for every slide.

A quicker way to do this for large presentations is to use Applescript:

tell application "Microsoft Powerpoint"
repeat with thisSlide in (get every slide in active presentation)
repeat with thisShape in (get every shape in thisSlide)
set visible of shadow format of thisShape to false
end repeat
end repeat
end tell

Enter the above text into Script Editor. Then open the presentation you want
to remove shadow from and run the script. The script will iterate through
every shape in every slide, and will turn off the shadow for each shape.

- Jason

 

[deuterium]

A quicker way to do this for large presentations is to use Applescript:
- Jason

Jason,

thank you for your AppleScript snippet. It was of great help to me,
although somehow I had some presentations it wouldn't work on. I found
out that this was the case with presentations that had the shadow
format set for individual ranges of text instead of globally for the
text box. For future reference I took the liberty to modify your
example to also hide the shadows from individual text ranges:

tell application "Microsoft PowerPoint"
repeat with thisSlide in (get every slide in active presentation)
repeat with thisShape in (get every shape in thisSlide)
set visible of shadow format of font of text range of text frame of
thisShape to false
set visible of shadow format of thisShape to false
end repeat
end repeat
end tell

Have fun,

Phil