blueprint for a successful presentation

Biswajit Tripathy

Published by: Orissaa.com

Design your Business

Design your Business

by

Biswajit Tripathy

NOTE TO READERS Though every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in the book, it may change at any time for various reasons that includes technical advancement, upgradation of softwares etc. Readers should be sure to call, email us for confirmation of any information that is found questionable in this book. If you find any information out-of-date or incorrect, we would appreciate it if you would let us know via our email id ([email protected]). No parts of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher.

W e Spend our days w aiting for the ideal pathW e Spend our days w aiting for the ideal pathW e Spend our days w aiting for the ideal pathW e Spend our days w aiting for the ideal path to appear to appear to appear to appear in front of us. B ut w hat w e forget is that, Paths are in front of us. B ut w hat w e forget is that, Paths are in front of us. B ut w hat w e forget is that, Paths are in front of us. B ut w hat w e forget is that, Paths are m ade by w alking, not by w aiting.m ade by w alking, not by w aiting.m ade by w alking, not by w aiting.m ade by w alking, not by w aiting.

---- A nonym ous A nonym ous A nonym ous A nonym ous ----

To my Father who was always a spring in the summer of my days, his name is Basanta, which means Spring, My Mother whose name is Puspa, meaning Flower. She has always showered my path with flowers, My Wife Ruby who is a very precious part of my life, My Kids Harsh & Khushi, who are the source of my happiness and the reason for my life. & to all those who always thought I would never make it; they gave me the determination to go ahead.

Making of…. Why another book on PowerPoint? If that’s what you are thinking now, then you need to read this book; because this is not just another book on PowerPoint. This is the book on PowerPoint, which has started where all other books have chosen to end. This book talks about a lot of features of PowerPoint that you may not find anywhere else. This book will guide you to design the most beautiful & professional presentation you have ever designed. I am not a master in PowerPoint. After completing my graduation in Computer Engineering, I started working for a few companies and gradually reached a senior level where I needed to develop a lot of presentations. The low quality of presentations being designed was a major irritant to me and I started thinking of doing something that will help every PowerPoint user to make better presentations in an easier way. I started reading a lot of books on PowerPoint & read a lot of articles on Internet. But then I found that there was not a single book on PowerPoint that had the level of detail that I wanted. There was no material available to tell you how to design your own templates, to reduce the size of a big presentation, to convert your presentation to a self-running executable file & so on. This book has tried to cover a lot of things that you will need, which are not available anywhere else. So here I am and here is this book. I hope that everyone who reads and uses this book will find it useful. I am sure this book will address the purpose it is meant for. Please read the book & tell others if this book has been useful to you.

Dreams do come true….. You only have to believe they can.. After completing my Engineering in Computer Science, I started working as a Software Engineer for few years. Then I moved on to work for an Aerospace Company. After a year, I moved to work in a few manufacturing companies. After leaving my job in Paradeep Phosphates Limited as the Head of IT in 2004, I designed a website www.or issaa.com. During that time, I also planned to write this book. After the website was stabilized a bit, I went on to write the book. During the making of this book I have done a lot of research. I hope it helps you. All the best and enjoy this book.

Blueprints for a successful presentation

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HISTORY OF POWERPOINT ................................................................................................................................................ 12

BEFORE USING MICROSOFT POWERPOINT..................................................................................................................... 15

CREATING A SIMPLE PRESENTATION............................................................................................................................... 19

Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................................. 20

Getting Started........................................................................................................................................................................ 20

Slide Manipulation .................................................................................................................................................................. 22

Adding Transitions to a Slide Show ........................................................................................................................................ 26

Color Scheme ......................................................................................................................................................................... 26 Using the Animation Scheme .............................................................................................................................................. 26 Using Custom Animations ................................................................................................................................................... 26

Reviewing the Slide Show ...................................................................................................................................................... 27 To preview the slide show ................................................................................................................................................... 27 Highlighting parts of the slide show ..................................................................................................................................... 27 To use the Slide Show Menu............................................................................................................................................... 27 Navigating While In Your Slide Show .................................................................................................................................. 27

Saving Your Presentation ....................................................................................................................................................... 28 Saving the document as another file type............................................................................................................................ 28 Saving to the Web ............................................................................................................................................................... 28 To save a copy of a presentation to a Web server in Windows Explorer ............................................................................. 28

Pack & Go............................................................................................................................................................................... 28 Pack up a presentation for use on another computer .......................................................................................................... 28 Unpack a presentation to run on another computer............................................................................................................. 28

Designing a Quick Presentation using Design Template ........................................................................................................ 29

Printing a Presentation ........................................................................................................................................................... 29 To print notes....................................................................................................................................................................... 29 To print handouts................................................................................................................................................................. 29

MIND MAPPING..................................................................................................................................................................... 31 How to Draw a Mind Map .................................................................................................................................................... 32 Benefits of Mind Mapping .................................................................................................................................................... 33 Creating a Mind Map ........................................................................................................................................................... 33

ADDING MULTIMEDIA CONTENTS ...................................................................................................................................... 34

About recording a voice narration or sound in a slide show.................................................................................................... 35

To record a voice narration ..................................................................................................................................................... 35

To insert a CD audio track on a slide...................................................................................................................................... 36

To insert a video on a slide ..................................................................................................................................................... 36

Adding Flash Animation to PowerPoint Presentations............................................................................................................ 36

CREATING A TEMPLATE...................................................................................................................................................... 38


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Creating Custom Templates ................................................................................................................................................... 39

To create a design template ................................................................................................................................................... 39

To create a content template .................................................................................................................................................. 40

To add a template to the AutoContent Wizard ........................................................................................................................ 40

Animating PowerPoint Design Templates............................................................................................................................... 40

IMPORTING OTHER OFFICE FORMATS ............................................................................................................................. 41

Import Microsoft Word text into your presentation .................................................................................................................. 42

To import an Microsoft Excel chart ......................................................................................................................................... 42

CREATING PORTABLE PRESENTATIONS.......................................................................................................................... 43

MACRO PROGRAMMING IN POWERPOINT........................................................................................................................ 45 Create a New Presentation.................................................................................................................................................. 46

PROJECTING YOUR SLIDESHOW IN THE CLASSROOM .................................................................................................. 50

PROOFING, EDITING, & COLLABORATING ........................................................................................................................ 53

To check consistency and style .............................................................................................................................................. 54

To follow up with Meeting Minder and Action Items................................................................................................................ 54

Master slides and custom templates....................................................................................................................................... 54

Customizing your slides using the slide master ...................................................................................................................... 54

To change master text and title styles .................................................................................................................................... 54

COPYING YOUR PRESENTATION TO MEMORY STICK..................................................................................................... 55

ADVANCED POWERPOINT .................................................................................................................................................. 57

Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................................. 58

Working with Text ................................................................................................................................................................... 58 Guides and Rulers............................................................................................................................................................... 58

Identifying Toolbars ................................................................................................................................................................ 59

Page Setup for 35mm slides................................................................................................................................................... 61

Creating Action Buttons .......................................................................................................................................................... 61

Adding Objects to Slides Using the Drawing Toolbar ............................................................................................................. 61

Advanced Drawing Techniques .............................................................................................................................................. 63

Combining Presentation ......................................................................................................................................................... 65

Creating Original Artworks in PowerPoint ............................................................................................................................... 65


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Builds and Transitions - A Review .......................................................................................................................................... 66

Setting Animation.................................................................................................................................................................... 66

Saving a Slide as a Graphic File............................................................................................................................................. 67

Organizational Charts ............................................................................................................................................................. 67

Showing Off your Presentation at a KIOSK ............................................................................................................................ 68

Annotating Slides.................................................................................................................................................................... 69

Style Checker ......................................................................................................................................................................... 69

ADDING A NARRATION ........................................................................................................................................................ 70

EXTENDING POWERPOINT BEYOND ................................................................................................................................. 73

POWERPOINT FAQS ............................................................................................................................................................ 77

Drawing In PowerPoint ........................................................................................................................................................... 77

Pictures and Other External Files ........................................................................................................................................... 78

Animation and Slide Show...................................................................................................................................................... 80

Sound and Video .................................................................................................................................................................... 82

Printing.................................................................................................................................................................................... 83

Formatting............................................................................................................................................................................... 84

Saving, Using, Editing And Opening Presentations ................................................................................................................ 85

Unsolved Mysteries ................................................................................................................................................................ 87

POWERPOINT TIPS .............................................................................................................................................................. 88

Toolbars.................................................................................................................................................................................. 88

Saving, Using, Editing And Opening Presentations ................................................................................................................ 90

Formatting............................................................................................................................................................................... 92

Transitions & Animations ...................................................................................................................................................... 103

Templates ............................................................................................................................................................................. 104

Drawing In PowerPoint ......................................................................................................................................................... 106

Pictures And Other External Files......................................................................................................................................... 107

Printing.................................................................................................................................................................................. 109

PowerPoint Mysteries ........................................................................................................................................................... 111

Powerpoint Add Ins............................................................................................................................................................... 113


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POWERPOINT KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS ......................................................................................................................... 114

Text Formatting..................................................................................................................................................................... 114

Deleting and Copying ........................................................................................................................................................... 114

Navigating in Text Blocks...................................................................................................................................................... 114

Navigating and Working With Objects .................................................................................................................................. 114

Outlining, in All Views ........................................................................................................................................................... 115

Outlining, in Outline View...................................................................................................................................................... 115

Selecting, in Text .................................................................................................................................................................. 115

Working with Slides and Presentation Files .......................................................................................................................... 115

Working with Presentation Windows..................................................................................................................................... 115

Drawing & Formatting ........................................................................................................................................................... 115

Controlling Slides in Slide Show ........................................................................................................................................... 116

Getting Help & Programming Tools ...................................................................................................................................... 116

Blueprints for a Successful Presentation

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History of PowerPoint


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Microsoft PowerPoint is a powerful tool to create presentations and slide shows. These presentations are laid out in a storyboard type fashion, where individual slides are created & formatted with text & images. Microsoft PowerPoint allows you to construct dynamic looking presentations from scratch or by using the easy to use wizard. You can also choose to prepare the presentations manually if you have got some basic expertise. 1983 - April 1987: PowerPoint Version 1 First version of PowerPoint published by Forethought of Sunnyvale, CA. This version was originally called “Presenter” and was designed for Windows version 2.0 Development was done by 2 developers, and it took them exactly 16 months to complete Coding of the same was done using a Lisa with two 5 MB hard drives connected via the serial port. Ran on any Macintosh with 512K RAM and a floppy drive—no hard disk required.

Forthought was founded by Rob Campbell and Taylor Pohlman in order to develop a software called Presenter which was later renamed as Powerpoint. Features All slides in one file. Slide Master, Handout Pages & Note Pages. Slide Show, Lines, Boxes & Circles. Black & White

May 1988: PowerPoint Version 2 In August 1987, Microsoft acquires Forethought for $14 Million; the product unit stays in California. The competitor Aldus ships Persuasion 1.0 for Macintosh: outliner multiple masters graphing polygons Harvard Graphics for DOS. Lotus Freelance for DOS.

Features Find & Replace, Spell Checker, Color Schemes, Shaded Fills. Genigraphics Driver for slides

May 1990: Windows PowerPoint Version 2 This was the first presentation product for Windows 3.0. Fonts are a major problem for everyone. Harvard Graphics announces move to OS/2; later ships Windows product with same UI as DOS version. Lotus Freelance ships newly designed product on OS/2, then Windows. Aldus slow to release buggy, slow Windows product with poor Mac file compatibility.

Features 256 color support, WYSIWYG support, Bullets, Graphing, Compatibility with Harvard Graphics.

May 1992: PowerPoint Version 3 PowerPoint version 3 is again the first application which required Windows 3.1. Introduction of TrueType Fonts in this version of PowerPoint. Major release with shared code between Mac and Windows versions. Aldus share leader on Macintosh. Harvard Graphics share leader on PCs. Microsoft puts serious effort into promoting Microsoft Office.

Features Outlining & drawing tools, transition effects, flying bullets, sounds & video

February 1994: PowerPoint Version 4.0 The suite battles begin from here with other players like Lotus SmartSuite, Word Perfect. Lotus ships SmartSuite: 1-2-3, Ami Pro, Freelance Graphics Word Perfect ships PerfectOffice: Word Perfect, Quattro Pro, Draw Perfect Harvard Graphics can’t find a dance partner Aldus ignores Windows market, focuses on Mac.

Features Office look & feel: tooltips, status bar, OLE 2.0, Auto Layouts, Auto Content Wizard, Word Tables, Rehearsal & Hidden Slides.


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February 1994: PowerPoint Version 7.0 Application version number goes random. Microsoft owns major market share on PCs & MACs due to phenomenal sales of Microsoft Office. Lotus was bought by IBM & Word Perfect bought by Novell. Aldus was also bought by Adobe & was left on Cans. Harvard was left to die.

Features Rewritten in C++, VBA programmability, Real curves & textures, New animation schemes, meeting minder, auto correct, black & white view.

May 1997: PowerPoint Version 97 By this time most of original PowerPoint team has left Microsoft. Microsoft has dominant market share -- virtually no competition. Central office development team makes most product decisions. Focus on electronic presentations and on-line documents. Product is Virtually “documentation free”

Features Office Assistant, File compression, save to HTML, improved sound & animation effects, pack & go, Auto Clipart.

June 1999: Office 2000. (From here onwards PowerPoint became a part of Microsoft Office Suite) Now 4 versions of Office, that ship nine different products. Typical installation of Office Premium: 626 MB for all nine apps. PowerPoint version 2000.

Features Tri Pane view, picture bullets, animated GIFs, Save to Web, Auto Fit text, real tables, presentation conferencing, aliased fonts.

Sometime in 2004: Powerpoint 2002, XP Version Comparing & Merging changes in presentation, animation paths for various shapes.

2005: Powerpoint 2003 Enhanced Collaboration between co-workers. Package for CD Improved Graphics & Multimedia.

Non’2006: Microsoft Office 2007 A lot of new features like Office One Note have been a part of MS Office Suite.

Major changes in User Interface & enhanced graphics capabilities.


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Before Using Microsoft PowerPoint


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Check for latest updates PowerPoint is a complex software and like any other software this might also have bugs. Microsoft works real hard to fix bugs as & when they're discovered. To get the fixes, you have to use what are called "Service Packs". We strongly recommend that you check regularly for updates to your versions of both PowerPoint/Office and of Windows. These updates are available in Microsoft site. It is possible that you may not want to apply all available patches and service packs. If that is the case, you'll need to read the information from Microsoft to decide what to update and what not to? But ... if you use Office 2003, you should use Service Pack 1. For Office updates, start at http://office.microsoft.com/officeupdate/default.aspx?CTT=6&Origin=EC790020111033 For Windows updates see http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/default.mspx Or if you have one of these Windows versions: Windows XP/Home, click Start, and then click Help and Support. Windows XP or Windows 2000, click Start, Windows Update Make sure you've got a printer driver installed and set it as Default PowerPoint needs to find a printer driver when it starts up. Install some kind of printer driver and set it as your default. Even if you don’t have a printer, install simple any printer driver that you find available in your PC. Any printer with postscript fonts is advisable. Even if you never actually print to this driver, it'll make PowerPoint run smoothly. It doesn't matter whether the printer's connected or not. You don't even need to own a printer. If your default printer is on a network and the driver's installed on the network too, you'll have problems if the network goes down or if you disconnect from the network. That's the same as having no default printer at all. Laptop users should watch out for this one especially. Hence, it's advisable to install a local driver as your default printer, even though you never print to it.

Turn off Fast Saves Select Options from the Tools menu. In the Options dialog box, click on the Save tab. Remove the checkmark next to Allow Fast Saves.

Cut back on the number of Undos Click the Edit tab of the Options dialog box. Change Maximum Number of Undos to something reasonable. Ten or less seems like plenty; can you remember back more steps than that? Leaving Undos set too high uses more memory and can confuse PowerPoint at times. The default is always 20. And as long as you're in Options PowerPoint 97: Advanced tab Here you can set your Default File Location -- the drive and folder where PowerPoint will automatically offer to open/save your presentations when you do a File, Open or File, Save. PowerPoint 2000 onwards: Same deal, except it's on the Save tab. Print tab Turn off Background Printing. It might seem that Background Printing would speed up your work, but it probably won't. PowerPoint returns control to you a little more quickly when Background Printing is turned on, but


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because it's sharing computer cycles with the printing process, performance suffers (both your editing work and printing). Overall, you'll print faster with Background Printing turned off. And your printouts may be better: sometimes PowerPoint misprints notes pages if Background Printing is on. You may also want to experiment with turning Print Inserted Objects At Printer Resolution ON. This can improve your printouts of e.g. pie charts.

Turn off Automatic Layout if you have PowerPoint XP or higher Automatic layout can cause no end of peculiar little problems and this seems to have no practical value. Turn it off. Choose Tools, AutoCorrect Options (you'll need to have a presentation open for this to work). Click the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Remove the checkmark next to "Automatic layout for inserted objects" Click OK Though this appears to be a presentation-specific setting, once you turn it off, it will stay off.

Check the TEMP folder Periodically check your \TEMP folder and delete excess files. If there's a lot of stuff in there, it can slow PowerPoint (and other programs) down dramatically. If you use PowerPoint 2000 Choose Tools, Customize then click the Options tab. Remove the checkmark next to Menus Show Recently Used Commands First. This prevents PowerPoint from "hiding" menu items you don't use often. That's it, but ... Here are a few other suggestions that may prevent you from losing your work: NEVER open from or save to a diskette directly. Always copy presentations to your hard drive, open them, save them to your hard drive, then copy them back to diskette if necessary. Avoid opening from/saving to a shared Novell or NFS network drive. As with diskettes, work from a local (ie, on your hard drive) copy of the presentation, then copy it off to the network drive when you're done with it. Save Regularly and save often. Here's a good way to work: While you're working on a presentation, press Ctrl+S every few slides to save the presentation. Every time you're about to make any major changes, choose File, Save As and give the file a new name. We like to tack on a number ... MyPresentation-1, MyPresentation-2, MyPresentation-3 and so on. Or if you prefer something more automatic (and elegant), download & install Sequential Save, an utility which saves PowerPoint files sequentially on every changes. In either case, periodically copy the most recently saved file off to another drive, a network drive, removable storage or burn it to CD. That way if the computer's hard drive crashes, you don't lose all your work.

Windows setup We suggest making the following change to your default Windows setup: Make Windows show your file extensions. Normally, Windows hides the dot+three-character file extension from you. This file extension is what Windows uses to decide what application owns each of your flies, what to do when you double-click an icon and so forth. Sooner or later, you'll need to view or change the extension for one of your PowerPoint or related files, so to avoid confusion then, get Windows in the habit of showing you the info now. Here's how:


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Double-click My Computer, Choose Tools, Folder Options from the menu bar of the "My Computer" window

Click the View tab Scroll down a bit and remove the check mark next to "Hide extensions for known file types" Make sure the other options are set the way you want them for all folders on you computer

Click "Apply to all folders" Now when somebody suggests something cryptic like "Rename your .PPT file to .PPS" you'll be able to see what they're talking about and you'll know how to do it.


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Creating a Simple Presentation

When you complete this chapter you will know

1. How to Open PowerPoint 2. Getting Started with PowerPoint 3. Various Views 4. Slide Manipulation 5. Adding Transitions 6. Color Schemes 7. Review the show 8. Saving Presentation 9. Pack & Go 10. Using Templates 11. Printing a Presentation


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Introduction

PowerPoint is an application that lets you create, print, and deliver presentations. You have several options for the delivery of a presentation, but you only have to develop it once. You can print slides (a "slide" is what PowerPoint calls each screen of information), print handouts, print notes pages, prepare for 35mm slides, or deliver an on-screen presentation. Only the on-screen presentation allows you to use the full range of PowerPoint's features. This chapter will help you get started with PowerPoint prepare a basic presentation with a little effort. But the best idea will be using the help files that are an integral part of Microsoft PowerPoint.

Getting Started

How to get started with PowerPoint?

Click on the Start button >> Programs >> Microsoft PowerPoint OR Click on the Start button >> Programs >> Microsoft Office >> Microsoft PowerPoint, in case of Office 2003.

About the Slides On any given slide in a PowerPoint presentation, you can present information in a variety of ways. You can type in text using text boxes, images, or sounds, create charts, graphs, lists. Each element in a slide is considered its own object, and can be moved or modified independently from other objects in a slide. As you develop a PowerPoint presentation, it is important to remember that you should not try to include every piece of information you wish to deliver. PowerPoint slides should contain brief, concise, descriptive phrases that will help you remember what you want to present and to serve as a reminder for your audience. The most common mistake made by novice PowerPoint developers is to stuff too much information on each slide. When you start PowerPoint, the new presentation dialog box offers four choices as follows:

AutoContent Wizard asks you a series of questions designed to invite information about you and the type of presentation you are making. The Wizard then builds a dummy presentation that will guide you in developing the content of the presentation.

Design Template allows you to establish the background and color scheme from the available templates prior to beginning work in the new presentation. Template choices are generally easier to make after you have opened the new presentation because you can better see the characteristics of each template before making a selection. You can either select the available templates, download templates from web or prepare your custom templates with the help of information in later part of this book. Blank presentation opens a new presentation with no template. Open an existing presentation displays a list of recently opened PowerPoint presentations from which you can choose. Or, you may choose More Files to move to the location of a previously saved presentation file and open it. Auto Layout After you have opened a new presentation, PowerPoint displays the New Slide dialog box containing twelve AutoLayouts. AutoLayouts provide a pre-determined layout for each specific


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type of slide. They provide consistency throughout the presentation. Each layout depicted is described in the lower right corner when you click the layout. This sample New Slide dialog box shows the Title Slide selected (denoted with the thick border).

Title Slide Bulleted List Two Column Text Table Text & Chart Chart & Text Organizational Chart Chart Text & Clip Art Clip Art & Text Title Only Blank Slide Note: If you know what information you are going to put in your presentation, it is a good idea to use pre-designed layouts from above. Else choose the Blank Slide & go ahead with your presentation.

Different Views That PowerPoint Demonstrates There are different views within Microsoft PowerPoint that allow you to look at your presentation from different perspectives. Normal View Outline View Slide View Slide Sorter View Slide Show View

Switches to normal view, where you can work on one slide at a time or organize the structure of all the slides in your presentation

Switches to outline view, where you can work with the structure of your file in outline form. Work in outline view when you need to organize the structure of your file.

Switches to slide view, where you can work on one slide at a time

Displays miniature versions of all slides in a presentation, complete with text and graphics. In slide sorter view, you can reorder slides, add transitions, and animation effects. You can also set the timings for electronic slide shows.

Runs your slide show in a full screen, beginning with the current slide if you are in slide view or the selected slide if you are in slide sorter view. If you simply want to view your show from the first slide: Click Slide Show at the top of the screen Select View Show

Review the PowerPoint Development Area

Title Menu Tool


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Title Bar displays the name of the file that is opened and options for closing, minimizing and maximizing the application window. Menu Bar is the first row, which represents the various options like Edit, File etc. Clicking on each of these options invokes a submenu offering a set of command options. Toolbar contains a set of buttons that allows the users to work faster by clicking on a button that is symbolic of a specific command. Status Bar is available at the bottom of the screen. It displays the slide number on which the cursor is positioned in the active presentation. Drawing Toolbar enables a user to select various drawing options for presentations.

Slide Manipulation

1. Inserting A New Slide Click Insert at top of screen Select New Slide

2. Formatting A Slide Background

You can format your slide to make it look however you would like, whether it be a background color, picture, or a design template built into Microsoft PowerPoint. The next step will show you how to apply a Design Template, but the other items mentioned above can be accomplished the same way.

Click Format on the menu bar. Select Apply Design Template Select Design you wish to apply Click Apply Button

3. Adding Text to a Slide

Open the presentation you created. The first slide already contains the title and your name. Also, note that the footer text that you chose is on the slide. In the Outline pane, select the text “State the purpose of the discussion” and then type Classroom procedures, attendance, and grades. Select the text “Identify yourself” and then type Instructor and student introductions. Continue by replacing text in each of the slides. You can edit slides at any time by clicking the text you want to change. Then you can delete, add, or change text.

Normal View

Slide Sorter

Slide


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4. Adding Notes to a Slide

The Notes pane is used to add speaking notes to a presentation. After you have completed a presentation, you can print the presentation with notes so that you can keep track of what is coming up next in the presentation. Use the scroll bar in the Slide pane to move to the first slide in the presentation. Click in the Notes pane. Type Explain that the presentation will give all class participants an overview of what to expect for the coming semester. Continue to add notes to each slide by selecting the slide with the scroll bar, clicking in the Notes pane, and then typing the notes. Save your work.

5. Replacing Fonts in your Presentation

On the Format menu, click Replace Fonts. To see this option, you may have to click the chevron. In the With box, click Arial Black. Click Replace. Click the Replace menu and click Tahoma. In the With box, click AvantGarde. Click Replace. Repeat steps 4-6 until you have selected the most effective fonts for your presentation. Click Close when you have finished. Save your work.

6. Inserting Clipart & Pictures

Display the slide you want to add a picture to. Click Insert on the menu bar. Select Picture Select Clip Art Click the category you want Click the picture you want Click Insert Clip on the shortcut menu When you are finished using the Clip Gallery, click the Close button on the Clip Gallery title bar Steps 1-4 are very similar when inserting other Pictures, Objects, Movies, Sounds, and Charts

7. Add an Autoshape

On the Insert menu, click Picture and then click AutoShapes. Click Stars and Banners and then click the 5-Point Star. Click in the upper-right corner of the slide and then drag the object down diagonally about one inch. To delete an AutoShape, right-click the AutoShape you want to delete and then click Cut.

8. Add an Autoshape with Text On the AutoShapes toolbar, click Callouts. Click the Rounded Rectangular Callout. Click in the slide and drag the object down diagonally about one inch. Type the text of your choice. Select the text you have just typed. Right-click the Callout box, click Font, change the font size to 24, and then click OK. Click and drag the upper-right corner of the Callout box until all the text fits within it. Close the AutoShapes toolbar.

9. Grouping & Ungrouping

• Choose the objects or pictures you want to group. From the drawing toolbar, select Draw – Group. You will see all individual pictures or objects will be combined to a single object. For ungrouping, select the object, click Draw – Ungroup. All the individual components in the object will be ungrouped.


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10. Insert a Chart

Click on the Insert Menu Click New Slide Click on Chart Type a title: Create a Chart Double-click on the box marked “Double click to add chart” PowerPoint includes sample data that can be replaced with your own. Change the numbers under 1st Qtr with: 85, 62.5, 15 Change the chart type to a 3D bar. Click the Chart Type button on the toolbar: Select 3D Bar Click on the white area outside of the chart box to return to PowerPoint slide view.

11. Inserting Slide Numbers, Date Time

Select Insert – Slide Number from the menu bar to insert a slide number. Select Insert – Date/Time from the menu bar to insert your date/time.

12. Inserting Headers & Footers

On the View menu, click Header and Footer. On the Slide tab, under Include on slide, select Date and time and Update automatically if you want the date to reflect the last date the slides were modified. You can also do one of the following: You can also select a date format from the date list - Or – Select Fixed and type the date you will be giving the presentation, so that it reflects when the presentation is given instead of when it was updated. Select Slide number to print a number on each slide. Select Footer; the text English 7-8 is already in the footer. To change this, select the text and then type the preferred text in the text box. Select Don't show on title slide. This shows the footer you have created on all subsequent slides, but leave the footer off the title slide. Click Apply to All to make these changes throughout the presentation.

13. Inserting Movie & Sound

For a media-rich slideshow, you may decide to display some movie or sound files that you can play during your presentation. You must first have the movie or sound file saved on your computer. For more details on this, see the later part of this book. You can insert a voice narration, video, audio, music etc in this section.

14. Inserting Comments

On the Insert menu, click Comment, and then type Remember to update this slide. PowerPoint 2000 automatically adds your user name to indicate that you wrote the note. To move the comment, move the pointer over the it. When the double-headed arrow appears, click and drag the comment to where you want to move it. To turn off Comments, on the View menu, click Comments.

15. Follow up with meeting minder Participants in an online meeting can also use the Meeting Minder dialog box or the Speaker Notes dialog box to take notes. The notes are visible to all participants. These features are available only when the presentation is in Slide Show view.

To add notes or meeting minutes, right-click the slide and then click Meeting Minder or Speaker Notes.


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Click in the box and then type the notes or minutes. To add an action item, right-click the slide, click Meeting Minder and then click the Action Items tab. Click in the box, type the information for the first action item, and then click Add. Repeat step 2 for every action item and then click OK. The action items appear on a new slide at the end of the slide show.

16. Make your Presentation Look Great with a Background PowerPoint includes several presentation designs with formatting and graphic elements. Even if you only have a black and white printer, there is an option that can make presentation designs look great in black and white. In this exercise, we will show you that option. Add a design:

• Click on the Format Menu • Choose Apply Design • Scroll through the list of designs and select one you like • Click Apply

View your Presentation in Black and White:

• Click on the View Menu • Choose Black and White

17. Inserting Other Objects

Tables: Go to the menu bar and select Insert >> Table to insert a number of rows and columns to create a table. When the table is inserted, a new table menu window will pop up with various formatting features. Here, you can add borders, change the border sizes of the table, and manage the cells in the table. Hyperlink: If you are giving a presentation on a computer that has access to the Internet, then you may find it helpful to have some hyperlinks in your slideshow, so that you can click on a link while you are presenting and then demonstrate a web site. To insert a hyperlink, go to the menu bar and select Insert >> Hyperlink. Then, a new window will appear for specifying the information regarding the hyperlink you want to insert into your document.

List: boxes are the same as any other text box. There are many ways you can create lists in text boxes in PowerPoint. The first way is to create a new slide and choose a slide from the pre-made layouts. You can recognize a slide with a list object box by the bulleted list. Another way to add a list is insert a new text box in a slide. Then, click inside the box. Using the formatting toolbar, click on the Numbering or Bullets button. To start making your list, simply click your cursor next to the first bullet and type. To add a new item to the list, just hit the Enter key on your keyboard to begin a new line. WordArt: Inserting a WordArt element rather than regularly formatting text can give a little extra flair. WordArt is essentially text effects. To bring up the WordArt Gallery, open up the WordArt toolbar by going to the menu bar and selecting View >> Toolbars >> WordArt. A separate toolbar just for making WordArt will now appear. Click on the respective options to create a nice looking wordart to be inserted into the slide. Inserting Wordart

1. On the Insert menu, click Picture and then click WordArt. 2. Double-click the WordArt in the first column, third row. 3. Type the text you want in the WordArt. 4. In the Font box, click a font. 5. In the Size box, click 72. 6. Click OK. The WordArt appears on the slide. 7. Drag the WordArt to the location on the slide that you prefer. 8. Close the WordArt toolbar by clicking the X in the upper-right corner of the toolbar.

Flowchart 1. Select the slide to which you want to add flowchart symbols. 2. On the View menu, click Toolbars and then click Drawing. 3. On the Drawing toolbar, click AutoShapes, click Flowchart, and then click a shape. 4. Click in the slide and then drag the shape down diagonally about one inch.


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5. Type the text you want in the shape and then make any changes to the text like you did with the AutoShape.

6. Add additional flowchart symbols by following steps 3-5.

Add Smart Connectors 1. On the Drawing toolbar, click AutoShapes and then click Connectors. 2. Click Straight Arrow Connector (in the upper-center of the palette). 3. Move the pointer over the shape you just added to your slide. Notice that OfficeArt changes

the pointer to a scope and the object is outlined by four blue boxes. 4. Click any connection point on the first shape. Release the mouse button to anchor the

connector. 5. Click any connection point on a second shape. Release the mouse button to anchor the

connector. 6. Drag the first shape to a new location on the slide. Notice that OfficeArt keeps the arrow

connector attached between the shapes.

Adding Transitions to a Slide Show You can add customized transitions to your slide show that will make it come alive and become appealing to your audience. Follow these steps when adding Slide Transitions. In slide or slide sorter view, select the slide or slides you want to add a transition to. On the Slide Show menu at the top of the screen, click Slide Transition In the Effect box, click the transition you want, and then select any other options you want To apply the transition to the selected slide, click Apply. To apply the transition to all the slides, click Apply to All. Repeat the process for each slide you want to add a transition to. To view the transitions, on the Slide Show menu, click Animation Preview.

Color Scheme Color schemes are useful if you are not already using a pre-made designed template. If you click on the “Color Schemes” text, you will see the color schemes menu. From this point, you can apply pre-made color schemes to one or all slides. Simply click on a color scheme, and you will see how it looks on the current slide appearing on your scheme. If you don’t like any of the available color schemes, click on the Edit Color Schemes or Customs to create your own color schemes. Using the Animation Scheme When you select a text box, an image object, a graph, or any other sort of PowerPoint object, you can choose to apply an animation to it. During your slideshow presentation, instead of the text just appearing on the screen regularly, an applied preset animation uses a special effect to make an object appear on the screen in some sort of action, such as "flying" or "typing" or "spinning" on to the screen. View the Animation Schemes by going to the menu bar and selecting Slide Show >> Animation Schemes. A panel containing all of the animations you can use will appear in the “Slide Design” panel on the right of your screen: Make sure you have selected an object. Then choose a Preset Animation from the list. If you click on an animation name, you can preview the animation on your screen. Using Custom Animations You feel like doing more advanced work with animations, you can choose to make your own special effects to apply to objects. Go to the menu bar and select Slide Show >> Custom Animation. The custom animation options will appear in the “Slide Design” panel on the right side of the screen. Play around with all of the different options until


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you come up with something you like. You can come up with just about any kind of combination of transitions, directions, timing, and grouping of words/letters/objects.

Reviewing the Slide Show Now that you have created a presentation, you can make sure that the delivery is as well prepared as the presentation itself. PowerPoint offers a variety of ways to review and deliver presentations so that they are polished and professional. The Slide Show feature allows you to preview your presentation on your computer. You can use the Slide Show to check a presentation before printing it or to prepare to show it electronically. By adding transitions to your presentation, you can help emphasize topic changes. To preview the slide show

• On the Slide Show menu, click View Show. • After the first slide appears, click anywhere on the screen to move through the presentation. • At the last slide, click anywhere to end the slide show.

Highlighting parts of the slide show

You can use highlighting while you are giving the presentation to add emphasis to important information.

• On the Slide Show menu, click View Show. • Click the right-mouse button, point to Pointer Options and then click Pen. The mouse pointer becomes a

pen. • Click and hold the pen on the slide. Drag the pen around the words you want to highlight until a line

encircles the text. • Click the right-mouse button, point to Pointer Options and then click Arrow. The pen changes back to the

mouse pointer. • Click anywhere on the slide to advance to the next slide. • To save your changes, on the File menu, click Save.

To use the Slide Show Menu

• On the Slide Show menu, click Set Up Show. • Click Browsed at a kiosk and notice that PowerPoint automatically checks the Loop continuously box. • Under Slides, click All. Notice the box at the bottom of the menu that lets you select how slides are

advanced--manually or based on slide timings. The selections that make it easy for you to set up a self-running presentation are all now available in a single menu. Leave as the default by clicking OK.

• On the Slide Show menu, click View Show. The presentation runs in a continuous loop. • To end the show, press ESC.

You can view your slide show by any of the following ways:

Click Slide Show at the lower left of the PowerPoint window. On the Slide Show menu, click View Show. On the View menu, click Slide Show. Press F5 on the keyboard Navigating While In Your Slide Show Forward Navigation: Simply click on the left Mouse Button or hit the Enter Button on your keyboard Reverse Navigation: Hit the Backspace on the keyboard Exiting the show: Hit the Esc Button on the keyboard


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Saving Your Presentation It's important to save your work frequently, so that you don't lose your work. To save your presentation, go to the menu bar and select File >> Save As. When the window appears, find a location to save your presentation on your computer, and give it a file name in the text box. To save your file periodically as you work on it, use the shortcut Ctrl+S. Saving the document as another file type Now that you have a conventional slide show presentation, you can save the presentation as another file type for use on any computer. If you are sharing your presentation with others who have a different version of PowerPoint or other kinds of presentation software or files, you may need to select a different file type. By saving your file in HTML, you make it possible for anyone with a browser to download and read the presentation. Saving to the Web To “Save a presentation to the Web” means to place a copy of the presentation in HTML format on the Web. When saving a presentation to the Web you can do any of the following:

• Make available on the Web a copy of a presentation that only you will edit. • Make a subset of your presentation available. • Select which browser format you want to make your presentation available in, such as Microsoft Internet

Explorer 6.0 or Netscape Navigator 8.0. • Make only the slides (not the notes) of your presentation available.

To save your presentation as a Web page

• On the File menu, click Save as Web Page. • Select a folder and name the file and then click Save. • To view the presentation as a Web page, open it in the browser.

To save a copy of a presentation to a Web server in Windows Explorer

• In Windows Explorer, right-click the file you want to copy or move to a Web server and then click Copy. • Double-click Web Folders. • In the list of Web folder sites, double-click the folder you want and then right-click the destination folder

you want to save the presentation to and then click Paste. • If you don't see the Web server you want to save your presentation to, double-click Add Web Folder at

the root folder of Web Folders to create a new Web folder to it. When you save a presentation as a Web page, all supporting files—such as bullets, background textures, and graphics—are organized in a supporting folder. If you move or copy a Web page to another location, you must also move the supporting folder so that you maintain all links to the Web page.

Pack & Go Pack up a presentation for use on another computer Open the Presentation you want to pack On the File menu, click Pack and Go Follow the instructions in the Pack and Go Wizard. Unpack a presentation to run on another computer Insert the disk or connect to the network location you packed the presentation to In My Computer, go to the location of the packed presentation, and then double-click Pngsetup Enter the destination you want to copy the presentation to


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Designing a Quick Presentation using Design Template

Design Template In the new section of the New Presentation panel, click on the “From Design Template” button. The following panel will then appear. This is a list of different design templates. They are pre-made backgrounds & layouts that you can use to quickly prepare a presentation. When you find the design you want to use, simply click on the design and it will be applied to your presentation. Each new slide you create now onwards, will retain the same design.

You can right-click on a design template to bring up even more options. You can apply a design template to selected slides, all the slides, use the design for all new presentations you create, or choose to view large preview versions of the slide designs.

Printing a Presentation

You can print other types of presentation output using the Print what list. When you print notes pages, they print with one slide at the top of the page and the presentation notes at the bottom of the page. Handouts print two, three, or six slides per page with room for your audience to add notes as you give the presentation. You may use handouts to provide an outline of the presentation to your class. To print notes

• On the View menu, point to Master, and then click Notes Master. • Add the items you want on the notes master—art, text, headers or footers, date, time, or page

number. Items you add appear only on the notes; no changes are made to the slide master. • On the File menu, click Print. • In the Print what box, click Notes Pages. • Click OK.

To print handouts

• On the View menu, point to Master and then click Handout Master. • On the View menu, point to Toolbars and then click Handout Master. To preview the layout you

want, click the layout buttons on the Handout Master toolbar. • Add the items you want on the handout master— art, text, headers or footers, date, time, or page

number. Items you add appear only on the handouts; no changes are made to the slide master. • On the File menu, click Print. • In the Print what box, click Handouts. • In the Slides per page box, click the number of slides you want on the handouts. • If you select four, six, or nine slides per page, click Horizontal or Vertical to specify the order in

which you want the slides to appear on the page. • You can also change the orientation of the paper when you print handouts. Click Page Setup on

the File menu and then click Landscape or Portrait under Notes, handouts & outline. • Click OK.


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Good bye to your Ignorance of making a PresentationGood bye to your Ignorance of making a PresentationGood bye to your Ignorance of making a PresentationGood bye to your Ignorance of making a Presentation PowerPoint 2000 is a powerful presentation tool that can be used by both educators and students to present information to students and peers.

Use PowerPoint to write lecture notes. You can also record your lecture directly into the slide show and then save the presentation to the Web for students to review before tests. Search the World Wide Web for the topic you or your students are studying. By downloading videos, sounds, and pictures you can bring the world right into your classroom. You can also record sounds directly into a slide show if your computer has a microphone. Teach foreign language phrases and simple stories using the voice narratives partnered with illustrations. Create multimedia presentations for class reports and group projects. Incorporate research from Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia, Microsoft Bookshelf, and the Internet in a presentation. Show the results of surveys and questionnaires using charts and graphs in a PowerPoint slide. Create slide shows using the Clip Gallery to teach vocabulary in the foreign language classroom.


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Mind Mapping

At the end of this chapter you will know about

Using Mind Mapping Drawing a Mind Map Benefits of Mind Map Creating a Mind Map


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Whenever I plan to make a presentation, I simply get stressed by thinking about it. How do I begin? What format I should use? How can I make my presentation as impressive as possible? Sometimes this creates a serious mind block and I keep postponing the presentation. It was not that I didn’t know what to do? It was because too many things were in the mind about how to present the presentation. Later I realized maybe I don’t have all the information required for choosing a format for the presentation. I used to get excited that the presentation always posed both as a creative & intellectual challenge for me. When presented with challenging tasks like this, we often fail to organize our thought process – even if it is an all-important presentation that could be the turning point in our career. Mind Mapping is a process that helps us beat these mind blocks. So what is a mind map actually? Mind Maps are very important techniques for improving the way we take notes. By using Mind Maps we show the structure of the subject and linkages between points, as well as the raw facts contained in normal notes. Mind Maps hold information in a format that our mind will find easy to remember and quick to review. Mind Maps abandon the list format of conventional note taking. They do this in favor of a two-dimensional structure. A good Mind Map shows the 'shape' of the subject, the relative importance of individual points and the way in which one fact relates to other.

Mind Maps are more compact than conventional notes, often taking up one side of paper. This helps you to make associations easily. If you find out more information after you have drawn the main Mind Map, then you can easily integrate it with little disruption. Mind Maps are also useful for:

Summarizing information Consolidating information from different research sources Thinking through complex problems, and Presenting information that shows the overall structure of your subject Mind Maps are also very quick to review, as it is easy to refresh information in your mind just by glancing at one. The following example shows how mind mapping can be used to think creatively.

Give a child to write an essay on any particular topic. He will have trouble finding enough words to write the essay. Now follow this method. Instead of asking him to write an essay, ask him to write certain words associated with the topic. As his imagination runs through, he will fill up the sheet with a lot of words. Once he is through with that, ask him to use the words as reference to write an essay. He will be able to write the essay. How to Draw a Mind Map Use just key words, or wherever possible images. Only related points & few words (as few as possible) Keep your thoughts logical. Start from the center of the page and work out. Make the center a clear and strong visual image that depicts the general theme of the map. Create sub-centers for sub-themes. Put key words on lines. This reinforces structure of notes. Print rather than write in script. It makes them more readable and memorable. Lower case is more visually distinctive (and better remembered) than upper case. Use color to depict themes, associations and to make things stand out. Anything that stands out on the page will stand out in your mind. Think three-dimensionally. When two topics seems related, connect them using an arrow. Don't get stuck in one area. If you dry up in one area go to another branch. Put ideas down as they occur, wherever they fit. Don't judge or hold back. Break boundaries. If you run out of space, don't start a new sheet; paste more paper onto the map. (Break the 8x11 mentality.) If you forgot something, come back, add them & continue. Be creative. Creativity aids memory. Take a break. Come back, see what you’ve done. Spend sometime modifying the map that you have prepared.


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Benefits of Mind Mapping Mind Map can halve the time it takes to prepare a presentation or write a report. Mind Map allows you to use words to visually relate concepts & information in ways that are more enlightening than note taking or outlining. Mind mapping a presentation helps you take a look at how you can best present your information, because it enables you to focus not only on the content, but also on the sequence of the content. Mind Map also allows you to see what is missing. Creating a Mind Map Start with the central word or idea. Note only related points. Keep exhausting your ideas until you are finished. Do not restrict your thoughts and keep them logical. Use only key words. Don’t use too many words than required. That might confuse you later. If you remind something, which you have forgot to add, bounce back, add the idea and continue. When two topics are related to each other, draw an arrow to connect them. Make the arrow in a different color so that it can be identified easily. Give yourself a break of a few minutes. Sit back & look at what you have prepared. Spend sometime on adding, modifying the mind map. Congratulations!!! Now you are ready with your mind map. Remember; don’t use the mind map as a presentation. Instead, use the mind map to write your report. Use it to make sure that all the elements you want is there before you start working on your presentation. Notes: Leave lots of space Some of the most useful mind maps are those which are added to over a period of time. After the initial drawing of the mind map you may wish to highlight things, add information or add questions for the duration of a subject right up until exam time. For this reason it is a good idea to leave lots of space. Use capitals The idea of using capitals is to encourage you to get down only the key points. Capitals are also easier to read in a diagram. You may, however, wish to write down some explanatory notes in lower case. Some students do this when they revisit the mind map at a later date while others write in such things as assessment criteria in this way. Look for relationships Use lines, colors, arrows, branches or some other way of showing connections between the ideas generated on your mind map. These relationships may be important in you understanding new information or in constructing a structured essay plan. By personalizing the map with your own symbols and designs you will be constructing visual and meaningful relationships between ideas which will assist in your recall and understanding. Use color to separate different ideas: This will help you to separate ideas where necessary. It also helps you to visualize of the Mind Map for recall. Color also helps to show the organization of the subject.


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Adding Multimedia Contents

When you complete this chapter you will know

Recording a Voice Narration Insert an audio track Insert a Video Adding Flash Animation


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As the audiences become more sophisticated, they expect from you, more professional-looking presentations. Adding multimedia content such as video and sound to your presentation gives it the edge that it needs to capture your audiences’ attention and hold it. At the same time, multimedia content can often communicate more information than a slide with only a few sentences. Sounds, music, videos, and animated GIF pictures are available in the Clip Gallery. You can insert a music, sound, or video clip into a slide show. You can have the clip play automatically when you move to the slide or have the clip play only when you click its icon during a slide show. You need speakers and a sound card on the computer to play music and sounds. To find out what's installed on the computer and what settings are in use, check both the Multimedia and Sounds categories in Windows Control Panel.

About recording a voice narration or sound in a slide show You might want to add narration to a slide show in the following cases:

• For a Web-based presentation • For archiving a meeting so that presenters can review it later and hear comments made during the

presentation • For individuals who can't attend a presentation • For self-running slide shows

To record a narration, the computer needs a sound card and a microphone. You can record a narration before you run a slide show or you can record it during the presentation and include audience comments. If you don't want narration throughout the entire slide show, you can also record separate sounds or comments on selected slides or objects. You can't record and play sounds at the same time, so while you're recording the narration, you won't hear other sounds you inserted in your slide show. Also, voice narration takes precedence over all other sounds. If you are running a slide show that includes both narration and other sounds, only the narration is played. The narration automatically plays when running the show. To run the slide show without narration, click Set Up Show on the Slide Show menu and then select the Show without narration check box.

To record a voice narration

For this procedure, you need a microphone.

• On the Slide Show menu, click Record Narration. A dialog box appears showing the amount of free disk space and the number of minutes you can record.

• If this is the first time you are recording, click Set Microphone Level, and then follow the directions to set the microphone level.

• Do one of the following: • To insert the narration on your slides as an embedded object and to begin recording,

click OK to begin recording. • To insert the narration as a linked object, select the Link narrations in check box and

then click OK to begin recording.

• Advance through the slide show, and add narration as you go.

• To save the timings along with the narration, click Yes. To save only the narration, click No.

A sound icon appears in the lower-right corner of each slide that has narration.

P.S. Keep in mind that voice narration is not always the best way to get your information across. If some of your audience is deaf or hard of hearing, if some people in your audience have computers that do not have sound cards, or if the computer is located in a noisy room, you might want to use slide notes for each slide also.


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To insert a CD audio track on a slide

You don't need to insert the CD in the CD-ROM drive for this procedure.

Display the slide you want to add a CD audio track to.

On the Insert menu, point to Movies and Sounds and then click Play CD Audio Track.

Select the track and timing options you want, and then click OK. A CD icon appears on the slide.

A message is displayed. If you want the CD to play automatically when you move to the slide, click Yes. If you want the CD to play only when you click the CD icon during a slide show, click No.

To preview the music in Normal view, double-click the CD icon.

To insert a video on a slide

Display the slide you want to add the video to. On the Insert menu, point to Movies and Sounds. Do one of the following: To insert a video from the Clip Gallery, click Movie from Gallery and then locate and insert

the video you want. To insert a video from another location, click Movie from File, locate the folder that

contains the video and then double-click the video you want. Preferably try to copy the video file to the same directory as your PowerPoint Presentation.

A message is displayed. If you want the movie to play automatically when you move to the

slide, click Yes. If you want the movie to play only when you click the movie during a slide show, click No.

To preview the movie in Normal view, double-click the movie.

Advanced Options: You can drag your movie clip around and insert text boxes & images around it, as with any other slide item. You can also resize movies just like pictures: drag on the white circle in one of the corners. For full-screen projection, just enlarge your movie until it fills the slide. If you have PowerPoint 2003, you can also right-click on the movie, choose Edit Movie Object, and check Zoom to Full Screen.

Adding Flash Animation to PowerPoint Presentations Most of the people have the idea that Flash is a web design tool. It is no doubt, it allows you to create incredible web content with sound, animation, and graphics. However, if you are going to use Flash to create web content or other complex media, you can take advantage of this and use Flash animation (Shockwave files) to add to PowerPoint presentations. This will make your PowerPoint presentation look more attractive. The advantage of having a Flash Animation are many. Some of them are:

• Vector-based animation: looks good at any size. • much smaller files than gifs • powerpoint loops all animated gifs • very precise controls, including buttons, starts & stops • gif files aliased to specific background color--easy to change in flash

Though PowerPoint supports various types animated files, these are quite static and are quite large in size. Using Flash animations inside PowerPoint presentations adds interactivity & vector animation to the PowerPoint presentation – with fairly little increase in file size. And, if the Flash ActiveX Control r25 is installed, the Flash movie can even be printed.


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Integrating a Flash movie inside PowerPoint allows vector animation and interactivity to be added to a PowerPoint presentation.

Note: Don't Forget the ActiveX Control!

Using Flash in PowerPoint requires the Flash ActiveX control to be installed on the machine used to view the PowerPoint content. If that machine uses Internet Explorer 4 or higher and can view Flash, the ActiveX control is automatically installed. To add a Flash movie to a PowerPoint presentation

1. Open the PowerPoint 2000 presentation to which you want to add Flash animation. 2. Select View > Toolbars > Control Toolbox. The Control Toolbox appears. 3. Click the Hammer and Wrench icon (More Controls). A list of all the ActiveX controls installed on the

machine appears. 4. Choose Shockwave Flash Object from the list of controls. 5. Move cursor over the slide. Click and drag to define the area in which to play the Flash movie. You can

make the movie any size. 6. Right-click on the Flash movie placeholder and select Properties from the popup menu that appears. The

Properties dialog appears.

On the Alphabetic tab, scroll down to view swURL. In the box to the right, enter the path or URL to the SWF you wish to use. If the SWF is in the same directory as the PowerPoint file just enter the SWF name. The SWF can also be at any valid URL network address. Click OK. Now view the slideshow. The Flash content should play as expected. When you choose the object, the cursor should change into a crosshair.


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Creating a Template

When you complete this chapter you will know about

1. Creating Custom Templates 2. Create a Design Template 3. Add a template to Autocontent Wizard 4. Animating Design Templates


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Creating Custom Templates

With PowerPoint you can easily change presentation styles. Depending on the available material and category of audience you are addressing, you may want to select specific styles or keep a consistent style for a topic or series of lessons. In case you don’t

If at any time you select a style that you do not want to use for your presentation, you can easily and quickly change to another style. Or you can try several different styles to find one that fits your presentation. Design templates are used to change the styles at one go. In this chapter we will show you how to create your own design template

To create a design template To build your own template, start with a new blank presentation, and select the blank new slide option. Click the OK button, and then, from PowerPoint’s main menu, select View| Master| Slide Master. When the slide master appears on the screen, you'll see a fairly black-and-white uninspiring template. You can, however, change the fonts, colors, and background of the slide. Begin by setting the background color: right-click over a blank area of the slide (outside any of the frames) to view a menu of options for adjusting the template's background and color schemes. From the menu, select Background to introduce the Background dialog that controls background colors. From the Background dialog, you can select from the default palette of colors, click on the More Colors option to introduce more colors still, and/or click on the Fill Effects option to introduce a variety of pattern/fading color options. (You might want avoid the fill effects, since they can potentially interfere with the clarity of text elements on the screen: if you do use fill effects, always double-check for visibility and clarity.) Once you've set your background color, you can adjust the slide color scheme: this lets you choose default colors for a variety of elements that might appear on your slides. Again, start by right-clicking over a blank area of the slide (outside of any frame). Select the Slide Color Scheme option from the context menu that appears. You'll then be presented with a two-tabbed dialog, as illustrated below: A range of preset color combinations appears under the Standard tab. Under the Custom tab, you have the option of setting screen element colors one at a time. Make your adjustments as you'd like and then click the Apply to All button. Next, you'll want to adjust the Font styles, the Bullet styles, and the Animation Effects. To do this, you'll need to click on the screen element you'd like to adjust (i.e. the title area) to highlight its border. Then right-click on the selected frame to bring up a context menu of possible actions. For differing slide elements, you'll want to set differing properties, as outlined below: Title Style : Set only the font and font color; avoid applying animations to titles. Text Style : Font colors and animations can be set for the entire Text area by selecting the frame; alternately, individual heading levels can have font sizes, colors, bullet styles, and animations set one at a time if you select each line individually and right-click on a single line. Date/Footer/Number Styles : Animations should be avoided here. Font sizes and colors can be set. Finally, if you'd like to include a picture (or a logo) as part of your slide template, you can use the Insert|Picture item from PowerPoint's main menu, and then add to your template whatever image you'd like. You should remember also that right-clicking on a picture and selecting the Order option allows you to send the picture behind the text elements on your screen.

P.S. If none of the templates suit your needs or you want to create a presentation with a unique appearance, start with a blank presentation and follow the steps for designing a template. To open a blank presentation, click New on the File menu.


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That's it. Your template is finished. Click on File|Save As and select Design Template (*.pot) from the Save as type field. Give your template file a name in the File Name field, and then click the Save button. The next time you create a presentation, you'll be able to apply your very own design template by selecting it from the list of options under the Format|Apply Design Template list of templates.

To create a content template • Open an existing presentation or template that you want to base the new template on. • Change the presentation or template to suit your needs. • On the File menu, click Save As. • In the Save as type box, click Design Template. • In the File name box, enter a name for the new template and then click Save.

To add a template to the AutoContent Wizard

• On the File menu, click New and then click the General tab. • Double-click the AutoContent Wizard and then click Next. • Select the category that you want your template to be displayed in (you cannot add to the All or Carnegie

Coach categories) and then click Add. • Find the template you want to add and then click OK.

Animating PowerPoint Design Templates

You've learned a great deal about creating an effective PowerPoint presentation. Here's the piece that will separate your presentation from all the rest: animating PowerPoint's own design templates. Drawing upon your knowledge of using Slide Masters, of grouping and ungrouping objects, of re-coloring objects, and animation, you can add your own personal touches to PowerPoint's own Design Templates. For the most effective animation, choose those designs that contain concrete objects, such as twinkles, tropics, and theater, rather than blended and shaded designs. To animate template designs,

1. Choose VIEW: Master: Slide Master. 2. Click in an empty place on the slide (not in a text box). 3. From the Drawing Toolbar, choose DRAW: Ungroup. 4. Press ESC to deselect all the objects. 5. Click on the object you wish to animate (remember you can group objects to have them function as a single

entity.) 6. Choose SLIDE SHOW: Custom Animation. 7. Choose your animations options.

Animate any other objects you desire.


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Importing Other Office Formats


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Import Microsoft Word text into your presentation You can use text or document created in Word to add text to an existing presentation. PowerPoint can import Word documents, and documents in rich text format (.rtf), plain text format (.txt), or HTML format (.htm). PowerPoint uses the outline structure from the styles in the document, when you import a Word document. A heading 1 becomes a slide title; a heading 2 becomes the first level of text, and so on. If the document contains no styles, PowerPoint uses the paragraph indentations to create an outline. The slide master in the current presentation determines the format for the title and text.

1. Open a Word document. 2. In Word, select the text you want to import into PowerPoint. 3. On the Edit menu, click Copy. 4. Click PowerPoint on the taskbar. 5. Place the cursor in the outline where you want to insert the text. 6. On the Edit menu, click Paste.

To import an Microsoft Excel chart Like Microsoft Word, you can also import spreadsheets created in Microsoft Excel into a PowerPoint Presentation.

1. Open an Excel chart. 2. In Excel, select the chart you want to import into PowerPoint. 3. On the Edit menu, click Copy. 4. Click PowerPoint on the taskbar. 5. Place the cursor on the slide where you want to insert the chart.

On the Edit menu, click Paste.


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Creating Portable Presentations


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After creating a Presentation in your PC, you might need to move it to another PC. To do the same, please follow the guidelines mentioned herewith: Fonts: Do not use any fancy fonts. Use only those fonts that ship with Office or PowerPoint. Fonts do not travel with the presentation, so if you do have a special font that your company uses, you'll need to know how to copy the necessary files, and install that font on the destination machine. Well, if it is really necessary to use the fonts, see the later part of this book on tips to carry fonts with your presentation. Sounds and Movies: make sure that all sound and movie files are located in the same folder as the presentation that you've created, and that you insert them from this location. Sound and movie files, because of their large size, don't become an actual part of the presentation file - a link is formed to the file. When the presentation is played, the program goes looking for the sound at the location described in the link. This works fine on the original creation machine, but as soon as you move things to another machine, if the links don't accurately describe where the files are, things fail to play. PowerPoint will always look for the sound in the folder that contains the presentation, so this is the best place to put them. Start off by putting the sounds or movies in the same folder as the presentation, and then inserting them into your presentation. This will create an internal link with no real address: PowerPoint knows that the sound or movie is in the same folder as the presentation, and will look for it there regardless of what that folder's name is. Get all the Pieces: If you've used sounds, movies, or special fonts, remember to take those files with you as well as your presentation. They don't travel with the presentation automatically! Confirm Software Versions: Call the person who is working with the destination machine, and verify what version of PowerPoint it is running. If you have to save down to that version, you should definitely check the presentation before giving it--you might get some unwelcome surprises! Allow Extra Time: Allow some extra time to review the presentation on the destination machine ahead of time. If there are problems, it's best to know up front when you have time to do something about them. Save As... When you've completed all the edits to your presentation, it may have gotten pretty big. To reduce the file size a bit, try saving the presentation with a new name. This sometimes reduces the file size by as much as 30%. Find utilities in Internet which actually reduces the size by upto 40%.


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Macro Programming in PowerPoint


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This chapter describes the steps to create macros within PowerPoint. The example to be given here, will add a slide to your presentation, set a background texture for a slide, set slide timings, and run a slide show. The chapter will teach you to learn some of the tools & concept you need to become a macro programmer. Create a New Presentation On the File menu, click New. This opens the New Presentation dialog box. Select the Blank Presentation icon on the General tab, and click OK. This opens the New Slide dialog box. Select the Blank Auto Layout in the lower-right corner, and click OK. You now have a blank presentation open, ready to create the macro. Create a Macro On the Tools menu, point to Macro, and then click Macros. This opens the Macro dialog box. In the Macro Name box, type a name for your macro. NOTE: Macro names must begin with a letter and can contain up to 80 characters. Visual Basic for Applications keywords are invalid names for macros. The name cannot contain any spaces. Programmers typically use an underscore character(_) to separate words. If you type an invalid macro name, you receive a message similar to the following <macro name> is not a valid name for a macro where <macro name> is the name that you typed for the macro. Click Create. This opens the Visual Basic Editor. The Visual Basic Editor is an area where you can create, edit, and debug your macros. Add Code to a New Macro You are now looking at a flashing insertion point within the Code window. The Code window is where you actually type Visual Basic commands. A recorded macro can also be viewed in the code window. For the most part, the Code window acts like a typical text editor, enabling you to cut, copy, and paste text. However, there are some differences that make it easier for you to create macros. The important differences are detailed below. Type the following line of code between the Sub and End Sub: Dim MySlide As Slide

When you were typing in the code, you probably noticed some interesting things happen. After you hit the spacebar following the word as, a drop down list of the available data types appeared on your screen. This is just one of the ways the Visual Basic Editor makes programming a little easier. What does this code do? Dim Indicates to the Visual Basic Editor you are about to declare a variable. There are several other methods available to declare variables, but this article discusses only the Dim method. MySlide Is the name you provide the variable. It is a good idea to give your variables meaningful descriptive names. X is an example of a poor variable name. Meaningful names make your code easier to read. As Slide Specifies the type of data the variable will contain. In this case, MySlide will have the data type Slide.

Let's add some more code. Type the following line of code after the variable declaration:


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Set MySlide = ActivePresentation.Slides.Add(1, ppLayoutTitle)

This code adds a new slide to the active presentation. The slide created uses the Title Only AutoLayout. Lets take a closer look at this line of code. Set MySlide Assigns an object reference to a variable or property. Using Set makes it easier to refer to that same object later in your code. ActivePresentation Tells the Visual Basic Editor you are referring to the presentation that is open in the active window. Add(1, ppLayoutTitle) Creates a new slide and adds it to the collection of slides in the presentation. The Add method takes two parameters: The first parameter, the slide index, is the number 1 in this case. The slide index is the position where PowerPoint creates the slide. When the index is set to 1, PowerPoint creates the new slide at the beginning of the presentation. The second parameter specifies the type of AutoLayout.

For more information about creating slides programmatically, search for "Add Slides" using the Help menu.

For more information on the slide AutoLayouts available, search for "PpPlaceHolder Type" using the Help menu. TIP: When entering code, if the property and method list pops up, you can select the item you want and then press TAB, which adds the object to your command and leave the cursor on the same line. Your macro-code now looks something like this: Sub YourMacro () ' ' Macro created 1/7/97 by You ' Dim MySlide As Slide Set MySlide = ActivePresentation.Slides.Add(1, ppLayoutTitle) End Sub

NOTE: The text following ' apostrophe (on the same line) is a comment. Comments are ignored by the Visual Basic Editor. They are added to the code to make it easier to understand what is going on in the code. Now that your macro actually does something, you can try running the macro. Run the Macro There are several methods to run a macro. Only one method is described in this article. On the File menu, click Close and Return to Microsoft PowerPoint. The Visual Basic Editor closes and you return to PowerPoint. On the Tools menu, point to Macro, and then click Macros. This opens up the Macro dialog box. Select your macro from the list and then click Run. View the Macro Code To view the source code of a specific macro, follow these steps: On the Tools menu, point to Macro, and then click Macros. This opens up the Macro dialog box. Click the macro that you want to edit. Click Edit. This opens the macro within the Visual Basic Editor. The Visual Basic Editor is where you make corrections, remove unnecessary steps, or add instructions you can't record in PowerPoint. Add Some More Code You are now ready to add the rest of the commands to complete the macro. Type the following as the next line of code in your macro: ActiveWindow.ViewType = ppViewSlideSorter


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This changes the presentation to slide sorter view. We are doing this so we can select the entire slide, including the slide itself. For more information about PowerPoint views, search for "views" using the Help menu. Add the next line of code to your macro: MySlide.Select

Add the next section of code to your macro: With ActiveWindow.Selection.SlideRange .FollowMasterBackground = msoFalse .Background.Fill.PresetTextured msoTextureRecycledPaper End With

These commands tell PowerPoint that this particular slide does not follow the master, and then set the background preset texture to the recycled paper. The With statement allows you to group commands that have common references. Using With to group multiple commands can improve the performance of the macro as well as saving you a lot of typing. If you didn't use the With statement, your code would look like this: ActiveWindow.Selection.SlideRange.FollowMasterBackground = msoFalse ActiveWindow.Selection.SlideRange.Background.Fill.PresetTextured _ msoTextureRecycledPaper

The underscore (_) in the second line is a continuation character. It tells the Visual Basic Editor that you could not fit the specific command on one line and are continuing the instruction on the next line. You can see the advantage of using With statements: less typing and faster code. The main disadvantage of the With statement is that it sometimes makes the code more difficult to read, especially if you nest a With within another With statement. Add the next line of code to your macro: MySlide.Shapes.Title.TextFrame.TextRange.Text = "Look What I Did!"

This command adds the text "Look What I Did!" into the title box of the slide that you created. Add the next section of code to your macro: With ActivePresentation.Slides.Range.SlideShowTransition .AdvanceTime = 5 .EntryEffect = ppEffectCheckerboardAcross End With AdvanceTime Specifies how long (in seconds) a particular slide is visible when running a slide show. EntryEffect Specifies the slide transition effect that runs just prior to the slide appearing.

Add the last line of code to your macro: ActivePresentation.SlideShowSettings.Run

This line of code starts the presentation as a slide show. The Complete Macro Code Sub YourMacro() ' ' Macro created <Date> by <You> ' Dim MySlide As Slide ' Add a new slide to the presentation. Set MySlide = ActivePresentation.Slides.Add(1, ppLayoutTitle) ' Change the presentation to slide sorter view.


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ActiveWindow.ViewType = ppViewSlideSorter ' Select your slide. MySlide.Select ' Apply a preset texture to the slide. With ActiveWindow.Selection.SlideRange .FollowMasterBackground = msoFalse .Background.Fill.PresetTextured msoTextureRecycledPaper End With ' Add text into title of the slide. MySlide.Shapes.Title.TextFrame.TextRange.Text = "Look What I Did!" ' Set the slide timing and transition effect. With ActivePresentation.Slides.Range.SlideShowTransition .AdvanceTime = 5 .EntryEffect = ppEffectCheckerboardAcross End With ' Start the slide show. ActivePresentation.SlideShowSettings.Run End Sub


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Projecting Your Slideshow in the Classroom

When you complete this chapter you will be able to

Project the presentation on an LCD Projector Export to Overheads Export to 35mm Slides


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Projecting the show in a LCD Projector After you are done with the Presentation, you might need to show the presentation to your audience. You will need a digital projector to do the same. Even though the instructions given in this book are relatively simple, every computer-projector combination is different and it is very common for something to go wrong. Hence, you need to try out in advance if possible by having a demo projection, and still leave yourself plenty of time to set up the final show.

Advance preparations

The Projector comes with a cable that connects your laptop with the projector. This cable fits with most computers. There should only be one port on your laptop that it could possibly connect with. You might also need to use a standard extension cord/cable, depending on the classroom. If your presentation is having any media with sound, you will need a second cable to link your laptop’s headphone/speaker jack to the audio input on the projector. This cable looks like a walkman headphone jack on both ends. If you have those cables, you can connect them directly, but if not, they should be fairly cheap to buy at an electronics store. If you check your computer speakers, there might be one running between them which you can detach. As a last resort, you could bring in your computer speakers and hook those up to your computer instead Find out in advance which key combination will get your computer screen to display from the projector. Unfortunately it is not the same for all computers. It is usually Fn + some F-key. On Dell laptops it is Fn + F8. On Toshiba laptops it is Fn + F5. On at least some IBM laptops it is Fn + F7. If you’re lucky, the correct F-key on your laptop will say “CRT/LCD” or have a tiny icon of a computer and screen. Even in some other laptops you will find a picture of projector in the related Function Key. If you have no clue what works, you can try pressing Fn + each F-key without the projector connected. When your screen temporarily flashes black, and/or if some icons of monitors appear, you have probably found the right combination. If your screen stays black, that’s still a good sign – just keep pressing the same two keys until your display returns.

Setting up the presentation

For setting up the presentation, start with both projector and laptop off. (If your computer is already turned on you can try following these instructions anyway – sometimes it works). Plug in the projector. Attach your laptop to the projector with the main cable, and the audio cable if necessary. Turn on the projector. It may take a while to warm up. You will not see your slideshow yet, but you should see a blue screen projected onto the wall. If not, check to make sure the power is on and the lens cap is off. Turn on the computer. Wait for it to boot up, and then press the required keys for projector display (Fn + F8 on a Dell laptop). Your computer screen might go black for a few seconds, but then you should see it displayed on the wall. If this works but your laptop screen remains black, press Fn + F8 (or whatever keys you pressed before) one more time. If you are using audio, play a sound file and check the volume. You should be able to turn the projector volume up fairly high, even though the sound quality is not great. Turn the volume up on your computer as well, if necessary. If you still don’t hear anything at all, make sure the mute function is off on both projector and computer, and that the audio input cord is pushed all the way into projector and laptop ports. Open PowerPoint and your slideshow file. Press F5 to start your slideshow. Yes, it is possible to get your slideshow to display on the wall and your lecture notes (or whatever you want) to display on your laptop screen. You need to use dual monitor configuration for this. Like setting up a projector, it is often a lot more complicated than it should be, and it varies by computer. You can find instructions in the PowerPoint help files if you like, or through Google. Desperate last-ditch attempts to make your show appear

• Try other key combinations. Press all the F-keys in turn. Press the Fn-key with each F-key. Something has to

work! • Make sure the resolution of your laptop matches that of the projector:

a) Look on the projector and see if you can find the resolution written on it. It is probably either 1024x768 or 800x600. If you can’t find it, try these instructions anyway.

b) On your laptop, go to Control Panel �� Display, then click on the Settings tab.


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c) Under Screen Resolution, move the slider to the correct resolution. If you don’t know, try 1024x768 pixels. Click on Apply. If you still can’t get your screen to display, try 800x600 pixels. Keep trying resolutions until one works.

• Sometimes there are different input sources on the projector. Find the input button and cycle through these. • Turn everything off and turn it on again, starting with the projector.

Running your presentation once the projector is set up

• Open your PowerPoint file, then press F5 to start your show. • Move through your slideshow either by clicking on the mouse or by using the up and down arrows on your

keyboard. (Some projectors also come with a remote control). A bunch of fancy commands for jumping around in your slideshow are available at: http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/assistance/HP051953031033.aspx

• If you need to go backwards, press the up arrow. • If you move your mouse pointer over the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, you will see a menu with

several advanced options. If you click on the pen icon, you can get a “pen” that allows you to draw on your slides (in non-permanent ink).

• To leave the slideshow at any time, hit ESC. • Congratulations, you’re done with setting up the show. Good Luck with your presentation.

Export to Overheads (Transparencies) You can print transparencies directly from the presentation without printing out the paper copies and running transparencies from the paper copies through your copier. Just load the transparencies into your printer and print one or two slides to make sure everything is working correctly. Then do the remaining slides. If you have a color printer you can print color transparencies directly, too. Use transparencies when you're not sure you'll have an LCD projector and as a backup in case the equipment doesn't work - as it sometimes doesn't.

Export to 35mm slides If you eventually want to output your PowerPoint presentation to 35mm slides, you should change the page setup before you begin entering data. 35mm slides are slightly wider than slides used in presentations. Changing the page setup after you've completed your presentation might radically change the formatting. So, the instant you begin creating a 35mm slide show, go into File | Page Setup | Slides Sized For | 35mm slides. Now you have the correct aspect ratio for 35mm slides.


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Proofing, Editing, & Collaborating


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When you have created and saved a presentation, it is important that you proof read and edit a presentation to make sure it is error-free. This is especially important for collaborative projects that have several authors.

To check consistency and style

By default, PowerPoint automatically checks the presentation for consistency and style, and marks problems on a slide with a light bulb. You can fix or ignore these errors and also change the elements that PowerPoint checks for. The light bulb is not available if you have turned off the Office Assistant. To turn on the Assistant, click Show the Office Assistant on the Help menu.

• Open the presentation you want to check for style and consistency. • Click the light bulb and then click the option you want in the list.

To follow up with Meeting Minder and Action Items

Participants in an online meeting can also use the Meeting Minder dialog box or the Speaker Notes dialog box to take notes. The notes are visible to all participants. These features are available only when the presentation is in Slide Show view.

• To add notes or meeting minutes, right-click the slide and then click Meeting Minder or Speaker Notes.

• Click in the box and then type the notes or minutes. • To add an action item, right-click the slide, click Meeting Minder and then click the Action Items

tab. • Click in the box, type the information for the first action item, and then click Add. • Repeat step 2 for every action item and then click OK. The action items appear on a new slide at

the end of the slide show.

Master slides and custom templates

If you use PowerPoint on a regular basis for presenting related materials, you may want to use master slides and create a custom template. With the master slides and custom template, all of your presentations will have a consistent look and feel, and you won't have to customize each presentation layout separately.

Customizing your slides using the slide master

The slide master allows you to customize the look of each slide and ensure consistency across your presentation. In the slide master, you can change fonts, bullets, and header and footer information. Use the slide master to do the following: add a picture; change the background; adjust the size of the placeholders; and change font style, size, and color. To have art or text—for example, a company name or logo—appear on every slide, put it on the slide master. Objects appear on slides in the same location as they do on the slide master. To add the same text to every slide, add the text to the slide master by clicking Text Box on the Drawing toolbar—do not type in the text placeholders. The look of text you've added with Text Box is not governed by the slide master.

To change master text and title styles

The date, footer, and number areas can all be changed in the same way. Experiment to see which combinations you like best. Remember that the slide master changes every slide in your presentation

• On the View menu, point to Master and then click Slide Master. • Click anywhere in the Click to edit Master title styles text block. • On the Standard toolbar, click the Font down arrow and then click Arial. • On the Standard toolbar, click the Font Size down arrow and then click 40. • Right-mouse click anywhere on Click to edit Master text styles and then click Bullet. • In the Bullets and Numbering list box and then click Pictures. • Click the multi-color block in the first row of the third column and then click Insert Clip.

On the View menu, click Normal to return to the presentation.


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Copying Your Presentation to Memory Stick


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Resist the temptation to drag & drop PowerPoint files to a memory Stick, unless you are absolutely sure the presentation has no link to any other file (audio, video, excel sheet etc.). If you copied your linked files into the folder with your slideshow as you were creating it, you can afford to drag & drop the presentation into the memory stick. If you have a newer version of PowerPoint installed in your PC/Laptop, various tools are available, which makes copying even easier.

PowerPoint 2003 PowerPoint 2003 allows transfer of files in few clicks. Go to >File – Package for CD. If you are burning to a CD, insert the CD & click on Copy to CD. If you are copying to a memory stick, insert it, Choose copy to folder & locate the appropriate drive. All of your linked files should automatically be included, regardless of whether or not you copied them all into the same folder. You also get a copy of PowerPoint viewer, which allows the Show to play even if the target computer doesn’t have PowerPoint installed.

PowerPoint 2002 In PowerPoint 2002, you should be able to use the command, File – Pack & Go, but make sure to check the boxes marked Include Linked Files and Embed True Type fonts. This process also gives you the option of downloading the PowerPoint Viewer if you don’t already have it. PowerPoint 2002 zips your files; hence you need to unzip them on the new computer.

Other Versions of PowerPoint In all older versions of PowerPoint, you will have to rely on copying the entire folder method. If you don’t have PowerPoint in the target machine, you can download the PowerPoint Viewer & install it in the target machine. What I would suggest to all PowerPoint users is to have a copy of PowerPoint Viewer with them all the time. You can also carry a copy of PowerPoint Viewer in the memory stick.


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Advanced PowerPoint

At the end of this chapter you will know about Working with Text Identifying Toolbars Page Setup Creating Action Buttons Adding Objects to Slides Using the Drawing Toolbar Advanced Drawing Techniques Combining Presentations Creating Original Artworks Builds & Transitions Setting Animation Saving a slide as a graphic file. Organization Charts Showing Off your Presentation at a KIOSK Annotating Slides Style Checker


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Introduction This advanced module of PowerPoint is intended for those who have already mastered the basics of PowerPoint.

Working with Text Reminders about Fonts It is preferable to use a sans serif font type in a presentation because a font without serifs is easier to read on a screen. Serif fonts like Times New Roman or Palatino or Courier tend to drag the viewer's eye back to the line. The serifs themselves do not translate well into on-screen presentations and are best kept for print-based book chapters and articles. The best presentation fonts are Arial, Helvetica and Tahoma. Alignment and Formatting Objects Text and objects can be placed right up to the edges of a slide but for accuracy of placement, use guides. To get additional information on guides see below. To align objects, select the object or objects you want to align from the Drawing toolbar, click Draw, then point to Align or Distribute, following it with the alignment you need. Possibilities include: Align Left Align Right Align Center Align Middle Align Bottom and so on... Use WordArt to Enhance Titles or Text Use Insert | Picture | WordArt or from the Drawing Toolbar, select the WordArt icon. Select the WordArt format you want. Click OK. Type in the text (keep it short). Next select the Font and Font Size, bolding or italics and click OK. If the text looks the way you want it to look on the slide, grab the handles at the corner of the object and tug it carefully into the size you want. Reposition the object by clicking in the middle of the image; hold down the left mouse button and drag it into place. If you want to make any changes, double-click on the middle of the object and PowerPoint will bring up the WordArt window. Be judicious in your use of WordArt. A little goes a long way. Add a Shadow to Text First select the text you want to be shadowed and from the Formatting toolbar, select Text Shadow. The text will be shadowed. To shadow all slide titles, go into the Slide View master, click the dashed line in the title box and when you see the hatched line, click the Shadow Button. Now all titles will be shadowed. This is not an affect I particularly care for - so I rarely use it - but many do. Creating Mirrored Text For some reason you might wish to have a word or phrase appear as its mirror image. To do this, use WordArt to create the text. Click on the text to select it. Then do File | Copy, then File Paste. Move the second copy directly underneath the first. If the second image is not selected, click on it. That will select it. From Draw select Rotate or Flip, then Flip Horizontal. This does give you a different view of things. Guides and Rulers. Guides are the lines that drop down the slide from the ruler. It's a good idea to have both the guides and the ruler turned on if you want to locate objects precisely. Use guides to move and place objects exactly where you want them. Guides can be used to group objects, or to rotate objects in relations to the edges of a portion of the document. If you are a good designer, you can use the


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guides to stack objects. Stacking objects involves drawing objects and placing them on top of each other. Stacked objects can be brought forward or sent backward depending on the commands you use. To view the Rulers or Guides, select Slide view, then from the View menu, select Guides and then select View | Rulers To add a guide, hold down Ctrl, grab and drag an existing guide, for example, the guide dividing the slide in half vertically. To delete a guide, drag it off the slide. You may hide the guides without deleting them, by selecting Guides on the View menu. This turns the guides off. To align objects, select the objects you want to align. From the Drawing toolbar, click Draw, and then point to Align or Distribute. Select Relative to Slide, then select the alignment option you want. Adding hypertext links You can create hypertext links to a site on the Web, to a different section of your presentation, to another presentation or to a Word document. Select the text you want to use as your hyperlink. This can be the URL itself. From your Standard toolbar, click on the Insert Hyperlink icon. You can enter an Web address beginning with http://, or browse for a file, such as an EXE (executable) program on your hard drive or on your Intranet. (The Insert Hyperlink button is also used in Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Access). When you are presenting (and connected to the Internet), and when you get to the slide with a hyperlink, clicking on the link will open Internet Explorer and take you to the site. Clicking on Internet Explorer's Back button will take you back to the presentation so that you can continue on with your discussion. Hyperlinks become active only when you run your slide show - not when you're creating the show. Be aware that if you link to something on the Web or to another object, that that object must be available on the site or you will get an error message. Hyperlinks can be set as relative or absolute links.

Identifying Toolbars

Most of the tasks in PowerPoint can be accomplished either through menu choices or via a toolbar. Generally, you will find the toolbars easier and quicker to access once you are comfortable with their functions.

Office 2000 may be installed to show only your most recent menu selections. To see non-visible choices, click the double-headed arrow at the bottom of the menu list, or hold the mouse over the menu for a few seconds. Either of these actions will then display all the choices in that menu item. After you choose an option, that menu choice becomes "recently used" and is visible when menus are pulled-down. When toolbars contain more choices than can easily be displayed on a toolbar, additional, less frequently used choices, are hidden. You can click the double-headed arrows, as well as drop down arrows, to display additional toolbar choices. To "permanently" reveal all menu choices, choose TOOLS : Customize. Click the Options tab and uncheck "Menus show recently used commands first." This will not affect the toolbar, only the menu choices.

NOTE: Changing this option will affect each Microsoft Office suite application, including Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

View The View Toolbar is located in the lower left corner of the screen and lets you quickly move through different views of the presentation: Text Options on the Text Toolbar allows you to make choices affecting highlighted text.


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NOTE: Keep in mind that some options may be hidden. To access those, click the double-headed or drop-down arrow on the toolbar.

Drawing The Drawing Toolbar contains the tools (each is described in detail later in this tutorial) to incorporate objects into a presentation:

Navigating during Development To navigate through the slides during development, you can use the Scroll Bar on the right of the screen. Press and drag the Slider to move continuously through the presentation. An indicator shows the slide you are currently passing and the title of that slide. Release the Slider to move to the indicated slide. To move one complete slide forward or backward, click the appropriate double-headed arrow at the bottom of the Scroll Bar. Another option is to move directly to the desired slide by clicking on the slide itself in the Outline pane. All AutoLayouts but two (Blank and Large Object) have a Placeholder for Title. The Slider demonstrates one reason why it is important to always use a layout that contains a Title Placeholder and to always title each slide—the title helps orient you to the location within the presentation. In addition, the bottom left corner of the PowerPoint screen shows the current slide, out of the total number of slides, as well as the name of the Design Template applied to the presentation. Creating Bulleted Lists To create a bulleted list from the AutoLayout, choose the Bulleted List layout. Click in the main Placeholder and begin typing. Each time you press ENTER, the cursor is automatically placed in the next bulleted point. If the text you type in a bulleted item is longer than a single line, the text will automatically wrap to subsequent lines and indent appropriately. Each new bullet appears somewhat "greyed out" or dim prior to you typing the first character in the item. This is because the bullet will not appear on the slide unless it has accompanying text. Each slide should contain no more than seven (7) bulleted points. Multiple-line items should have no more than 2-3 lines each. You should decrease the number of bulleted points in proportion to multiple-line entries. To create subsequent indented levels, make sure the cursor is in the line in which you want the next level to begin, then click the Demote Tool. Each consecutive point will remain on the current level until you click the Promote Tool to return to a previous level or the Demote Tool to indent one level further.

• Bullet Styles Although you can set Bullet Styles in the Master, you also can change the bullet style on any slide or on any bulleted point. When you change the bullet style, every subsequent bullet on that slide, whether promoted or demoted, will have that style until you change back to the default or change to a different slide. To change the bullet style, make sure the cursor is in the line of text in which you wish to change the bullet, then choose FORMAT : Bullet.

NOTE: Sometimes it is difficult to remember exactly what the default bullet style was, so pay close attention to the selected bullet before proceeding with any changes.

You can choose from the selections provided by PowerPoint, choosing both the size (in percentage of text size) and the color. Click Character to include any symbol font installed on your system. Keep in mind, however, that if you choose a font that is not installed on the computer from which you are giving your presentation, the presentation computer


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will choose the "closest" font to the one you chose and the result may not be one you like. Both Symbol and Wingdings font are standard on most computers and should display as you intended. PowerPoint 2000 also has a number of "Picture" bullets in the ClipArt from which you can choose.

• Adding / Removing Bullets The Bullet Tool is a toggle. Click it once to place a bullet at the beginning of the current line of text (the one in which the cursor is flashing). Click it again to remove the bullet. This way you can add bullets to text you have typed without using the Bullet AutoLayout.

Page Setup for 35mm slides

PowerPoint assumes that you will be delivering an on-screen presentation. If you are using PowerPoint for development but will be creating 35mm slides, you should size the presentation for that medium before beginning development. 35mm slides are wider than on-screen presentations; if you develop slides before setting the page size, you run the risk of your slides not looking the way you want them to look. To size your presentation for 35mm slides: From the menu, choose FILE : Page Setup. In the Page Setup dialog box, click the drop-down box beside Slides sized for. Choose 35mm Slides. Click OK.

Creating Action Buttons

PowerPoint 97 includes a set of built-in 3-D buttons for such actions as Forward, Back, Home, Help, Information, Sound, and Movie. You can click these buttons during a slide show to start another program, play a sound or movie, or link to other slides, files, and Web pages. Or, you can create your own action buttons. From the Drawing toolbar, select Autoshapes and point to the Action buttons. Select the action button you want, and click once on the slide. This will insert the icon. You can then select which action you want to be played: open up a new document, run a software program, open another PowerPoint presentation or other file, or play a sound from a list of sounds. You can, of course, enlarge or reduce the size of the icon by grabbing the handles on the selected icon.

Adding Objects to Slides Using the Drawing Toolbar An object can be anything PowerPoint allows you to grab and manipulate. Examples include graphics, charts, tables, images, clip art, and the like. To add various shapes, be sure to be in the Slide view, and select the Drawing Toolbar. From the Drawing Toolbar you can add Autoshapes, straight lines, arrows, various shapes such as rectangles or ovals, text boxes, fills, shadows, Word Art, 3-D, and change the color of text. The Drawing Toolbar is a very useful toolkit, indeed. If you don't remember how to get the Drawing Toolbar, here's how - go to View | Toolbars | Drawing. Once you've clicked on the Drawing toolbar, it will appear at the bottom of your screen. Drawing a Shape Drawing a shape is quite easy and can add some pizzazz to your presentation if done discretely. Choose your drawing tool - such as Autoshapes, then Basic Shapes, then select the shape you want. Since the shape is an object, it will have handles if you click on it. To maintain the aspect ratio, grab a corner handle, and either push in to make the object smaller, or pull out to make it larger. You can copy the object several times and lay them in where you get the best effect.


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The object will be filled with whatever color you have used in the fill button. To change the fill color, click on the object, then on the down arrow Fill icon. Either select a color from the existing pallet, or from More Fill Colors. You can also make interesting effects by clicking on Fill Effects. To move the object, click in the middle of the object, and, holding the left mouse button down, drag the object into place. Adding a Shadow To add a shadow to the object, click on the object, and then toggle the Shadow on/Shadow off button from the Drawing Toolbar. When you see the menu of shadow effects select the shadow that has the most pleasing effect. Don't hesitate to try more than one shadow effect if you're not certain which one you like best. Shadows can be recolored from the Shadow Settings option. Create Embossed / Engraved Text and Graphics It's pretty simple to add or remove an embossed effect from text or an object. Select the object or text you want to add the effect to. From the Drawing toolbar, click Shadow. The two main effects are embossed and engraved. Basically an embossed effect forces the image out and the engraved effect depresses the object. To add an embossed effect, select Shadow Style 17 and to add an engraved effect, select Shadow Style 18. The shadow effects are not labeled in the Drawing menu, but the number will appear as you slowly draw your mouse over each of the available styles. Create 3-D effects with PowerPoint's drawing tools A 3-D effect can also be added to objects to provide interest and create emphasis. What 3-D effects are there? PowerPoint provides numerous 3-D effects. You can make boxes of various kinds, including elongated boxes. 3-D can be used with certain kinds of text, too, although pure text cannot be 3-D'd. Select the object you want to change such as a WordArt object by clicking once on it. . Using the Drawing toolbar, click the 3-D icon. (It looks like a rectangular box). Then add a 3-D effect by clicking the option you want from the menu of options. To change a 3-D effect, for example, its color, rotation, depth, lighting, or surface texture, click 3-D again, click 3-D Settings, and then click the options you want on the 3-D Settings toolbar. This is one tool that you will really need to play with to get a real sense of how it works. Personally I don't care for 3-D effects, but that's just a personal preference. Layering Objects Using Insert | Picture | From Clip Art, insert several objects onto your slide and overlap them slightly. The graphic that was added last will be on top. Aside: When working with objects it helps to think of how cartographers used to make maps. They would put one feature, Say Rivers - on one sheet of mylar, then on another sheet of mylar they would draw streets. These plus any other features would be layered over a base map. Each of the layers would show through to create the final map. Objects, like the mylar, are layered or stacked on your slide so that you can stack and manipulate them as you need to. To bring an object that is underneath another object to the front, click on the object and from the Draw menu choose Order, then Bring to Front. Now the other object is underneath the object we selected. This ability to layer can be used to put text on top of objects. For example, we might wish to print something outrageous on the picture of a balloon for a friend. If we did the text first, it would be buried under the balloon. The Bring to Front feature makes it possible to read the text. Grouping or Ungrouping Clip Art Click once in the middle of the ClipArt picture to select it. Select Draw then Ungroup. You will be asked if you if you would like to convert the clipart to a MS Office drawing and will remind you that all embedded data and linking


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information will be lost. If you still wish to continue, click OK. The clipart will be separated into different individual objects. In fact, all you will see is sections of the image with handles everywhere. At this point you can recolor the sections you want to recolor or delete out parts and colors until all you have is a black and white sketch. To group the now separated sections together, select all of the objects - hold down the shift key and click on them individually. Alternatively you can click anywhere on the screen, hold the mouse button down, and then draw a square around the objects. Everything inside the square will be highlighted. Now select Draw and Group or Regroup. Either one will work. Be aware that the objects will be grouped based on their current location within the square you just drew. Cropping/Trimming Clip Art Use Insert | Picture | From Clip Art to add images to your slide show. If you want to clip or crop the image, click on the image to select it and from the Picture Toolbar, select the Cropping tool. (It looks like two xx's side by side). Position the cropping tool over a sizing handle and drag a middle handle inwards on the side you want cropped. If you use a corner handle, you may cut off more than you wanted to because the corner handles maintain the aspect ratio. Play with the image till you have just the section you want. If you discover that you've cut off too much of the graphic, just grab the same corner and drag out. The original picture will return to its former size. Note: If your Picture toolbar does not appear, go to the View menu and select Toolbars, then Picture. The Picture toolbar is a floating toolbar. Fill Effects Fill effects include Gradients where you can select one or two colors of your choice, as well as the direction and variants of the gradient. Textures are image files similar to web page wallpapers; you can use PowerPoint's selections or choose an image file from your workstation. Patterns allow you to choose two colors and the pattern design with which you want to fill the object. Picture allows you to choose an image file from your workstation; the photograph will center itself within the selected object, hiding any parts of the image which do not automatically show within the object's shape.

When you choose Fill Effects, you will get three different options like Gradients, Textures, Pattern, Picture. You can choose either of them as per your requirement. Line Effects Each drawing object has an outline the color of the automatic color. The underline under the Line Color Tool is the current line color.To outline an object with the current line color, select the object, then click the Line Color Tool. To change the line color, drop down the arrow and make a new selection. Other options with the Line Color Tool include color and patterns similar to the Fill Tool. To change line style, dash style, and arrow style, click on these tools, respectively, after drawing the object and while it is still selected. Object Effects To place a shadow or 3D effect on an object, select the object, then click the tool selection.

Advanced Drawing Techniques Flow Charts

If you're demonstrating the flow of a process or system, you will be delighted to learn that PowerPoint has built in the elements to create a flowchart on a PowerPoint slide.


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To bring up the flowchart graphics use Insert | Picture | Autoshapes | Flowchart. Then select the element you want by clicking on the image of it. The elements are referred to as nodes and the arrows that join the nodes are called links. After you click on the node, your cursor turns to a cross-hair. The image is placed on the slide through clicking the cross-hair on the screen. To make a link, click on the connection icon, then on the primary node and while holding the left mouse key down, link the secondary node. This is a very easy process. And it looks fabulous when you are done. Adding text to a node is easy. Just select it by clicking once on the node and begin typing. You may need to reduce the size of the type. Keep in mind that your audience can't read type font less than 18 points. If the overall process was the important thing, and not the stages that were important, then point and discuss - and hand out the slide with the flow chart as a separate full-sized sheet of paper. Your audience can follow the details on the handout as you talk. If your flow chart is complex, try breaking it up into several slides. Enhancing Flow-chart Objects You can increase the thickness of the links and on the text box by clicking on the Line style icon and change the color of the nodes by clicking on the Fill color icon and selecting from the available choices. You have numerous connectors to choose from. Use them appropriately to enhance the flowchart. Aligning and Rotating Flow-chart Objects In addition to enhancing the appearance of your flow chart, you can align the nodes in various ways. For example, you can align the various nodes with other nodes By their left edges Horizontally by their centers By their top edges Vertically by their middles By their bottom edges Use the Drawing toolbar, click Draw, point to Align or Distribute, and then click Align Left, Align Center, Align Right, Align Top, and so on. The drawing toolbar can be used to space nodes equal distances from each other, and align them with relation to a guide or grid. Creating Demand Curves Create your X and Y axes using the Line feature from the Drawing toolbar and add titles. Increase the width of the line to at least 3 point by selecting the line and clicking on Line Style and selecting 3. To make an arc for the demand curve, click on AutoShapes | Basic Shapes from the Drawing toolbar and from there select the arc shape. When you see the mouse pointer change to a cross hair, click where you want the top of the arc to start and curve your mouse down to the bottom where the arc will end. You now have a demand curve. Since the arc is likely to be incorrectly positioned, click on the arc and drag it into position. If the arc is facing the wrong direction (i.e., it should be concave rather than convex), click on the arc to select it (note handles) and click on the Free Rotate icon. The handles turn green when the Free Rotate icon has been clicked. Grab one of the handles and drag up or down until the arc is in the correct position. Turn off the Free Rotate icon when you have the curve where you want it. Adding Images to the Clip Art Gallery Many people do not know that you can add images and clip art to the existing Clip Art Gallery. To insert new clip art into the existing set of images, select Insert | Picture | Clip Art | Import Clips. Now select the subdirectory where the images are stored and select the file. Now create a place to put your images in the clip art gallery by selecting an existing section using a check box, or by creating a New Category. Then OK. Perhaps even more important is your ability to import Clips from Web. When you click on this button, MS Internet Explorer opens up enabling you to add clips found on the Web. Be sure only to use Public Domain images or images for which you have permission.


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Combining Presentation

You can combine presentations, or copy already existing slides from one presentation into another presentation. To work with two presentations simultaneously, Open both presentations. Choose WINDOW : Arrange All to display both presentations side-by-side on the screen. NOTE: the presentation that was the active presentation when you made the Arrange All selection will be on the left. Notice that each presentation has its own Navigation Toolbar in the lower left corner of its respective window. Put each presentation in Slide Sorter View. Use the Scroll Bar to navigate through each presentation until you can see the slide you want to copy in the original presentation and the location in the destination presentation where you want the slide placed. Press and drag the slide from one presentation to the other. NOTE: You will not be able to drag the slide if the original presentation is in Slide View and the destination presentation is in Slide Sorter View. When you press and drag, you remove the slide from the original presentation. If you want to keep the original presentation as it was, do NOT save it when you close the presentation. An alternative is to right click on the slide to be moved and choose COPY, then click in the destination presentation and paste it. Notice that "transplanted" slide takes on the characteristics of the receiving presentation, including the color scheme. Any charts contained in the transplanted slide will be updated to reflect the colors of the destination presentation.

Creating Original Artworks in PowerPoint

You can paint original artwork directly in PowerPoint 2000 using the Insert Object feature. Launch PowerPoint, create a new presentation and choose a slide layout so that you are ready to begin working.

From the Insert menu, choose Object.

At the Insert Object window, choose Bitmap image from the list and click the OK button. A window will appear in the middle of your slide. Use the tools along the left side and the colors at the bottom to draw and paint your image. When you are finished, click on the slide outside of the paint window. Your picture will be floating in the middle of the slide. To edit the image, double-click on it to return to the Paint tools and colors and make your changes. To make changes your picture’s format, click on the image one time. The Picture toolbar will appear and you will be able to change contrast, adjust brightness, crop and more. While the picture is still selected, you can resize it by clicking and dragging the handles that appear on the corners.

The Picture toolbar will appear and you will be able to change contrast, adjust brightness, crop and more. While the picture is still selected, you can resize it by clicking and dragging the handles that appear on the corners.


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Builds and Transitions - A Review If you are using your PC & a Multimedia Projector to give a presentation, you can be a little bit more creative with special effects. Use the slide sorter view to assign builds and transitions. Transitions are the changes between slides. Builds are the movement of bullets onto the screen; In other words, how bullets fly onto the screen as you click the left mouse bullet. Adding Transitions Change the view to Slide Sorter view by clicking on that icon on the bottom left of the PowerPoint window. From the menu, select the down arrow by No Transition. That will cause a drop- down menu to appear from which you can select the transition you want. After you've selected a transition, underneath each slide will appear a little transition slide on the left-hand side. Adding Builds to Your Slides – Making Bullets Fly To create bullets that fly across your screen, select a slide and click on the down arrow to the right of No Effect. Another drop down menu will appear. Select the build you prefer, remembering that flying from the left to the right, or top down is usually better because Americans read from left to right, and from top to bottom and we feel more comfortable with that. I prefer to choose Random Effect (the last effect in the list) so that I never know which direction or effect is going to occur. It keeps the talks interesting. There is a danger in using Random Effect, as some of the builds are very, very slow in flying across the screen. It will drive you nuts while you wait for that one bullet to finally finish appearing so you can talk about it.

Setting Animation Animations--effects that make text and other screen items move, appear, and disappear--can, at the best of times, significantly enhance a presentation and focus the audience's attention on the point or points you'd like them to be focusing on. Unfortunately, it's also an inherent quality of animations that they can render an otherwise sober presentation silly, disrupting the presentation's pace and distracting the audience. The best way to ensure that your animations are helpful rather than harmful is to set them, insofar as is possible, at the template level in the slide master. A few animations, such as those that might be required for individual images that do not appear on every slide will still have to be set on a one-at-a-time basis, but by setting the majority of your animations at the template level, you can ensure that your audience doesn't become bewildered by an inconsistent barrage of differing transitions and motions. To set the animations at the level of the Slide Master, first make sure that you're looking at the slide master--if you're not, select View | Master| Slide Master from the main PowerPoint program menu. Next, right-click over the space allocated for a bulleted list to introduce a context menu, and from this select Custom Animation. You'll then see a substantial Custom Animation dialog appear (see below). In the upper left side of this dialog, you'll find a listing of five fields marked Text1 through Text5 . Clicking on any one of these highlights, in the adjacent preview window, the particular field that has been selected. As a rule, you should only set animations for Text2, the field that represents the bulleted list. The task of setting the animations for the Text2 field is relatively easy, although you will have a variety of options to pick from: begin by putting a checkmark into the checkbox beside Text2. This specifies that an animation will be applied.


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In the left-most field beneath the heading Entry animation and sound , select the animation that should be used to introduce bulleted items: you've got quite a range to pick from, but you'll find that the simplest ones (Appear or Dissolve ) are probably the least distracting and least likely to interfere with the pacing of your presentation. Some animations allow you to specify the direction of the animation (ie. Fly in from the left ) in the adjoining field. To preview an animation you've selected, you can click on the preview button on the upper right part of the dialog window. Don't set an animation sound. Please don't. Please, please, please don't. Animation sounds are always distracting and usually irritating. It is, however, a good idea to set the value in the After Animation field to represent a color that's a faded version of the color you are using for your text. Doing so will have the effect of making the current bullet always display slightly more brightly than items that you've already addressed. This can significantly aid your audience in focusing their attention on the current subject matter. On the lower right side of the screen, you'll also want to make a few changes: it makes good sense to have the text introduced all at once, so you can leave that default intact. On the other hand, it is sometimes helpful to have bulleted items appear one at a time (or grouped according to their respective levels), towards which end you should set the Grouped by value to represent that level of indentation that you would like the groups to appear in. For instance, setting this to 3rd would specify that every first and second level bullet would require a separate keystroke to be introduced, but that all third, fourth, and fifth-level bullets would appear in their respective groups, all at once. Since most presentations can effectively be given using the 5th level grouping, that is a logical choice, but it really does come down to a matter of taste and organization. Set the Group by value as you see fit, and then click the OK button to close the Custom Animations dialog. Note: Custom animation effects can also be applied to charts and multimedia components like sounds and videos. To set animation effects for these elements, you must right-click on one of the charts or media items as you are creating the presentation, and then select the Custom Animation option from the context menu. The animation effects for these elements cannot be set at the slide master level. Default animations for individual images or clip art in your presentation cannot be set at the slide master level either: right-click on the image/clip art item, select Custom Animation from the menu, and set the properties specifically for the individual image or clip art item in question.

Saving a Slide as a Graphic File When you want to convert a slide you created in PowerPoint to a graphics file, you can do so pretty easily and in more than one graphics format. You may wish to turn an Excel table or graph into an image for use elsewhere. This is how you do it.

Copy the slide to a separate file using Copy in the original file and Paste in a new file. In the new file containing just the one slide, click on File and Save and give the file a new name in the File Name box. When you click on the Save File As Type text box, you can either select the .WMF extension (Windows Metafile), or .GIF or .JPG formats. Use JPG if the slide contains lots of colors and .GIF is the slide is a simple one with few colors or is a black and white image. The slide can now be inserted as a graphic image in most programs. It can also be edited with a graphics program like Pain Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop for further work.

Organizational Charts The organizational chart slide allows you to present a view of a hierarchical structure--it needn't be a corporate organizational structure, and could be anything from a family-tree, to a visual representation of related skills, to a representation of the inter-relationships between species. As with most PowerPoint slides, there is a standard title field that should be filled in, identifying the subject matter of the slide. PowerPoint has a built-in Organizational Chart Auto layout. From Slide view, select the New Slide icon, and from that the Organizational Chart Auto layout. Once selected, it will take a few seconds to load that program. Adding subordinates, assistants and co-workers is a matter of clicking on the level then clicking on the box you wish to attach the person to.


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Organizational charts can also be used to indicate a population and on the next layer, the organization of the population into subpopulations.

Editing an Organizational Chart Edit an organizational chart element the same way you would edit any other text box. Change the fill, text font and size, text color, width of the links and box outlines. Boxes can be shadowed, and the borders changed to fancier ones. Select Boxes or Lines from the menu to make any changes.

The organizational chart program has quite rich formatting capabilities. Remember not to add too much to one slide. File, Update Presentation Name updates the PowerPoint slide. To exit, use Close and return to presentation name. Now, admire your org chart in your slide.

Showing Off your Presentation at a KIOSK

At a conference or health fair you may wish to set up your PowerPoint presentation as a loop if you need to be away from the booth for any length of time. Setting up a loop is not difficult but it does require some care to make the slides stay on just long enough for people to read, but not so long as to bore them. After creating the presentation, you will need to set the slide timings. You can set a slide show to run by itself with automatic timings. Select Rehearse Timings from the Slide Show menu item. The time will keep clicking off until you hit the stop button. Time for each individual slide will appear at the bottom left of each slide as you view it in Slide Sorter view. With longer shows, it's probably easier to set the timings manually. In slide or slide sorter view, select the slide or slides you want to set the timing for. On the Slide Show menu, click Slide Transition. Under Advance, click Automatically after, and then enter the number of seconds you want the slide to appear on the screen. The amount of time you leave depends on the number of bullets and the density of information in each bullet. When you have the correct amount of time, click on apply. Do each slide in turn until you are done with the slides. Each slide time will be different. To view the timings, click Slide Show. It's a little tricky getting the timings correct because your tendency is to rush through the presentation when you're reading it. Do remember that different people read at different speeds and plan accordingly. Your best bet is to get a friend or colleague to sit down with the presentation and go through it noting where the speed is too fast or too slow. You can then increase of decrease the timing as required. Go into the Slide Sorter view and from the Slide Show menu item, select Set Up Show. Then select Browse at a Kiosk (full screen). Select all slides (radio button) (or the ones you want to show), and Advance Slides using Timings. Alternatively, you can set it so users can move through the show at their own pace by using the mouse. Here the process is the same (Slide Show | Set Up Show | Browse at a Kiosk (full screen) except that you then select Advance Slides Manually. If you haven't set up transitions between slides, it helps to do so when creating a loop. It just makes the presentation much smoother.


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Annotating Slides It may be useful to be able to write or draw on one or more of your slides during a presentation. To change the color of the pen before you begin your presentation, click Set Up Show from the Slide Show menu. From the Pen color box, select the color you want. To bring up a pen, right-click with your mouse, and then click Pen. To write, hold down the left mouse button as you write or draw on your slide. To change the pen color during the presentation, right-click Pointer Options, select Pen Color and then the pen color you want. This feature appears very transitory. Keep in mind that the mouse was never intended to be an artist's tool. Your drawings or added text will be clumsy efforts at best. To erase annotations during a presentation, click on the letter e.

Style Checker The Style Checker checks for spelling, visual clarity, and case and end punctuation. This valuable tool checks to see that the case in each of the Title Placeholders match, whether or not you have included end punctuation, and that each slide is set for maximum readability. To activate style checker, choose TOOLS : Options. Click the Spelling and Style tab, and make sure that Check Style is selected. While you can change the options, the default settings are generally the best for a great presentation. The Office Assistant automatically checks style as your develop your presentation. You must have the Assistant enabled for this option to work. To enable the Assistant, Choose HELP : Show the Office Assistant. Right click on the Assistant and choose Options. Check the Use the Office Assistant.

Style issues are marked with a Lightbulb Icon.


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Adding a Narration


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There might be circumstances in your presentation when you need to record a narration directly. In those instances where you wish to make an entire presentation available to your audience and you don't want to have to be there to present it, the Record Narration option lets you record your entire presentation for playback on a stand-alone computer--on a student's desktop, in a lab environment, at a kiosk--where PowerPoint is also installed, and where speakers or a headset are available. Tip: Save your presentation under a new name before beginning to experiment with the Record Narration function(s). If you later decide that you do not want the narration after you've applied it, you'll find it easier to open a previously saved audio-free copy than to remove the audio and timing settings from the narrated version. The process of recording a narration is simple: from the main PowerPoint menu, select Slide Show/Record Narration. A Record Narration dialog will appear. In the Record Narration dialog, you have the option to adjust input levels and recording quality or simply to click on the OK button and get started. It is usually a good idea to click the Set Microphone Level... button to make sure that the recording levels will give you a good quality recording. Upon clicking the Set Microphone Level... button, a Microphone Check dialog will appear, as illustrated below. Next select the Change Quality… button. The Sound Selection box will appear. Select CD Quality. This optimizes the audio for CD quality playback. Follow the instructions, reading the text into your microphone. As you do so, the the slider (under the meter bar) will move to the right (to increase the recording level) or to the left (to decrease the recording level). By the time you have finished reading, the recording level should be optimally set. Clicking the OK button will subsequently close the Microphone Check dialog. When you are again looking at the Record Narration dialog, a click of the OK button will immediately begin the recording process; so make sure that you are ready to start adding the narration to your presentation. When your first slide appears on the screen, the recording is underway. You can choose to either link your narrations (linking the audio wav. Files to the presentation file in a specific drive of your computer (floppy, zip, C, etc.) or to embed the audio files. Leaving the link narrations checkbox unchecked will cause the audio files to embed into your presentation. As a result your presentation file will be a larger file size if you embed the audio files. Linking the sound files (checking the box) will cause the wav. files to be saved separately while remaining linked to your slides. The presentation file will remain its original size. Note: Embedding the audio into your presentation will cause less confusion later when you are viewing the presentation. The trade-off is that the presentation file size will be larger. From this point, you can give the presentation as you would if you were standing before a room of people; as you make your way through the slides, the "timings" of your key-presses are linked to the audio track so that, when you've finished, your presentation is ready to be canned and delivered pretty much without you. If you wish to pause your narration at some point during the recording, right-click on a slide to introduce the following context menu:


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Then click on the Pause Narration option. To begin recording again, right-click on the slide again, and select the Resume Narration option (not illustrated here). After you reach the last slide, you'll see a prompt asking whether you'd like to save the timings; if you're happy with the narration, click Yes; otherwise, click No, and start the process again from the beginning. Once the presentation has been saved with its timings, the entire presentation will play on its own, with your narration guiding the audience and the slides advancing at the appropriate moments, in sync with your voice. Tip: If you want to re-record a narration that has already been added to a slide, view the slide in PowerPoint's Normal View, and then select Slide Show|Record Narration from the main PowerPoint menu. You will then be able to record your narration as you did before. When you have finished re-recording the slide, advance to the next slide and then press ESC to stop the recording. If you make a mistake or another error occurs while recording, you can end the narration by clicking through the remainder of your slides. Start the recording process again and the new audio will replace the earlier version.


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Extending PowerPoint Beyond

When you complete this chapter you will be able to Edit Add Ins Deliver Add Ins Create templates & Miscellaneous Add Ins Use Microsoft PowerPoint Animation Player


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Very few of the millions of PowerPoint users worldwide are aware of the concept of PowerPoint add-ins. In their most basic form, Add-ins is a small program that can be run only from within PowerPoint. They are usually integrated with their host program; and more often than not, they add new menus or icons to the PowerPoint interface. Further PowerPoint add-ins usually falls in three categories: Editing Add-ins Delivery Add-ins Template and Miscellaneous Add-ins Editing Add-ins

Editing add-ins usually add new editing possibilities to a presentation. Sometimes these are just complicated macro routines made simple by a click of an icon; at other times, they provide solutions to PowerPoint problem areas. Vox Proxy (http://www.voxproxy.com/) is an add-in that adds Microsoft Agent style animated characters to PowerPoint. These characters speak to the audience from within a running PowerPoint presentation. Another example is the free PPTools Starter Kit add-in (http://www.rdpslides.com/pptools/FAQ00046.htm) from Steve Rindsberg and Brian Reilly that provides an arsenal of new routines to PowerPoint. (Included in the CD) CrystalGraphics (http://www.powerplugs.com) provide add-ins that can do everything from adding new transitions and animated shapes to PowerPoint. In fact, they have an excellent add-in that provides a single click access to over 30,000 famous quotations from within PowerPoint! Delivery Add-ins Delivery add-ins is related to the distribution aspect of PowerPoint presentations. They usually alter the presentation itself to accommodate a new distribution format like Flash, Java, Real Media or Windows Media. Other delivery add-ins creates autorun CDs from PowerPoint presentations. Impatica (http://www.impatica.com) converts entire PowerPoint presentations to Java presentations that can be played on any browser—often file sizes are reduced to as little as 10% of the original size. (Included in the CD) PowerCONVERTER, from PresentationPro (http://www.presentationpro.com), similarly converts PowerPoint presentations to Macromedia's Flash SWF format. Other PowerPoint to Flash converters include Presedia (http://www.presedia.com), IceSLIDE (http://www.iceweb.com/site1/pages/iceslide.cfm) and iCreate (http://www.wanadu.com). (Sample Software Included in the CD) PresenterONE (http://www.realnetworks.com/products/presenterone) from Accordent can create RealMedia movies from PowerPoint presentations. Incidentally, you can output entire PowerPoint presentations to the QuickTime format if you are using PowerPoint on the Macintosh. To create autorun CDs from PowerPoint presentations, you can look at three choices including Sonia Coleman's ACDPC (http://www.soniacoleman.com), RunIt! (http://www.creativemindsinc.com) and GST PowerLaunch (http://www.autorun-autoplay-tools.com/gst-power-launch2.htm).

Template and Miscellaneous Add-ins Any add-in that does not fall into the category of an editing or delivery add-in is usually classified into this category. Accent Graphics (http://www.presentation-librarian.com) makes the popular Presentation Librarian and PowerSearch add-ins that provide PowerPoint with extensive cataloguing and search capabilities. Slide Converter from Aladat (http://www.aladat.com) allows you to create a new presentation using images of your slides. CrystalGraphics PowerPlugs Headings (http://www.powerplugs.com) are a collection of hundreds of alpha channel imparted visuals that add sophisticated headings to PowerPoint slides. Hemera includes a PowerPoint add-in that allows a single click access to its Graphicsdesk


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(http://www.graphicsdesk.com) clipart subscription service. If you have the full version of Adobe Acrobat (http://www.adobe.com/), you'll find that the installation of the program automatically initializes an add-in that simplifies creation of Acrobat PDFs from within PowerPoint. These are only a few of the hundreds of PowerPoint add-ins that are available. You can find more add-ins using google.

Add-in Compatibility With various versions of PowerPoint being used today on the Windows platform, it would be prudent to find out if an add-in actually is compatible with your PowerPoint version before actually using / buying the product. Thankfully, many add-ins have trial or demo versions you can test before deciding. In addition, below mentioned is a website that details add-in compatibility for the three different PowerPoint versions. Be aware though, that the page weighs around 100 kb and may take a while to load for those on dial-up access. http://www.indezine.com/products/powerpoint/addin/compatible.html Following this information we are now ready to go ahead with add-ins. What about you? Microsoft PowerPoint Animation Player Download the PowerPoint animation Player from the Microsoft page http://www.microsoft.com/office/office/viewers.asp Open PowerPoint 95, and your presentation On the File menu, select Save as HTML. Then Next. On the next screen, select, New Layout, then Standard Page layout. Next. Now select PowerPoint Animation Use a resolution of 640 x 480 or 800 x 600 and the default width of graphics (1/2 screen) Add your email address and URL Select page colors and button look. Either use the default or change the colors. Generally speaking the default is preferable. Select one of the three buttons for your presentation Decide where you want the navigation buttons to go. Most people use bottom, right side or top. If you have slide notes, be sure to select the Include slide notes in pages check box Now click Finish The file will have the same name as the file you are converting but will be in its own subdirectory A link is automatically inserted to show them where to get the Player Using this method, the person must have the Player in order to view your presentation. If they don't have the viewer, the presentation will not display

LINKS

POWERPOINT TEMPLATES How to Conquer the World. http://www.howtoconquertheworld.com/powerpoi.htm 12 backgrounds. You add the text boxes from another presentation and save them in the new background. Photographic Specialties http://www.ezslides.com/pot.htm . 16 zipped backgrounds. Quite nice.


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Presenters Online Templates http://www.presentersonline.com/resources/resources_templates.html Business, education, high tech and general templates. SOUNDS Presenters Online Sounds http://www.presentersonline.com/resources/resources_sound.html Quite a few sounds at this site.


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PowerPoint FAQs

Drawing In PowerPoint

How do I change the default colors? Each slide has what is referred to as a "color scheme". The scheme colors are the colors that appear in the little pop-ups for different controls. PowerPoint templates come with multiple color schemes built in, which you can change by using the Format/Color Scheme menu command. You can also use this to create your own schemes. Every slide can have a different color scheme. Different color schemes can be used to break out sections of a long presentation.

What happened to recolor Picture? It's there, it's just hard to find. The recolor picture command is no longer a menu command, but is now a button on the "picture" toolbar. From the View menu, select "Toolbars..." and then "Picture". You will need to select a picture object in order for the recolor picture command to become available. Is there a limit to the number of guides you can have? Yes, for some strange reason, you can only have up to 8 guides in each direction. To get more guides, hold down the CTRL key while dragging on a guide. (You must first turn guides on by using the Guides command on the View menu.) To get rid of a guide, drag it off the page.

How do I make my own PowerPoint backgrounds? (See Create Templates) What you're talking about, is creating templates, or "POT" files. First of all, any file can be saved as a POT file--all you have to do is use the SAVE AS dialog and select POT as the file type, replacing PPT. This action automatically takes you to the location where the rest of the templates are stored, which is sometimes useful and sometimes not. As for the file itself, you'll want to do the following things to make a good template: (easiest if you make it in this order) Format the slide master, including making a nice background, setting the fonts, bullets, etc. Create and apply a color scheme to the Slide Master; make sure that desired objects (text, drawings, etc) follow these colors. You can create multiple schemes for a single template, but the master will only use one of these schemes at a time. Later, when actually in use, each slide can use a different color scheme, so sometimes it's nice to make templates with differing schemes that give each template different looks. Format the page numbers, footers, as you like, and set them for being visible or not, depending on your wishes. Go to black and white view, and, by using the right mouse button to click on individual objects, set the way each object on the page will print until the page resembles the way you want it to look when printed to black and white printers. Insert a New Title Master. By doing this after you've done all the rest, it will automatically "inherit" all the work you've already done, so you've got a good starting place. Make any changes you want to the Title Master, including changing the color scheme and black and white print settings. With no objects selected, from the FORMAT menu, select FONT. Select the font that you want other text and labels to default to. Go to slide sorter view and delete any slides that are there.


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Go to slide view, where you should see nothing. From the FILE menu, select SAVE AS, and in the "save as type" drop down box select "Presentation Template" Close the file, and then create a new presentation from this template, evaluating what needs to be changed, and what bugs need to be fixed. Have fun! For more details see the Chapter on how to create a template in the book.

How do I create additional pre-set color fills? There is no way to create two or multi-colored fills that you can get to display in the fill menu. A lame workaround is to just make a shape with the fills you like (combine shapes to get multicolored fills) and then keep it around and copy/paste it into your pres.

Pictures and Other External Files

My pictures turned to Big Red X's--what happened? You are not alone; this is a serious problem that many people are running into. It is due to a file size bug; when PowerPoint doesn't have enough memory to deal with the size of your file, the graphics get forever replaced with big red X images. If you can insert the pictures directly from PowerPoint (using Insert/Picture) as opposed to using copy/paste, the file size sometimes turns out to be much smaller (some applications create links and other exciting remnants when doing a paste operation). When saving and reopening these files, people find fewer problems. As for opening files which already have red crosses, Microsoft suggests closing the file WITHOUT saving (as saving would also save the red crosses), close all other programs to free up as much memory as possible, restart your computer, and finally reopen your file. We have tested this workaround and it seems to work; problem is that almost everybody closes the file and saves it. In this case, you must manually reinsert the picture from its original source. How can I put Flash or Shockwave files into my presentation? Putting Flash or Shockwave files in PowerPoint is such an obvious idea that it's really too bad the PowerPoint team didn't think of it. However, it can be done in both PowerPoint 97 and PowerPoint 2000, using the VBA tools. You don't need to be a programmer to do it, but it is geeky! That said, here's what you do: First of all, you must install the Shockwave 4 plug-in Viewer on your system. You may download this for free from the Macromedia web site at http://www.macromedia.com. Secondly, save your Flash files as SWF (Shockwave) movies, and WRITE DOWN where you saved them. (this will become clear later). Once that is done, go to PowerPoint (97 or 2000) and make a slide. From the View menu, select Toolbars/Visual Basic to bring up VB toolbar. Click on USSR Button (hammer & something) marked "Control Toolbox" -- this brings up another toolbar. In the NEW set of tools you just bought up, again click on the Hammer & something button that is now marked "Other tools" -- you will get a drop down list. Scroll down this list until you get to "Shockwave Flash Object" --release your mouse button and your cursor becomes a cross hair: draw out a rectangle on your slide (you can change the size later). Right-click on the new rectangle with big x, and from the pop-aside menu select "Properties". (Isn't this EASY?!!) A large, intimidating properties list pops up on the left side of the screen. Make sure the "Alphabetic" tab is showing. Put on your propeller hat for geeky bits. Change "EmbedMovie" to True (which makes the shockwave file part of the ppt file, so you can give it to others). Set "Loop" to False if you don't want the movie to play endlessly; keep at TRUE if you do. After "Movie" type the absolute path of your file: i.e. c:\desktop\xyz.swf Close the properties box. Your slide will now look exactly the same. But, have no fear. Go to SLIDE SHOW, and you should see your flash movie play. And, when you return from slide show, the movie is now displayed on the screen, and you can resize it appropriately. You can put your shockwave files on the Slide Master and they will animate on every slide. Knock yourself out. How do I make bitmaps and captures screens display well in slide show? The trick is that bitmapped graphics only look exactly correct at one particular size. This is most noticeable in screen dumps, where you want to see a proper pixel for pixel representation. What is happening, is that during slide show, PowerPoint scales the presentation to fit the size of your monitor, and that the scaling hoses your bitmaps. To fix this you can do the following. In PowerPoint 97, right-click on the bitmap, select "Format Picture...", go to the "Size" tab, from the Scale area check the box labeled "best for slide show", and set the resolution to match your system resolution (available from the Display area of the Windows Control Panel). For PowerPoint 95 and all other versions, click on the bitmap, and from the Draw menu (or other depending on your version), select the Scale


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command. You must then enter a percentage based on the screen resolution of the system on which you plan to deliver your electronic presentation, using the percentages as listed below: 640x480 = 150% 720x512 = 133% 800x600 = 120% 1024 x 768 = 94% 1280 x 1024 = 75% This will scale the bitmap to a size that, when displayed in slide show, will appear at its original size. Crazy but true! Can the WMF format be converted to GIF? Yes, but not in PowerPoint. The way I do it, is to insert the image you want to use in PowerPoint, Word, or any other product that accepts vector based graphics, size it to the size you want to see your GIF file display, then copy/paste it into PhotoShop or some other bitmap editing package, where you can now save it as a GIF file. Is there some way to prepare photos so they display well in PowerPoint? There are two things that make bitmaps look bad in PowerPoint. One has to do with the reduction and enlargement, and the other has to do with colors. To find out about the size issues, look at the question on bitmaps and screen captures above. As for the color issue, if your computer is set up for more than 256 colors, you shouldn't have any problems. If not, read on. If you're displaying more than one photo per slide, or a color photo against a multi-color shaded background, you may experience some color degradation in your photograph. This is due to the fact that some PC systems are configured for displaying only 256 colors at a time, and photographs and shaded backgrounds require many colors to be properly rendered. One option is to change your video settings to allow more colors (you must have a graphics card with 2 or more MB of video ram to do this) by using the Display area of the Windows 95 Control Panel. Another option is to use a product like PhotoShop to lower the number of colors in the photograph. Use PhotoShop's Indexed Color feature, and select Adaptive Palette, then keep setting the number of colors lower and lower until you get a small number that still looks good. Numbers that are powers of 2 (2,4,8,16,32,64,128, 256) will also reduce your overall file size. When you save the file, save as a GIF file, which will give you the best compression, while preserving the correct palette adjustments. JPEG format has better compression, but will always save the photo with millions of colors, thus leading to pretty harsh display problems on 256-color systems. I'm trying to open *.wmf files, and just gets garbage. What do I do? WMF files are graphics files, which need to be "inserted" as opposed to "opened." This is a subtle, yet important distinction to the product. In PowerPoint, start a new presentation (or open an existing one), and then from the Insert menu, select Picture, then select your file name. How can I make the background of my logo transparent? Only PowerPoint 97 (version 8) and PowerPoint 2000 support transparency in graphics, but there are a few ways to work around this problem. 1) If your logo can be represented in monochrome (one color only), then try scanning it as "line art", and saving it as a monochrome bitmap. Monochrome bitmaps should come into PowerPoint versions 4.0 and higher with their backgrounds transparent. Note, however, that I use the word "should" ... it doesn't always work. 2) Set up your design so that the logo is sitting on a solid color, not a shaded part of a background. Use PhotoShop or the equivalent to save the number of colors in your logo to below 64. Import the logo file into PowerPoint using the Insert Picture command. Then, use the Recolor Picture command to reassign the logo's background color to the same color as the background of your slide (or color that the log is sitting on). This will give you the same feeling as the logo being transparent. Why are my Excel Spreadsheets getting cropped when I paste them into PowerPoint? According to Microsoft Tech Support, PowerPoint has an internal limit of 6 x 6 inches for this type of object. Spreadsheets larger than 6" in height or width will get cropped when they are pasted into PowerPoint. This is extraordinarily stupid! What resolution should I scan an image at in order for it to present well in PowerPoint? If you want an image to look good on the screen in PowerPoint, scan it at the screen resolution: 72. dpi. Higher does you no good--it only makes the files bigger. HOWEVER, you may find that 72 dpi images are a bit too low-res for printed output, so you might want to scan at 150, which makes a nice compromise. THEN AGAIN, if you are outputting to 35mm slides, you're talking a whole another ball game. 35 mm slide output devices are very high


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resolution, and you'll want 300 dpi scans. These will make your presentation gigantic, but anything-lower resolution will look really bad. Some people keep multiple versions going to solve this problem, but that's a pain too. Such is life.

How can I import DXF files into PowerPoint? Microsoft Office 2000 does not install or have the option to install DXF filters with the standard CD-ROM installation. The converter patch can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/2000/appndx/toolbox.htm#outlook When you get to this page, scroll down until you find the Converter Pack heading and then choose which file you want to download. The document that explains more about this can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/support/Office/OFF2K/Converter.asp

Animation and Slide Show Why won't my branched presentations work when presented with the Viewer? The Viewer does not support branching. It's not you, it's the software. Is there a way to go backwards in an electronic slide show? To go backwards a slide in slide show, you can use any of the following: Page up, Right mouse button, Left arrow key. For more info, see our Powerpoint Keyboard Shortcut file. How do I get Animated GIF files to play in Slide Show? In order to do this, you'll need to upgrade to the new PowerPoint 2000, which does support animated GIF files. You can even use them as bullets if you want. Are there any Animation Plug-ins for PowerPoint? Ravware Software has created a PowerPoint '97 plug-in that allows you to play animated FLC files in slide show. We have not tried this tool, but if you want to give it a go, check it out at http://www.ravware.com/activex.htm Why is my slide show playing in a window? It looks like some how the presentation was set to play in a window, as opposed to the full screen. This property is set on a presentation basis, so you might see it on one presentation and not others. From the Slide Show menu, pick "Set Up Show". In the Show Type box, make sure that the option "presented by a speaker (full screen)" is checked. Most likely this has been changed to "browsed by an individual (in a window)". How can I make objects flash infinitely in slide show? There is no automatic easy way to do this. There is a hack that will get you this effect if you really want it. Make a group of objects that flash once, and then pile on top of it more copies of the same object, each set to flash once. Set a few seconds delay between each effect, so that it won't all happen to fast. It's not great, but it's the closest you'll get to that "game show" feeling. Is there any way to have OLE objects update automatically in slide show? No. How can I go "back" in a slide show like I do in my browser? The next slide/previous slide actions use the "slide show" (one slide after another) metaphor, not the web-space metaphor (where "back" means "the last slide I saw"). If you're doing a kiosk style or self-running presentation, the best thing to do is to put buttons on each slide that navigate directly to the places they may want to go. To make a BACK button: Draw a button (or use Slide Show/Action Buttons and select the blank button, then draw it out on the screen like you would a box). Select this button or graphic, and then go to the Slide Show menu, select Action Settings, and


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click the radio box marked "Hyperlink to:" and set it to "Last Slide Viewed". This button will behave like the Back button on your web browser. If you want this on all of your slides, put the button on the Slide Master (View/Slide Master). Is there any way to make Right Mouse go backwards in slide show? From the Tools menu, select Options, and then click on the View tab. There is a checkbox in the Slide Show section: "Popup menu on right mouse click"--uncheck this box and the right mouse button will make slide show go backwards. How can I change the speed of the transitions?

You can't. Some effects are slower than others (fly versus crawl), but the speed is not adjustable. Can I create links that go to web pages while in slide show? Yes, but you'll need PowerPoint 2000 to do it. Why does the speed of animation effects change on different computers? Animations do run differently on different computers, depending primarily on the processor speed and the amount of RAM. If you are doing a lot of animation, you want to have lots of both. It may be that the second computer is not as powerful as the first. Sometimes another problem has to do with screen display speed; laptops with screen types other than active matrix displays are very slow, and tend to lag in displaying things. Can you prevent PowerPoint from advancing slides when anything other than buttons are clicked? For example, on one page there are 12 different action buttons, which lead to 12 different slides. Can you set PowerPoint to prevent it from advancing to the next slide if you happen to miss one of the action buttons and you click the background? A good example is if you are on slide 12 and you want to click an action button that moves the presentation to slide 74, but you miss and the presentation advances to slide 13. The answer to this question is YES. Go to the slide that has all the buttons on it, and from the Slide Show menu, select "Slide Transition". In this dialog, UNCHECK BOTH BOXES ON THE LOWER LEFT. This will make the slide so that the ONLY thing it responds to is clicking on the buttons. How can I make font animation (like in Microsoft Word) work in PowerPoint? You can't. Is there a way to make my own animations and play them in PowerPoint? PowerPoint 2000 allows you to place animated GIF files (like the ones that you see on web pages) into your pages; the animations will play in slide show. This does not work in PowerPoint 97. If you want to create "movies" that play in PowerPoint, you'll have to use something that saves as AVI files: two products I know of are Macromedia Flash and Adobe Premier. I believe Flash to be a better (easier) product. But beware that AVI files will always have an opaque background--they play "in a box" so to speak. For true animation, Flash might be a good product for you, in that you can create self-running animated files that require no player. It's a great product, but not particularly easy to learn. The on-line tutorial is a must. Is there any way to seamlessly run slide shows sequentially? PowerPoint 4 had a great feature called "Play Lists" that allowed PowerPoint to read a text (LST) file with the names of the presentation files in order, and it would play those files one after another in slide show. This was great for conferences, etc. Unfortunately, in fact tragically, this feature was lost in PowerPoint 95, and has never reappeared. Ugly workarounds include creating a DOS batch file, which switches between DOS and PowerPoint between each presentation (ooh, THAT's nice). A less ugly alternative involves creating an agenda slide that contains jumps to other presentations saved as PPS files, so that they're launched as slide shows. The third ugly alternative is to put a button on the last slide of each presentation that jumps to the first slide of the next presentation. Is there any way to "zoom in" on a picture in slide show? There are two ways I know that you could do this; both are hacks. The most elegant, but also most time consuming would be to make more slides with the zoomed-in bitmaps on them. These could be hidden slides, which would allow you to gracefully skip over them if you didn't want to explore them, or just press the H key while in slide show to show the hidden slide. Alternatively, you can , when you need to zoom in, ALT-Tab to PowerPoint (regular view),


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zoom in to the picture as you like, then ALT-Tab back to slide show when you're done. Preferably, you would turn off as many toolbars as possible to make this less ugly. Is there any way to have smooth (aliased) fonts in Slide Show? This feature is now possible, if you're using Windows 98. From the Windows Start Menu, select Settings, then Control Panel. Click on the Effects tab, and check the box that says "Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts". Is there any way to run two different slide shows at once on two different monitors? Simple answer: no.

Sound and Video What movie format plays on both Mac and Windows? At this point, there is no good answer to this problem. Is it possible to use an Audio-CD soundtrack in my presentations? Yes, but you'll need PowerPoint 97 (or higher) and there is a bit of a trick to it. Put your Audio-CD in your CD-ROM drive. For most computers running Windows 95, this automatically starts the Windows 95 CD player and you hear your music. It is very important to CLOSE the CD Player application before you try inserting the sound in PowerPoint. If you have the CD Player application running, it won't work properly, so just remember to close that puppy down! Meanwhile, back in PowerPoint 97: from the Insert menu, select "Movies and Sounds..." an then "Play CD Audio Track..." This brings up the Play Options dialog. Set things as you like, and then click OK. You should now see a little sound icon on your presentation. If you go to slide show, you can now click on this icon, and it will play the sound. If you want the sound to play automatically: 1) click on the sound icon (the one you just inserted) to select it. 2) From the Slide Show menu, select "Custom Animation..." This brings up the Custom Animation dialog, which has several tabs. On the "Play Settings" tab, click "Play Using Animation Order"; also click "hide while not playing" to hide the icon (if you want to, most people do). You can now choose to have the sound play just on one slide, or across multiple slides by playing with these settings. 3) From the "Timing" tab, click "Automatically". Otherwise, you have to click to get the sound to play. You can use the arrow buttons to the right of the animation order box to control the order in which objects "play" on the slide. For example, you might want your title to fly in first, then have the music play, and then have bullets fly in. To do this, you'd want to make sure your sound clip was second in the play list. How do I make my sound files invisible in Slide Show? After inserting a sound file, you will see an icon on the slide representing that file. Select the icon, then go to the Slide Show menu and choose Custom Animation. On the Play Settings tab, you'll need to make sure that the box that says "Hide while not playing" is checked. This will make your icon disappear in slide show. To make the sound play, you'll need to click on the invisible icon. This can be tricky, so try locating the icon in a corner where you'll remember it, and/or making the icon much bigger so you won't miss "hitting" it. Note that hidden sound icons do not play at all when slide shows are configured to run within a window. This is a bug. How do I get rid of the Virus Alert when playing mpeg Videos in Slide Show? In PowerPoint 97, disable Macro Virus Protection by selection Options from the Tools menu. In the PowerPoint 2000, set your Office Security Settings to Low via Tools/Macro/Security. Why do my movies start and end with black boxes? There is nothing in PowerPoint that would make this happen. Most likely the first and last few frames of your movie file are black, and that's what you're seeing. You'll need to find some way to edit them out of the movie to get rid of them. How can I make PowerPoint load embedded sound files more quickly? PowerPoint loads the image of the next slide into memory while the previous slide is playing, but I don't believe it has any way to load linked files until they are activated. Is there any way to play a Sound and Animation simultaneously? No.


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Can I play QuickTime movies in PowerPoint? Yes and no. You can play QuickTime movies in Macintosh PowerPoint 3, 4, and 98. Windows PowerPoint does not support QuickTime movies, only AVI files. The trick to know about is that the movies are referenced in the file, but do not become part of the file. Therefore, you need to make sure that when you play the PowerPoint slide show you 1) have the movie file and 2) the movie file is located in the same relative path as it was when you inserted it in the first place (best to just keep the movie in the same folder as the presentation). The answer to the next question about sounds applies to movies as well. Why don't sounds play when I move my file to another computer? When preparing a presentation (with sounds) that is to be used from different computers, it is very important to make sure that all of the sound files are located in the same folder as the presentation that you've created, and that you insert them from this location. Sound files, because of their large size, don't become an actual part of the presentation file--a link is formed to the sound file. When the presentation is played, the program goes looking for the sound at the location described in the link. This works fine on the original creation machine, but as soon as you move things to another machine, the links don't accurately describe where the files are, and things fail to play. The first thing to know is that PowerPoint will always look for the sound in the folder that contains the presentation, so this is the best place to put them. You can't modify the links, so you have to start off by putting the sounds in the same folder as the presentation, and then inserting them into your presentation. This will create an internal link with no real address: PowerPoint knows that the sound is in the same folder as the presentation, and will look for it there regardless of what that folder's name is, or what machine it's on.

Printing Is there a way to control how slides print in black and white? In PowerPoint 95, 97, and 2000 you can specify how every object on the page prints, separately from how it will display on the screen. It's a super-useful but pretty darned hidden feature. In slide view, click on the "B&W View" button at the far right of the main toolbar. This will show you how your slide will print to a black and white printer. To change any object, click on the object (or the background) with your RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON and select options from the "Black and White..." pop-aside menu choice. You can also do this for object on your slide master. Is there any way to keep some slides from printing? Sometimes, when building a presentation, you use extra slides to get the animation effects that you want. When you print, however, you don't want these slides to print. Try making these slides "hidden" slides (the Hidden Slide button is available from the Slide Sorter View or as a menu command from the Slide Show menu). Once you've made them hidden slides, when you print you'll want to un-check the "Print Hidden Slides" checkbox in the lower right corner of the Print dialog. Make sure that you un-hide your slides again before doing your slide show, or these slides will not show up. How do I print giant posters from PowerPoint? Although PowerPoint allows a maximum page size of 56 x 56 inches, you need to find a printer that can print on that size paper. Some of the slides imaging places have these types of printers. PowerPoint itself has no ability to tile a page to a printer--it just things of a page as a page. If your printer has the ability to cut up or "tile" a large image onto many pages than you'd want to set that through the printer settings via the Print dialog. Our printers here don't do such a thing, but maybe there's one out there that does. Is there any way to print a catalog of slides with titles and file names? The best thing that exists is to use the 6-slides per page option in PowerPoint's print dialog, and to set the Handout Master (View/Masters/Handouts) to have the file name in the header or footer. If you don't want pictures of the slides, and just want titles, print the outline (again, select this in the Print dialog) and format the Outline Master (View/Masters/Outline) to have the file name in the footer. For each of these approaches you'll have to print out each presentation separately. Why is my bulleted text printing differently from how it looks on screen? The only time when I've seen something like this happen is when there is an issue with fonts. Sometimes you get into a situation where either you have screen fonts but no printer fonts, and the printer substitutes a font that


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doesn't match with the screen font OR you have printer fonts for which you have no corresponding screen font, so the computer uses the "closest match" it can find. Again, you have the situation where everything looks great on the screen, but things print differently from what you see. To see if this is what your problem is, try changing all of the text to a standard windows font like Arial or Times, and then see if the problem still exists.

Formatting What to do if one object on your slide is hidden behind another

It's fine to have overlapping objects on a PowerPoint slide. But when you are working with text and images, sometimes one object will get stuck behind another, preventing you from moving or editing the one underneath. To fix this problem, right-click on the top object. In the menu that appears, go to Order - Send to Back. Now you should be able to access the object that was behind it. . Is there a way to adjust "kerning" or "tracking" in PowerPoint?

No. Sorry! How can I get Word tables to look good in PowerPoint? Upgrade to PowerPoint 2000, which re-wrote all the table code so that it works. If you're stuck using a previous version, DON'T format the table using one of Word's preset styles. While in Word, make all the lines in the table a different color from the text in the table. Then when you're back in PowerPoint, use recolor picture to recolor the lines in PowerPoint. There are many problems about Word's use of color and PowerPoint color schemes, and this is the way I've found that gets around the problem the best. The table code in PowerPoint 97 isn't very good, and has lots of problems, mostly in the area of columns being cut off. For best results, insert tables while in PowerPoint and create them from scratch, as opposed to creating them in Word and pasting them into your presentation. How do I get graphs to look right when the file is transferred to the Mac?

Graphs that are created on the PC in PPT'97 (using PowerPoint's Graphs or Excel Charts) sometimes have translation problems when these files are opened on the Mac in PPT'98. There is a bug that shows up in build charts with blended fills. If you experience this bug, try taking the fills out, and the builds should then work properly. Other chart translation problems can be solved by double-clicking on the chart (in Mac PowerPoint '98), which opens them up in Graphing module, and then clicking "off" the chart to go back to PowerPoint. This will solve the problem for the Macintosh file, but alas, if it is a file that PC users want to share with Mac users here and there (and having two versions is impractical) you are out of luck. Microsoft is aware of these bugs. Any way to have more than two masters, like Persuasion?

Persuasion users always hate this part of PowerPoint. The answer to your question is "no". Why do my Org Charts keep falling apart?

The sad truth is that the Org Chart code in PowerPoint just isn't very good. It is common to have charts look different each time you look at them, printing problems, and strange formatting occurrences. The only good workaround is to draw your org charts from scratch using PowerPoint's drawing tools, which will not have any of these problems. How do I change PowerPoint's ruler from Metric to US?

PowerPoint, like the other Office applications, doesn't store a setting for the ruler, it looks to Windows to provide this setting. To change the setting, close all open applications, and: From the Windows Start button, click Settings, then Control Panel. Double-click on Regional Settings Click on the tab labeled "Number" Down towards the bottom of the list is a setting called "Measurement System"; set this to US, or Metric, which ever you prefer. When you re-launch PowerPoint, the ruler should then obey this setting.


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Why are all my slides black and white? What happened to the colors? Check to see that the "Black and White View" button hasn't accidentally been pressed. This is on your main formatting toolbar, right next to the view percentage readout. This button toggles the presentation's view between color and what you'll see when you print. While in this view, you can right-click on any object, and by using the Black and White settings menu, change how each object prints. Is there any way to change the presentation design of individual slides?

Unfortunately, a template applies itself to every slide in the presentation, so you can only use one template per show. There is a workaround, however. RIGHT-Click on the background of the slide you want to change, and select BACKGROUND from the little menu that pops up. Check the box that says something like "omit background objects" This will cease to display anything from the slide master. Now go to the slide master of the template you want to use, and copy/paste the objects to this slide. You'll probably also have to change the color scheme as well, which is tedious. Is there anyone who makes an Indexing Tool for PowerPoint presentations?

Yes. Check out http://www.accent-graphics.net They are making a tool "designed to automate the storage and retrieval of PowerPoint slides thereby making existing presentation materials available for the rapid development of new presentations." I haven't used this tool, but their web site is useful and looks to be worth checking out. How do I make a new Title Master?

Go to VIEW/SLIDE MASTER; then from the INSERT menu, select NEW TITLE MASTER. How do I make a slide use the Title Master and not the Slide Master?

Select FORMAT/SLIDE LAYOUT, and pick the title layout.

Saving, Using, Editing And Opening Presentations Which versions of PowerPoint can open/save which other versions?

PowerPoint 97, 98, and 2000 all use the same file format. All versions of PowerPoint can open the previous version's files from the same platform. Some versions allow you to down-rev save (lines in red), some allow you to open directly from a different platform (as shown in lines in blue). See the diagram below for the complete matrix of what does what. When opening Mac files from a PC, make sure to copy the file on to PC floppy from the Macintosh. Is there any tools for recovering corrupt .PPT files?

There is one; we haven't tried it, but it does come from Microsoft so we'll let you judge its quality. This is an add-in that "clones" the active presentation. Supposedly, you can use this add-in to create a corruption free copy of a presentation that you suspect may be corrupted. You can find this add-in at: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q193/8/48.asp Can I save my presentation to HTML?

The answer is a qualified "yes". If you want to do this, upgrade to PowerPoint 2000. In the File menu of PowerPoint 2000, you'll see the "Save to Web" option. This dialog does a lot of things, none of which are obvious.

Clicking SAVE: This saves your presentation as HTML in such a way that PowerPoint can reopen the file, edit it, and save back to HTML. (Useful if you saw a typo, for example, and you wanted to go back and fix it.) The file created by this function will be large and will look and work really nicely in IE5. HOWEVER, it won't work at all in any verison of Netscape. So, this is the classic "Microsoft only" solution. Files are big. All links, action buttons, transitions, builds, animations, and even Flash files display properly. Clicking PUBLISH: gives you three alternatives, all of which are one-way only (you can't open these html files back up in PowerPoint). Option 1: Publish for IE4 and higher: does the same quality job as above (good, but only for IE); no difference in file size from SAVE.


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Option 2: Publish for Netscape Navigator 3.0 and higher: creates a file that doesn't look as good as the IE versions, but does work for Netscape. You'll find that navigation buttons and links will still work, but all other effects will display but not work. Files are very small.

Option 3: Publish for both options 1 & 2: essentially, this does both 1 & 2, and people get the best one for their browser. Files are same size as adding options 1 & 2. While this creates a lot of space on the server, it probably is your best option if you don't live in an all Microsoft world. Important Note: If you want transition effects, builds, and animation effects to work in your web pages, you'll need to change a setting. From the File menu, click on Save to Web. Then click the Publish button, and then click the button marked "Web Options..." In this dialog, make sure that the box that says "show slide animations while browsing" is clicked. Otherwise, your animations will not play, regardless of how you save the file. How can I transfer my presentation to video? Upgrade to PowerPoint 2000, and then try using the "Presentation Broadcasting" feature.

Is it possible to save a presentation as read-only? Not really. You can save a presentation as a template (POT) file, which will open an unnamed copy of the template, but these files contain only masters, and no slides.

Is there a list of keyboard shortcuts somewhere? Yes, on this very book. Next Chapter PowerPoint Keyboard Shortcuts has all the available shortcuts mentioned.

How do I get rid of Custom dictionary entries? These are stored in a file known as custom.dic. If you use the FIND command (from the Windows Start menu) you will probably find this file in: c:\\office97\office To edit the file, launch Notepad, and open custom.dic. There you will find the list of words that you've entered into your custom dictionary. Delete any words you don't want, save the file, close the file, and then restart PowerPoint.

What is the maximum file size for PowerPoint? There is no maximum file size either in file size or number of slides. The system will barf on the file when you run out of memory, so buy lots of memory, particularly if you like to use pictures, sounds, and/or video.

How do I completely remove PowerPoint? Uninstalling PowerPoint does still leave some bits and pieces around on your machine. For a complete explanation of how to get rid of everything, check out http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q169/7/36.asp

How do I make a PowerPoint file into a self-running executable file? You can't. For those of you who don't understand what this is, it would be a presentation that would "play" itself, regardless of if PowerPoint was installed or not. The only products that we know of that do this are Macromedia Director and Macromedia Flash. But there is an indirect way of doing this: You can convert your PowerPoint file to Flash, and convert the Flash file to a Standalone Executable file using tools like FlashSee or some other tools. But then the presentation should be properly formatted. Slide timing should be properly adjusted.

How do I merge two presentations into one? Start with one presentation, and use the "Insert/ Slides from File" command. You can also copy slides from one presentation to another, but you'll need to go to the slide sorter view to do it. If you pick up slides from the slide sorter view, then you should get everything associated with that slide. If you try to copy a slide from Slide view, you just get the objects on the slide, and not the slide itself.

Can Power Point slides be made into PDF files? PowerPoint slides and entire presentations can be made into PDF files, but you'll need to purchase a copy of Adobe Acrobat in order to do it. PDF is a format owned and created by Adobe. Their Acrobat "Reader" is free, and can be downloaded from their web site at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html. However, to save a file to PDF, you need to buy a full copy of Acrobat. Once you've done that, you can save any document to PDF, which is very useful. Also, the reader that you get with the full product has more fun features than the free one. You can find a lot of freeware software in Internet that allows you to convert PowerPoint presentations to PDF files.


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Why do I get errors trying to edit OrgCharts in PowerPoint? It is not uncommon to get the "There isn't enough memory to read MS OrgChart" error. Unfortunately, this part of the product is just a plain old disaster. It's not you, and unfortunately, there's not much you can do about it. I try to avoid using OrgChart, and make my charts by "hand" using the PowerPoint drawing tools. It may seem slower at first, but since it actually works, it ends up saving time.

Is there a way to copy slides into a specific location in my presentation? In PowerPoint 95 and earlier, you simply go to the slide sorter of one presentation, copy the slides you want, then switch to the slide sorter of the destination presentation, click in between the slides to set an insertion point, and then PASTE. In PowerPoint 97, however, the ability to set an insertion point mysteriously disappeared. (read: BUG) The way to accomplish this in PowerPoint 97 is to click on the slide you wish the new slides to follow, and then PASTE. This is extremely unintuitive, since in every other instance of Microsoft programs, pasting into a selection replaces the selection with the pasted items. PowerPoint 2000 fixed this bug (it allows you to set an insertion point between slides), but still allows you to paste into a selection, for those people who got used to doing it the "'97 way".

Why is my file still big, even after deleting things? For some mysterious reason, PowerPoint 97 and 2000 store lots of information in the file that does not get removed when the files are saved and closed. However, if you save the file as a new name, using the SAVE AS command, you will almost always find your files reduce in size, sometimes quite dramatically.

Unsolved Mysteries What happened to PowerPoint 5.0 and 6.0? This isn't really an unsolved mystery, but it still feels like one to me, so I've put it here. If you have a better, more fun explanation, let's hear it! The Microsoft Office team was having a very difficult time keeping track of what versions of each product were in each version of Office, so they decided to bring all of the products up to the same version number. Since Word was at 6.0 already (while PowerPoint was at 4, and Excel at 5), all the applications made their next release (shipped in Office '95) be 7.0. Office '97 for Windows then shipped with version 8 of all the applications, and just to confuse things the Macintosh version 8 products (which shipped in 1998) were called Office '98, because it was just too darned embarrassing to ship a product called Office '97 in 1998. My favorite artifact of all of this is my Office '96 t-shirt, the shirt for which no product ever existed.

Are there any utilities that will replace bitmaps in bulk in PowerPoint? So far, we do not know of any such beast. If you do, please let us know.

Is there any way to play ScreenCam exe files in PowerPoint slide shows? We know of no way to do this. The problem is that if you click on the screen while the movie is playing (as you would to show a demo) the movie disappears.

Know where to get a copy of PowerPoint to run on Windows 3.1? Try with your friends. Also search Google. Maybe, just maybe some website is still offering the same. But I am not very hopeful on the same.

How do you populate List Boxes using VB in PowerPoint? Answer for this question is still awaited.


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PowerPoint Tips

ToolbarsToolbarsToolbarsToolbars

Displaying Keyboard Shortcuts in Tool Tips

If you'd like to see the available keyboard shortcuts for menus, commands, and toolbar buttons, go to Tools/Customize, click on the Options tab, and click on "show shortcut keys in screen tips". Preview Fonts in the Toolbar

If you'd like to see previews of the actual fonts in the font selection of the formatting toolbar, go to Tools/Customize, click on the Options tab, and click "List font names in their font", click Close. Easily Changing from Caps to Lower Case (or Vice Versa)

If you have text that is in the wrong case, select the text, and then click Shift+F3 until it changes to the case style that you like. Clicking Shift+F3 toggles the text case between ALL CAPS, lower case, and Initial Capital styles. You'll be surprised how often you use this once you get the hang of it! Saving Your Toolbar Configurations If you like to customize your UI, move toolbars around, configure toolbars, etc, then you'll want to know that all this information is stored in c:\windows\application data\microsoft\powerpoint\ppt.pcb By copying this file, you can move your customizations to other machines. Getting Rid of Short Menus

Forgetting user reaction to this feature when it was introduced in Word years ago, the Office team decided to try it again. Unfortunately, it's still annoying. To see all of your options when you click on menus, go to Tools/Customize, click on the Options tab, and uncheck "menus show recently used commands". Getting Rid of Tri-Pane View

Unfortunately there is no way to permanently avoid this improvement, but you can quickly get rid of it by holding down the CTRL key when you click on the Slide View button. Handout Master, Notes Pages and Handout... You may have noticed the presence, under the "View" >> "Master" menu, also of Handout Master and Notes Master. What are they for? What is the difference between them and the Slide Master? Handout Master: by choosing this option, you will be able to edit or slightly modify the appearance of all the printouts you will get when printing choosing the option "handouts". Once you have displayed the Handout Master ("View" >> "Master" >> "Handout") you have four text boxes, in the four corners, where you can type any additional information you would like to appear ONLY in the handout but not in the slides or in your presentation. You can add any text info by clicking on any of the four text boxes (the header and the footer) and type your text, which will be displayed in your printouts. Check also the following article about "Header and Footer" because it is strictly connected to this.

Blueprints for a successful presentation PowerPoint Keyboard Shortcuts

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Notes Master: what you can do when you select the "Notes Master" is more or less the same as the Handout Master. In this view, you can add your specific headers and footers by using the same method shown above, and you can also modify the style of the text that will appear in the printouts of your notes. When you choose to show the notes in the Notes Page view mode, you have the preview of each slide and some room below for writing speakers' notes which you can print to help you remember what you have to say during your presentation. Therefore the Notes Master can be used to apply headers and footers and also to format, as you would like, the text which will be printed below the slide preview when printing the Notes Pages. You also have another Master, the Title Master (not in PowerPoint XP). Sometimes the Title Master option is there but it is grayed out. That means that you need to create a Title Master since it is not present yet. In order to create a new Title Master, you can do the following: Click on "View" >> "Master" >> "Slide Master" Click on "Insert" >> "New Title Master" or alternatively, only if you have PowerPoint 97 or 2000: Hold down the [Shift] key Press the "New Slide" icon The Title Master works as a normal Slide Master. The only difference is that it applies ONLY to those slides which have a Title layout. Then you can easily use it as a second Slide Master: any time that you want your slides to be formatted as the Title Master, apply to them the Title layout and they will change according to the Title Master. How To Create A New Master Slide And Apply It To Your Existing PowerPoint Presentation

Often you will find yourself in front of a presentation of which you want to change the look. This can be easily achieved by simply going to "View >> Master >> Slide Master" and changing the look of the Master slide. Since this slide is actually a template for all others, all of the changes done in it will affect the rest of the slides in the presentation. Let me remind you that a presentation should always be created in three main steps: Writing the outline, Applying the formatting and overall design of the presentation in Master Slide. Making individual changes on slides (or making them different from the overall design) Problems arise when you skip the first two steps: When you change the look of the Master Slide the look of the other presentation slides will not change. The reason is that PowerPoint will "presume" that you don't want to follow a Master Slide, if you skip the first two steps of the creation process (Outline > Master Slide) and go directly to edit your presentation in Slide View. These are the steps you have to follow to fix such presentation: Open PowerPoint with the presentation you want to fix. Go to the Master Slide ("View >> Master >> Slide Master") and change its look in the way you want. Go to the Slide Sorter View and select one slide. Now Click on "Slide Layout" button (you can also find this option in "Format >> Slide Layout") and click on the "Reapply" button. That is it! This is all you need to do when you want to (re)apply your new Master Slide design to slides that were originally created without a Master Slide.


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Repeat the step c) and d) for every slide in your presentation and you presentation will get the new "look" that you wanted. (Alternatively, you can select all slides to which you want to re-apply a design at once by clicking on them while pressing the Shift key.)

Saving, Using, Editing And Opening PresentationsSaving, Using, Editing And Opening PresentationsSaving, Using, Editing And Opening PresentationsSaving, Using, Editing And Opening Presentations To enable the Assistant Choose HELP : Show the Office Assistant. Right click on the Assistant and choose Options. Check the Use the Office Assistant. Style issues are marked with a Lightbulb Icon. Zoom The Zoom Tool allows you to magnify the view of the slide for better close-up work on a portion of the slide. To use the Zoom Tool click the drop-down box and choose the percentage of magnification you need. Saving Across Multiple Diskettes

From the File menu, select Pack and Go. This wizard will compress your PowerPoint presentation and copy the file onto as many floppies as are necessary. Be sure to format a bunch of floppies BEFORE you start the process, and make sure they are empty. P.S. This feature requires PowerPoint 95 or higher. Save Your Fonts with Your Presentation If you're preparing a presentation that you plan to distribute to others, be sure that you check this option by clicking on the Tools button in the File/Save As dialog box. This will work for most TrueType fonts on the Windows platform. Custom Presentations You may need to make different presentations based on the same slides to different peoples. Instead of making two separate presentations, you can create two versions within the same collection of slides. Click on Slide Show > Custom Shows > New In the Define Custom Show Dialog box, type a name for the new Show and select the slides that you want for that presentation by selecting the name and clicking Add. You can repeat this for the number of custom shows you want. To Run a given Custom Show, click on Slide Show > Set Up Show and select the required show to play. Creating a Slide Show from a Previously Made Outline Type the outline using your word processor. Each line at the far left is a slide. Change indentations by using the SHIFT and TAB keys. Use the TAB key to move in a level to the right and SHIFT + TAB key to move out a level to the left. From the OUTLINE VIEW, select INSERT from the menu, then select SLIDES FROM OUTLINE. Select the proper drive and file. Click OK. Creating an Outline in Powerpoint Open the OUTLINE PAGE from the OUTLINE BUTTON. Type the outline into the outline window.


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Bullets automatically appear at the start of each line after the numbered line. Change indentations by using the SHIFT and TAB keys. Use the TAB key to move in a level to the right. Use the SHIFT + TAB key to the left. How to Change or Remove Bullets From OUTLINE VIEW select line to change. Click BULLETS on the toolbar to add or remove a bullet. Select FORMAT/BULLETS to change bullet style. Hidden Slides You can hide slides within a presentation. Hidden slides remain available as part of the saved presentation and are accessible to you during development or in future presentations but do not appear as one of the consecutive presentation slides during a show. You must be in Slide Sorter View to access the Hidden Slide Tool. To hide a slide, make sure it is the current slide, then click the Hide Slide Tool. Hidden slides display in Slide Sorter View with a slash through the slide number. Slide View does not differentiate between hidden and non-hidden slides, and all are displayed. During presentation, however, hidden slides are passed over unless specifically chosen by you through the Slide Show Navigator. Speaker Notes During a presentation, you can record notes via the Show Controls. The notes you add are recorded on the Notes Page for that slide. To record notes, from the Show Controls, choose Speaker Notes. Keep in mind that your notes are visible to the audience while you are typing them even if you have not chosen to print Notes Pages for your audience. On-screen Notes During a presentation, you can "mark" on a slide with the Pen Tool. To create slide "blueprints," from the Show Controls, choose Pen. You will see the cursor change to a pencil. Press and drag the mouse to "mark" on the slide. Any markings made with the Pen remain on the slide only as long as it is the current slide. To change pen colors, from the Show Controls, choose Pointer Options : Pen Color, then choose the color you want. You must make pen color selections before you select the pen to "mark" on the slide.

You must change from the pen to a regular cursor before the presentation can progress. To remove the pen and return to a regular cursor, from the Show Controls, click Arrow. Pausing the Presentation During a presentation, you may want to pause your presentation for discussions. You have two choices. To pause the presentation leaving the slide visible, from the Show Controls, choose Screen : Pause. To pause the presentation blackening the screen, from the Show Controls, choose Screen : Black Screen. Black Screen focuses the audience's attention on you rather than the content on the screen. To return to your presentation from either of these two options, from the Show Controls, choose Resume. To end the presentation prematurely, from the Show Controls, choose End Show. You can also end the presentation by pressing ESC. Hiding the Pen Another option available under the Pointer Options is Hidden. When you choose Hidden, your mouse cursor is no longer available or visible on-screen. This is beneficial when you are running a presentation in a kiosk mode and you don't want guests to move the mouse, leaving the show controls visible or making selections. It is also beneficial if you are giving a presentation and have chosen to use the arrow keys to move through your presentation rather than using the mouse. To "undo" this option change, press ESC and stop the presentation.


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Combining Presentations You can combine presentations, or copy already existing slides from one presentation into another presentation. To work with two presentations simultaneously, Open both presentations. Choose WINDOW : Arrange All to display both presentations side-by-side on the screen.

NOTE: the presentation that was the active presentation when you made the Arrange All selection will be on the left.

1. Notice that each presentation has its own Navigation Toolbar in the lower left corner of its respective window. Put each

presentation in Slide Sorter View. 2. Use the Scroll Bar to navigate through each presentation until you can see the slide you want to copy in the original

presentation and the location in the destination presentation where you want the slide placed. 3. Press and drag the slide from one presentation to the other.

NOTE: You will not be able to drag the slide if the original presentation is in Slide View and the destination presentation is in Slide Sorter View.

When you press and drag, you remove the slide from the original presentation. If you want to keep the original presentation as it was, do NOT save it when you close the presentation. An alternative is to right click on the slide to be moved and choose COPY, then click in the destination presentation and paste it. Notice that "transplanted" slide takes on the characteristics of the receiving presentation, including the color scheme. Any charts contained in the transplanted slide will be updated to reflect the colors of the destination presentation.

Formatting Choosing the Right Colors for Your Next Presentation Keep your color choices simple You're working on an important slide presentation. You've followed all the steps on your PowerPoint template: You've organized your information, created headlines and positioned your charts and graphs. All the elements seem to be in order, but the slides are lackluster. No, dull. Even you are bored with them. What's your audience going to think? You decide what your slides need is color, lots of bold, bright color. Color that will make your information stand up and be noticed. Color that will shout out your message. Color that will hit your audience over the head and grab their attention, whether they like it or not. You add red, green, some blocks of blue. And orange. You've always liked orange. By the time you're done, your slide presentation looks like a circus. Instead of livening your slides and emphasizing your message, you've wound up with a muddled mess. What went wrong? Most people -- or at least those of us without an art background -- don't understand that the colors they choose are not as important as the relationships they create. Some colors work together, others fight against each other. Establishing sound relationships is key. Color is never viewed in isolation, but is always judged in its environment. It is influenced by its neighboring colors. For example, place a bright yellow ball in a child's nursery, and it will fit right in. Place that same ball in a boardroom, and it will stick out like -- well, a bright yellow ball in a boardroom. So how are you supposed to know what colors work well together? How do you select ones that will get your message across with the appropriate tone and style? And how do you establish these successful relationships? The solution is as simple as turning your head and looking out the window. When you think of creating a color palette for your presentation, think of nature's palette. (OK, if you're working in a high-rise, you may have to use your imagination here instead of looking out your window.) Think of a summer coastal scene -- how the crisp blue-green of the ocean cedes to the rich stands of deep green fir trees that smack vivid against a cornflower-blue sky. Or imagine a field in early winter -- the dull yellows and golds, the muted greens and the flat, somber sky. These colors all work together in harmony, look appropriate together. There's nothing showy or shouting about them -- and yet, they evoke a feeling and create a mood. There's a sense of balance and order. They work together.


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And that should be your goal when making your color choices. Selecting color should never be arbitrary or merely subjective. "I like it" is not sufficient criteria for creating a palette. You need a plan. Where to start? The first thing you need to decide is the feel you want for your presentation. Color has thermal qualities of warm and cool. Colors close to red-oranges are warm (think of "red hot"); colors close to blue-greens are cool (think of "icy blue"). Start by selecting either a warm or cool hue. ("Hue" is simply another word for color.) Choose only one or two vivid hues. And then, if you want to expand your palette and create visual variety, use a broader range of those colors. You do this through the use of tints and shades. A tint is a hue mixed with white, and a shade is a hue mixed with black. For example, pink is a tint of red and brown is a shade of orange. By experimenting with tints and shades, you can create palettes that range from direct and playful to serious and somber. You can create a mood or feeling that will get your message across in the appropriate tone. Plus, you open up the color options before you, rather than painting yourself into a corner of clashing colors. The best rule to follow when selecting color is keep it simple. With color choice, more is not better. It's the color relationships you create that will make or break your presentation. Remember, choose only one or two vivid hues and use their tints and shades to broaden your palette. This will keep your slides clear, elegant and to the point. Follow these simple rules, and your presentation will be a color success. That is, providing you don't wear an orange tie with that blue suit. TAB key inside tables You may have noticed that pressing the [TAB] key alone doesn't work to obtain a tabulation when you are inside a cell in a table (this is valid for Word as well as for Word tables inserted inside a PowerPoint presentation). If you still want to use the [TAB] key, press it while holding down the [Ctrl] key as well. It will give you a tabulation that you can use to align or indent text inside a single table cell. How to Fix and Adjust Text Overflowing Text Eliminate some of the text. Split the text into two slides. In SLIDE VIEW, determine where you want to split the slide. Return to OUTLINE VIEW. Add a heading for the new slide. Use SHIFT+TAB to move the heading as far to the left as it will go. Use the TAB and TAB+SHIFT key to adjust the outline in the new slide. Reduce the type size from SLIDE VIEW. How to Move Text on the Slide From SLIDE VIEW, click on the text. A shaded box (PLACEHOLDER) will appear around the text. Click on the PLACEHOLDER, line and handles will appear. Click and drag on the handles to re-size. Click and drag on the shaded outline to move the PLACEHOLDER and its text. Creating Pages with Slides and Descriptive Text If you want to create printable pages that have notes or descriptive text associated with each slide, PowerPoint has a feature designed to do just this called Notes Pages, or Speaker's Notes (depending on which version you're using). To view the Notes page for any slide, go to the View menu and select Notes Pages. You will see an image of your slide there, and a placeholder for adding your script, notes, or any other text you wish. You can cut-and-paste text from Word here if you like. To print these pages, bring up the Print dialog, and at the bottom of the dialog where it says "Print What:", select Notes Pages. These pages were originally designed to be used as audience hand outs (with space for the audience to take notes) but were also used by many as speaker's notes: the text block would have the script of the presentation, to be used by the speaker, or for sales binders to educated sales people.


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Do you need to have only one slide of your presentation displayed with a different orientation (e.g. portrait instead of the usual landscape)? Do you need to have a presentation where you have some slides which have horizontal orientation (landscape) and some other who have the vertical (portrait) one? Well, PowerPoint does not allow you to change a different slide orientation within the same presentation. The basic trick is this: You can create any "invisible" object (no fill color, no line color) and place it anywhere on any slide, and then assign to it with any link to any other slide or action. I am sure you will find plenty of uses for this great trick. In the case exposed in that article, the empty rectangle has to be created on the Slide Master, thus creating invisible hyperlinks to specific areas of the slides which would redirect you either forward or backward. Soft Shadows

You can create "soft" shadows for square or round objects that sit on a solid color background. Make a copy of the object, then change its fill to be shaded from black to the background color, with the shading set with black going from the center out to the background color at the edges. Make this object about 150% bigger than the original object, and put it behind the object. This will give you the effect of "soft" shadows. Subliminal Messages

These can be pretty hysterical in the right circumstances. Create a text object. With the text object selected, click on the Animation Effects button on the tool bar (the one that looks like a yellow star), and then click on the "flash once" button. Go to slide show and see the message quickly flash and then disappear.

Setting the Default Text Style If you want to change the style of the text that appears when you type things that aren't the title or the slide body, do the following: Make sure no objects are selected. From the Format menu, select Font. Make all the changes that you want there, and click OK. From that point on, new text will be created in that style. To Set the formatting for the title or slide body objects, go to the Slide Master and format these objects on the master.

Discover how to take control of the bullet symbols Have you ever wanted to select presentation bullets that would fit with your taste, the topic of the presentation, the audience, and so on? Have you ever wondered how and where to find more appropriate icons for your presentation bullets? Microsoft PowerPoint also assigns, by default, different bullet styles for the different levels of indentation: For the first level of bullets, you find a normal black dot. For the second level, the sub-bullets, you get a dash (hyphen). The third level of indentation, the sub-sub-bullets, has again the same black dot as the first level, but smaller in size. The fourth level, even if I am pretty sure you are not likely to use it really often, has again the dash (hyphen).


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These are the standard symbols used by default any time you choose to have a bulleted list. If you want to customize the bullets, and you want to do it for all the slides and not only for one slide, do the following: Go to "View" >> "Master" >> "Slide Master". What you can do here is customize the single bullets: Move the mouse pointer on top of the bulleted area, and click just in front of the line whose bullet you want to modify: first bulleted line for the first level of bullets, second bulleted line for the second level and so on. Once the cursor is blinking in the right line, go to "Format": For PowerPoint 2000, select "Bullets and Numbering...". You will obtain a dialog box with different options: You can choose whether you want numbers, letters or symbols. You can set the size of the bullets in relation to the size of the text You can change the color of the bullets. But most of all, by clicking on "Character..." you have the option to change the type of bullet. You have different font families that you can browse to search for the right bullet for your presentation. For PowerPoint 97 you should click on "Format" >> "Bullets..." and then directly choose the font style, the symbol to use, the size of the bullets and the color of it. I would suggest you to choose among these fonts: Symbol Webdings Windings Monotype Sorts ZapfDingbats. You will find plenty of different icons and symbols that will replace your default bullets. The additional advantage, choosing one of the above fonts, is great compatibility: According to our article #1, you should keep in mind that not all the characters available to you in PowerPoint will be properly displayed in a different operating system, printer or browser. But any of the symbols chosen from the above list is universal, standard, and can be found also on different computers. You will avoid any bad surprise of having another computer replacing automatically any unknown symbol with a default bullet, usually a simple black dot, sometimes an empty white rectangle. Tips to improve text readability and effectiveness - How much data can fit on a slide? - How many table rows, columns, organigram boxes, and words per line are acceptable? - How many relevant elements can a slide have?

The amount of information that can be packed on a slide is limited by the requirements for readability and easy comprehension. A presentation which is difficult to read will not only loose in audience comprehension but will also increase the chances that the audience will be distracted and annoyed. Testing all slides on a projector and standing back at the same distance that the audience will be is essential not only for correcting font size and styles, but also to see how the colors used are affected when projected. Remember not to take the monitor as an example of how the presentation will finally look. If worse comes to worse, squeeze your eyes and stand back about ½ a meter from the monitor to have a close idea of what your most distant viewers will see. Below are some key points to remember: - Font sizes should be at least ½ cm for every two meters distance the audience is viewing from. - Line spacing should be at least 1 to 1½ times the height of the font used. - The width of the projected image should be at least 1/6 of the distance between the screen and the last person at the back of the room.


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- The height of the projected image should be a little higher than that of the audience so to remain visible should the room become crowded or if people are standing.

Titles & Text: Max title lines: 2 Max bulleted items: 5-6 Max words per lines: 6-8 Max reference elements: 2-3 Spreadsheets: Max rows: 7 Max columns: 7 Organigrams: Max elements: 14-18 cells Tables: Max rows: 7 Max columns: 7 Overall Relevant Items: Max number: 7 How Can I Replace or Modify Fonts? In case you have a short presentation (2-3 slides) and you want to replace some of the fonts used, you can just do it manually, by replacing the fonts slide by slide. This method doesn't work when you are dealing with a 10 or 20 or even more-slide presentation. There has to be a simpler way. One way is to make use of the Slide Master: whenever you want to modify a font style used in all the slides of your presentation, replace that font on the Slide Master. To do so, go to "View" >> "Master" >> "Slide Master". Now that you have displayed the Slide Master, click on the box whose text style you want to modify (titles? bulleted lists?) and assign a different font style choosing it from the drop down list. Doing this, will modify all the slides of the presentation, ensuring consistency of the overall design and saving you time. Another way of modifying the font style is by clicking on "Format" >> "Replace Fonts". In the first line, "Replace what" you have a dropdown list with as many entries as the font styles you have been using inside your presentation. Select here the one you want to modify. Then on the "Replace with" dropdown list just select the new font that should replace the old one. As soon as you click "OK", all the slides in your presentation will reflect these new changes. In a few clicks you will have changed all the fonts. This is a good method because it lets you modify the font styles selectively, and you can modify just one or all the different styles in use in your presentation. In case you want to play around with the letter cases, you can use another option you find under the "Format" menu: "Change case". From this dialog box you can change in one shot the case of words, phrases or entire slides or presentations. Just select first the text whose case style you want to modify. Then click on "Format" >> "Change Case" and select the one that better fits your needs. This method is not different at all from the same option you have in Microsoft Word. You can use this option also if you are formatting the styles from the "slide master". Shift+F3 is a keyboard Shortcut which also allows you to do this


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How to modify a PowerPoint .PPS file A .pps file is just a PowerPoint Show file, that is, a normal presentation file which will open up in full screen mode as soon as you double-click it. In this way, you don't have the possibility to modify it or to discover the tricks which lie behind apparently. Yes, because if you want to modify and edit a .pps file, you can do the following: Right-click in the file icon holding down the shift key (if you have Windows Millennium you will not need to hold it down). Choose "Open with..." from the context menu Select "PowerPoint" from the "Open With" dialog box Otherwise, you can also right-click on the file icon choose "Rename" replace ".pps" with ".ppt". As soon as you press Enter, your new presentation file will change icon and will become a normal PowerPoint presentation file. If you want to know another trick, do this: Open PowerPoint first Click on "File" >> "Open" Browse for the .pps file, select it and click on "Open" PowerPoint will open the .pps file without any problem! Making Auto-Fit Text Stop Auto-Fitting Turn this feature off by going to Tools/Options, click on the Edit tab, and uncheck "autofit text to text placeholder", click OK. Legibility: rules to determine best font size My first suggestion is to be careful about the use of the right fonts On this matter there is something more: the rule of the X-height. You probably have noticed that some fonts may have the same point size (e.g. both 12 points) but have a smaller X-height. The X-height is the product of the number of lowercase letters (such as "a", "e", "c" and so on) for the physical height of those lowercase letters. I explain: Arial or Helvetica, for instance, have a greater X-height than Garamond or Times New Roman, so the latter will be less readable at the same size. In this case, you are recommended to increase the font size of those fonts which have a lower X-height. To end with what people like the most, a scientific rule about font size compared to screen size and projector room size. This rule is called "8H" rule. It states that, calling H the height of the projector screen, the maximum distance of your last viewer in the audience should be 8H, that is 8 times the screen height. Meeting this requirement, and assuming that the image projector is the best possible, the room light is good (not too dark) and the average viewer has no viewing handicaps, you will be sure that the ones who sit in the last rows will be able to easily read your text. But the rule says something more: so far, you have set the right distance between the screen and the last rows. Now you have to deal with font size within the screen. Considering the height of the PowerPoint slide show you can safely choose a font size that is not smaller than 1/25 of it. How can I make it easier? I will explain it to you step by step with also some examples.


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Calculate the height of the slides Keep in mind that each centimeter corresponds, approximately, to 28.25 points Multiply the height of your screen in centimeters for 28.25 points and you will obtain the height in points Divide the height in points by 25 and you will have found exactly the minimum size, in points, of your fonts. An example? To determine the slide's height, go to "File" >> "Page setup..." and you will see that the standard height for an "on-screen show" is 19.05 cm Multiply the height (19.05 cm) for 28.25 points (obtaining almost 540 points) Divide 540 points by 25 and you will obtain almost 22, that is the minimum size (in points) to use for your presentation. In inches, a typical PowerPoint slide is 7.5 inches, so it results that an inch is approximately 72 points.

Going back to our "8H" rule, and having set that: the maximum distance between the screen and the last viewer is given by 8 times the height of the screen the minimum readable font size is given by the height of the PowerPoint slide divided by 25. we can conclude that a 22-point font size will be readable by an audience which is not farther than 8 times the height of the projector screen. Thus, in case you notice that the projector screen is at a greater distance from the last row, you should increase the font size to compensate this. For instance, if the last row is at 16 meters from the screen which is only 1 meter tall (the maximum distance should be 8 meters), you should double the font size in your presentation. The last trick comes from PowerPoint. There are some rules you can set about minimum font size which will help you not to use smaller fonts. Click on "Tools" >> "Options" and click in the "Spelling and Style" tab. Now, click on "Style Options" and then click on the "Visual Clarity" tab. Here you can set some rules such as the minimum title and body text size, the number of bullets per slide and the number of lines per bullets. Check it out, it will perform these tasks automatically. How to use an image as a background Did you ever want to utilize a cool picture that you had as a background for you slides? You tried to insert it, but then you realized that the strong color contrast did not allow you to type any text on top of the image, and you did not know what font color to use to have it displayed in a readable way. There is something we can do to have a picture as a background and still be able to read the text we place on top of it. Before explaining in detail what you have to do, I'd like to remind you a few tricks to insert images into your slides. - If you have your picture on your hard disk, in a floppy or on a network drive, the best way is to: go to Insert >> Picture >> From File... and then browse your folders to locate and select the picture you want to insert click "Insert" and it's done

- If you find a nice photo on the Internet and you want to use it for your presentation, you can do one the following: right-click on the image and choose "Save Picture As". This way you are going to store the picture and you can insert it at any time using the classical method seen above right-click and choose "Copy" (option available only if you have Internet Explorer). Doing this, you can then paste this image on your slide right away, just pressing "Ctrl+V" or choosing Edit >> Paste


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press the "Print Screen" key on the top right of your keyboard and then go back to the slide and press "Ctrl+V" to paste the image. This is called "screenshot", and it allows you to paste into PowerPoint anything that you have displayed on your screen. By doing any of the previous steps, you will be able to insert a picture on any slide. In case you want the image to appear on all the slides, as a background, you have to insert it on the Slide Master (View >> Master >> Slide Master). Here's the trick to resolve the issue of readability of the text on top of a picture. Once you have pasted your image either on a single slide or on the Master Slide, follow these steps: click on the picture to select it go to View >> Toolbars >> Picture, and be sure to display the Picture toolbar here click on the second icon from the left, "Image Control" choose the last option in the drop-down menu, "Watermark". Your picture will be set as watermark, that is, you will still be able to see the shapes on the image but all the colors will be muted and lightened, so you will be able to use any dark color (blue, brown, black, green) to type text on top of the image. If you want to obtain a perfect watermarked picture, after having applied the "watermark" effect try to increase or decrease the Color Contrast and the Color Brightness (using the apposite icons on the Picture toolbar) until you find the right combination. In this paragraph we have seen so far how we can use images that we find on the Web. What about nice backgrounds? When browsing the Web, have you ever found a Web site with a nice background? Maybe you have also thought that it would have been nice to be able to use that exact background in your presentation. It is definitely possible, and I will explain you the proper way to do it. First of all, let me remind you the difference between a picture you can find on a Web page and the background itself of the Web page: you can be sure that what you are right-clicking on is a picture if you see the option "Save Picture As...". Otherwise, if the image is a background, as you right-click on it you will see the option: "Save Background As..." The main difference is that an image can be inserted into PowerPoint and then manually stretched to cover the entire slide; a background needs to be inserted using a different way, since the image used as the background can be difficulty stretched manually. Moreover, remember that some images or backgrounds may be copyright-protected. In any case, if you want to be honest and respectful, find the email of the Webmaster - usually at the bottom of the page - and write him/her an email asking permission to reproduce the image for non-commercial use. Most of the times he/she won't even waste his/her time to answer you, but at least you won't be liable for anything). right-click on the background (be sure you are not clicking on a single image, you need to right-click exactly on a portion of background) choose "Save Background As..." save it anywhere you like (e.g. in your preferred folder) Now, open your PowerPoint and: select Format >> Background click on the little down arrow in the "Background Fill" select "Fill Effects" click on the last tab, "Picture" click where it says: "Select Picture..." browse your folders to locate the background you have previously saved once you find it, select it and click "Insert" click "OK" on the Picture tab click "Apply to all" on the Background box and it's done. Using Different Backgrounds within one Presentation Users of PowerPoint 2000 and lower will only have two background designs automatically supplied with the Masters (counting both the Slide Master and the Title Master). However, you can have any design you want on any slide. From the Format menu, select Background. Check the box that says "omit background items" and this will make the slide ignore the Slide Master's design. You are now free to add whatever design you want to this slide. If you want to do this to many slides at once, go to the Slide Sorter, select the slides, and then use the Format menu


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command. Remember though that if you choose to do something like put a photographic background on many of your slides instead of doing it once on the Master, that your file size may increase dramatically. PowerPoint 2002 supports multiple background masters.

Using More than One Guide If you like using guides, but wish there were more, you can create additional Guides by simply holding down the CTRL key while dragging on an existing Guide. This will create a new guide. To get rid of guides, just drag them off the edge of the slide.

Using Guides to Measure Make the Guides visible by using View/Guides. Then, hold down the SHIFT key while you click-and-hold a guide; the tooltip for the guide will display 0:00. As you move the guide, the distance the guide covers from the beginning of the drag will be displayed in the units of your ruler. In this way you can measure distances between objects, place guides at specific places, etc. Using Ctrl-Drag to Copy You can quickly make a copy of any object by holding down the CTRL key while you drag on the object. You will then "drag off" a new copy. Why should I use the shadow effect in my text? The purpose of the shadow is to increase the contrast of characters around their edges with the purpose of increasing readability and visual impact from distance. Text shadows can be used both to improve usability as well as for content design reasons such as to create more emphasis for a certain text or title. In some cases, when the contrast between the font color and the background color is not enough by itself to ensure readability, one can add a shadow effect on the text, as to sharpen the edges, and create a better contrast between text and background. Text shadows should be used only to create such contrast where the shadow color is darker than the background. Do not use text shadows that are lighter in color than the text they support. Visual results generated by such solutions look invariably unprofessional. The same holds true for text shadows that are lighter than the background color. A simple way of getting a shadow effect to your text is to select the text you want to apply the shadow to and click on the big "S" (for "shadow) in the "Formatting" toolbar, just besides "B" for bold, "I" for italic and "U" for underlined. Unfortunately, in this way you will obtain only a default light shadow: its color may be gray and its effect mediocre at best. If instead you access the "graphic" shadow feature in PowerPoint, you can completely customize the shadow, changing its color and moving its orientation. Let's see how to do it:

1. Select the text you want to apply the shadow effect to 2. On the Drawing Toolbar, click on the second last icon, "Shadow" 3. Select the last option "Shadow Settings..." 4. You will obtain a small floating window with some icons:

a. The first one from the left is "Shadow On/Off". This icon turns on or off the shadow effect b. The second block of 4 icons are to "nudge" shadow up, down, left or right. These are useful

options since you can customize the visible portion of your shadow: you can decide how much shadow you will display and in what direction it will appear.


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c. The last icon, the "Shadow Color", is a drop down list that will let you chose exactly the color you need for your shadow. You even have the possibility to apply a semitransparent shadow to your text.

By using these tools you will be able to apply any type of shadow to your text. What is more important, you will be able to change the shadow color according to the background and text color you have chosen. Just make a few attempts and see the result full screen. The purpose is to gain in readability, not in fanciness. As long as you use sober colors and try to focus on readability, your results will be great. How To Find Out The Size Of A PowerPoint Presentation With the development of computers, the variety of file types that you can view, record or edit has grown exponentially. One thing is notable there; all these new files require more space. The sizes of the files have grown tremendously since the computers entered the business world. Examples are many, but the most common one is in the case of written (text) documents. If you open a simple text file (my_memo.txt) that contains one sentence - "Hello World!" - in Microsoft Word and then save it as a Word document, you will notice that the file saved in Word (my_memo.doc) is now thousands (!) times bigger than the original text file (my_memo.txt). I did this little experiment and obtained 12 bytes for the TXT file and 24,064 bytes for the DOC file. File size can become a problem when you have to save your file on a Floppy disk. Many companies tried to push a new standard, more appropriate for the size of today's files, and more or less they all failed. This practically means that floppy drives will be around for at least couple of more years. Since on the floppy disk you can fit only 1.44 MB of information (1MB=1,024KB=1,048,576 so a floppy of 1.44MB is 1474KB or 1509949 bytes in size) it becomes important to know how big is your PowerPoint presentation files are if you want to successfully save them on floppy disk. You can easily find out the size of your presentation most easily by checking the presentation properties while you are working in PowerPoint:

a) Open your presentation in PowerPoint.

b) In the Menu bar go to "File >> Properties" and click. A Properties window will open. It has five tabs

named "General", "Summary", "Statistics", "Contents" and "Custom".

c) Click on the "General" tab in the Properties window. This tab lists main data about your presentation: its name, type, location and finally, the size. If your presentation is lighter than 1 megabyte (MB), the size is represented in kilobytes (KB). As soon as your presentation file exceeds 1024 KB, which corresponds to 1 MB, its size will be represented in MB units.

Therefore, seeing the MB acronym should alert you that maybe the file will not fit on a floppy disk. As long as your file stays under 1.44MB, you are fine. If your file exceeds 1.44MB, which happens if you have used images and sound extensively in your presentation, you will either have to size it down in order to fit it on one floppy disk or you will have to distribute the presentation over more than one floppy disk. The so-called Pack-And-Go technique allows you to save the presentation on more than one floppy by splitting it into blocks, which can be automatically reassembled later. How To Quickly Reduce The Size Of A PowerPoint Presentation That Contains Many Uncompressed Images Most of the times you will find problems in PowerPoint presentations that are big in size. The computer simply freezes. Your presentation may contain uncompressed bitmap images. You can avoid this problem by using compressed images (e.g. .jpg) when you create your presentation. However, if it is too late for that because you are already in the middle of your live presentation in front of your audience you can apply a "quick & dirty" solution that can help you to present the material at least fluently and without hiccups. The solution is saving the slides that contain images in .jpg format and than re-inserting them back into the presentation.

1. Open PowerPoint and the presentation that you need to modify (in my case: "mexico.ppt").

2. Save the presentation under different name (in my case:


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3. "mexico_modified.ppt"). This allows you to modify a copy of your presentation (i.e. "mexico_modified.ppt") while keeping the original ("mexico.ppt") safe.

4. Go to "File >> Save As...". From the list box called "Save as type:" choose "JPEG File Interchange Format

(*.jpg)" and save your presentation in a folder that you can easily find again.

5. This folder will contain all your slides in a compressed .jpg format. The slides will be labeled Slide1.jpg, Slide2.jpg etc.

6. Open the copy of your original presentation again ("mexico_modified.ppt") and delete the slides that contain uncompressed images (in my case those were the slides 3 to 38). You can quickly do this when you select the slide sorter view. Select all the slides you want to delete by clicking on them while holding the Shift key. Then delete them.

7. Now create a new blank slide in your presentation ("mexico_modified.ppt") in the place where you want to

insert the .jpg version of the slides you have just deleted.

8. Go to "Insert >> Picture >> From File..." Select the folder in which your slides are saved in .jpg format and choose the first that needs to be inserted. (You need to remember which are the slides that originally contained the uncompressed images) In my case, it is the Slide3.jpg that I will place in the newly created slide. Now create another slide and insert the next .jpg image (Slide4.jpg) and so in.

9. Following this procedure you will be able to size-down your presentation relatively fast. My presentation went from 70MB ("mexico.ppt") to a more acceptable 4MB ("mexico_modified.ppt").

10. Alternatively, you could save your presentation as an HTML file ("File >> Save As HTML...") to obtain a

similar effect. The problem with saving in HTML format is that you loose transitions and pseudo animations. Another problem is that you will not be able to present in Full Screen mode - your slides will be probably smaller than the Screen space.

I do not recommend these methods for everyday use since there are better ways to keep down the size of a presentation while it is created. The presented methods should be applied only in case you need to fix your file quickly for the presentation. Making Presentation Files Smaller Prior to PowerPoint 97, there was no internal file compression code inside of PowerPoint, and files could get pretty big quickly. The most common cause of large files is the addition of large bitmaps. PowerPoint 97 compresses these bitmaps, but previous versions do not. To keep your presentations as small as you can, try reducing the resolution of your bitmaps, which will bring their size down tremendously. For viewing on screen, the bitmaps don't need to be more than 96 dpi; they won't print nicely until they're up around 150 or higher, but the screen always displays at 96 dpi, so if the primary viewing medium is the screen, there's no point in having the bitmaps be a higher resolution. Also, the bitmap format can make a big difference to your file sizes. JPEG and PNG both have good internal compression code. GIF has some, but not as good as JPEG. BMP files are the largest; TIFF files will also be very large. Sometimes, as you're working on a presentation, you'll notice that the file seems to get bigger for no reason. To get rid of this "bloating", save the file using "File/Save As" and give the file a new name. This can reduce the file size up to 50%. Maintain Proportions while resizing objects Resizing images in their positions while retaining proportions relative to one another is often required. To do this:

1. Select the objects one at a time, keeping the (Shift) key pressed. 2. Drag the object to the desired size and PowerPoint will automatically scale them all.

Use Curved Text WordArt allows text to be styled and twisted in various ways. For using curved text in PowerPoint

1. Click on Insert > Picture > WordArt. 2. Choose the style that you want to apply to the text and click OK. 3. A dialog box will prompt you for the text to be placed in the given format. 4. After the WordArt object has been generated, select it and click on the WordArt shape button on the

WordArt toolbar. Here you can choose the style in which you want the text to be bent.


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Create Semi-Transparent Objects (Say a Watermark)

1. Select the object you want and then Ungroup in by clicking Draw > Ungroup from the Draw toolbar. 2. Once the object is ungrouped, regroup it by selecting the Group option again from the Draw Menu. This will

convert the picture to a Microsoft Office drawing object. 3. Click on Format > Object. Under the color and Lines tab check the semitransparent box. Click OK..

Fill Colors When you draw solid objects (squares and circles), they fill with the automatic color. The underline under the Paintbucket is the current fill color. To fill an object with the current fill color, select the object, then click the Paintbucket Tool. To change the current fill color, drop down the arrow beside the Paintbucket and make a new selection. There are also additional options under Fill Effects, including choosing no fill color at all.

Fill Effects Fill effects include Gradients where you can select one or two colors of your choice, as well as the direction and variants of the gradient. Textures are image files similar to web page wallpapers; you can use PowerPoint's selections or choose an image file from your workstation. Patterns allow you to choose two colors and the pattern design with which you want to fill the object. Picture allows you to choose an image file from your workstation; the photograph will center itself within the selected object, hiding any parts of the image which do not automatically show within the object's shape.

Line Effects Each drawing object has an outline the color of the automatic color. The underline under the Line Color Tool is the current line color. To outline an object with the current line color, select the object, then click the Line Color Tool.

• To change the line color, drop down the arrow and make a new selection. Other options with the Line Color Tool include

color and patterns similar to the Fill Tool.

• To change line style, dash style, and arrow style, click on these tools, respectively, after drawing the object and while it is still selected.

Object Effects To place a shadow or 3D effect on an object, select the object, then click the tool selection.

Bullet Effects The Text Preset Animation Tool controls how bulleted points appear on the slide during an on-screen presentation. You must be in Slide Sorter View to access the Text Preset Animation Tool. To animate bulleted points, the slide containing bulleted points must be the current slide. Then click the drop-down box and choose the animation effect you desire.

Transitions & Animations How To Best Use Transitions and Effects Inside Presentations Presenters are greatly attracted by facilities in their presentation program providing the ability to add visual effects, transitions and animations to their slides. The heritage of such transitions comes from the movie and television industry who have first conceived and built inside their visual language an effective and appropriate use for them. Visual transitions have been born out of the need to create smooth transitions for the opening and closing of movies and cartoons, as well as for blending the passage from a scene to the next in a way that would add a new layer of communication. Cross-fades, dissolves and wipes were never conceived to attract people's attention but were indeed designed to create an extra layer of narrative inside the visual language of film and television images.


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In this light, it is your responsibility as a presenter to use transitions and effects to serve your communication needs and not to provide further visual pizzaz to your presentation. Animate Your Slide Show Switch to the Slide you wish to animate. Click Slide Show > Custom Animation > Order & Timing Check the objects you wish to animate from the list of objects Choose the animations from the effects tab for each object. Click OK to save the animation How to Do Text Animations or Builds From SORTER VIEW click the gray BUILD button. Select DIM PREVIOUS POINTS. Select EFFECT. From the drop down menu, choose the effect you want. Click OK, click SLIDE SHOW. Click or space bar to advance each slide. At the effects or animated slide, click to bring up each line of text.

Templates How To Create A Blank PowerPoint Presentation Template Or How To Turn Off Any Template Applied To A Presentation

So many people get bogged down by this problem, which it is very useful to explain how to go about this issue. Once a template has been applied to a PowerPoint presentation, there is indeed no easy way to "undress" the presentation. One can only change the template but one cannot say "no template". To get out of this fastidious loop, do the following: Create a blank presentation with a blank slide. Use the command File -> Save as... to save the presentation as a PowerPoint template inside the very folder where all other PowerPoint templates are (should be: (C:\programs\Microsoft Office\Templates\Presentation Design). Name the file BLANK. Now, this new template will be available among all other PowerPoint templates, and it will work as expected. Once called up it will "undress" any PowerPoint presentation off the template it is using. How to customize PowerPoint templates? Step-by-step guide to modify standard templates and more Let's start assuming that you have already created the content of your presentation by typing it into PowerPoint, preferably using the Outline View mode. What should your next step be? Deciding a consistent and effective look to apply to all of your slides. You have usually two ways to do it:


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You can create your own design, by using the Slide Master (View >> Master >> Slide Master): here you can apply a background color, use the drawing tools to create the layout. Draw boxes, rectangles, lines and fill them with the appropriate colors. You can then modify the position of all titles and text boxes, and format the font style, size and color. But to do this you need fantasy and some kind of "designer disposition", this is why a lot of people don't even try to create a look on their own. The second solution, easier but not less effective, is to use the templates that you can find both in PowerPoint itself and on the Web and customize them, by adding your "personal touch". Let's see the steps you should follow to achieve this result: From any View mode you are in, click the icon on the top right corner in the Standard toolbar that says: "Apply Design" (you can obtain the same by clicking on Format >> Apply Design Template). Microsoft uses two different words (design and template) to mean the same concept: a uniform "look" that you can apply to all of your slides, a visual dress that you can use to give your presentation a uniform appearance. In the "Apply Design" dialog box, you will see on the left half of the window the different templates you can choose, while on the right hand side you see a small preview of the selected template. Select one of the proposed templates and click "Apply". In a few seconds, all your slides will have the same background, the same font style, size and color and the same overall layout design. What is saved in a template? When you apply one of The Microsoft ready made templates ("Format" >> "Slide Design..." in PowerPoint XP, "Format" >> "Apply Design" in the previous versions), what are you actually applying to your presentation? Or when you decide to save a presentation as a template, what kind of information are you actually saving inside that file? In a few words, what type of information, settings and format are stored and saved in a PowerPoint template file? Well, a template contains the following info: Slide size and orientation (which you can change from "File" >> "Page layout") Color Scheme: (including colors for default fill, line, shadow, text etc.) - which you could modify (in PPT 97 and 200) from "Format" >> "Slide Color Scheme" Text Styles: (e.g. Title and Body Text placeholder formatting) - which you can then modify from the Slide Master Defaults for text and AutoShapes objects: Fill and Line color and styles, shadowed, etc. - these options can then be modified by right-clicking on any AutoShape object and choosing "Set AutoShape Defaults". Printer settings for slides, notes and handouts: Which can be modified from "File" >> "Print..." Initial view: Slides, Notes Page, Slide Sorter, etc. Now you know what type of settings you are saving every time you save a presentation as a template or you use any ready-made templates saved as *.pot files.


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Animating PowerPoint Design Templates You've learned a great deal about creating an effective PowerPoint presentation. Here's the piece that will separate your presentation from all the rest: animating PowerPoint's own design templates. Drawing upon your knowledge of using Slide Masters, of grouping and ungrouping objects, of re-coloring objects, and animation, you can add your own personal touches to PowerPoint's own Design Templates. For the most effective animation, choose those designs that contain concrete objects, such as twinkles, tropics, and theater, rather than blended and shaded designs.

To animate template designs,

Choose VIEW : Master : Slide Master. Click in an empty place on the slide (not in a text box). From the Drawing Toolbar, choose DRAW : Ungroup. Press ESC to deselect all the objects. Click on the object you wish to animate (remember you can group objects to have them function as a single entity.) Choose SLIDE SHOW : Custom Animation. Choose your animations options. Animate any other objects you desire.

Drawing In PowerPoint Differences between text boxes and AutoShapes (e.g. rectangles)

What is the difference between using a normal text box and using a rectangle from which you have removed the fill color and the line color? Apparently, there's no difference, they both work well. If you draw a rectangle, and you start typing on it, the text will be automatically centered, and it will be more complicated to move it around. Also, by default, if the text is bigger or longer than the rectangle (or any other shape), it will go outside of the shape. To avoid this, you can: Right-click on the rectangle. Choose "Format Autoshape..." In the "Text Box" tab, place a tick mark besides: "Word wrap text in AutoShape". The text box will be particularly useful in case you want to type something on top of a drawing you have created, and want to position this text elsewhere other than in the middle. In this case, my suggestion is to create the shape before, and when you want to type in it, use a text box and place it where you like, instead of typing inside the shape you have created. Editing Drawings

Anything you draw with the pencil tool, you can edit. To get the object into "points mode", either double-click on the object, or select it then hit the Enter key. You will then see points at every vertex, which you can move. You can add points by holding down the shift key and clicking, you can subtract points by holding down the ALT key while clicking and you can of course just drag points around. Nudging Objects You can use the arrow keys to move objects very small distances. This is a big win for those laptop users who no longer have mice. Select the object, then use your arrow keys. Each press of the key will move the object on "grid unit" (1/12th of an inch, don't ask why);


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if you hold down the ALT key while nudging, or if you have the grid turned off, you can move the objects one pixel at a time. Copying charts from different applications Open the chart you want to insert and do the following: Click outside of the chart area Click again, but only once, on the chart Right click on the chart and choose "Show picture toolbar" The 4th icon from the left is the "Recolor Chart" Select this one and click "None" to the message: "Chart colors follow". By clicking "OK" you will lock this chart format and colors in a way that will not be influenced by existing Master Slides or other settings that you may inadvertently set in the destination file. Whenever you insert this chart into another presentation, it will keep its specific colors and format and not follow any slide color scheme.

Pictures and Other External Files Clip Art - Is It Possible To Customize Clip Art?

Tips and suggestions on how to customize Clip Art in unique ways Have you ever played around with Clip Art? Clip Art are color images that you can insert into any slide to enhance the content of your presentation, to visually explain a concept or to add more colors to your slides. Do you have any idea about how many million people in the world have been using Clip Art in their presentations? I don't, but I bet they are millions... Have you noticed that most of the times your colleagues use the same typical Clip Art images in their slides? If you still want to use Clip Art, but you want it to be more unique and give it your "personal touch", there are two ways you can do it. Follow these easy steps, and no one will be able to recognize your Clip Art! Method A - If you only want to change the colors of any Clip Art image, do the following: Place the desired Clip Art into your slide by clicking Insert >> Picture >> Clip Art... Ensure the Clip Art is selected (if it's not, click on it once) Right-click on the Clip Art image and choose "Format Picture..." Go in the "Picture" tab and click on "Recolor" At this point you have an easy way to modify, one by one, all the colors used in the original Clip Art. You can put a tick mark on the color you want to modify, and choose from a drop-down list under "New" the new color you want to apply. As soon as you change the colors, you will preview, on the miniature on the right, how the Clip Art image will look like. Do all the necessary changes, then click "OK" on the two little windows to close them. Does your new Clip Art image look different? It does, and this way you can change the colors of all the Clip Art in the gallery. Method B - In case changing the colors is not enough to personalize a Clip Art, you can even modify its shape, remove some elements, add new ones, and mix two or three different images together. Let's see how you can do this: Insert the Clip Art (see previous paragraph) Ensure it is selected otherwise select it by clicking on it Go to Draw >> Ungroup


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Your Clip Art will be ungrouped, and you will now be able to click outside the slide to deselect all the elements, and then select only the ones you want to modify. What's the purpose of ungrouping a Clip Art? What can I do now? Well, it's up to your fantasy, but there are plenty of changes you can now make: You can increase or decrease the size of some elements inside the Clip Art You can modify the single colors You can remove some elements or even add new ones, by making copies of the other elements You can even modify the shape of all the objects, by using an advanced drawing feature we will see later on (at the end of this paragraph). Once you have personalized your Clip Art, I recommend selecting all the elements and group them again, so you will be able to resize and move them as a whole. *Remember that most Clip Art images have been grouped several times, so if you want to be able to access all individual elements of an illustration, try to ungroup them several times. I explain: once you have ungrouped it the first time, there might still be some elements grouped, so go back to Draw >> Ungroup, and try again. You will know that the "nested" groupings are ended when finally the "Ungroup" option will be grayed out. *Tip: if you find several Clip Art that may fit your needs, you can mix them together and then group them as a whole. **Advanced Tip (as promised under point "d"): you can modify the shape of some objects that make up a Clip Art (useful when correcting maps borders or facial expressions) by: Selecting the ungrouped object inside the Clip Art Going to Draw >> Edit Points (you can access this menu choice only if you have previously ungrouped all the elements of a Clip Art) You will see that the usual little white squares called "control points" become now black squared dots Clicking on them and dragging them to modify the shape of the selected object Clicking on the lines and dragging, and this will create a new black dot that you can edit. This way you can modify any shape that has been created under PowerPoint. Once you are done with the editing, go back to Draw >> Edit Points and deselect this feature to turn it off. How to type on top of the pictures There is something you can do to your pictures when you want the text that lies on top of it to be more readable. The text you have on top a picture is either a text box or a text placeholder that comes from the standard layouts. In both cases, these objects (both text boxes and placeholders) can be filled with color. To apply a fill to them, click on them once and then click on their border (or [Shift] click on them). Following that, move into the Drawing toolbar and choose your color by clicking on the bucket icon (Fill Color). Once you have chosen the desired color from the hexagonal color palette, put a tick mark in the bottom where it says "Semitransparent". This way, the fill color of your text box will not completely cover the shape of the picture that is behind. Nevertheless, your text will definitely be more readable and contrasting with the background. Another nice use of the semi transparency of color boxes is to display pictures that cannot set as watermarks because you would like them to be clearly seen by your audience.


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In this case, you can do the following: Insert a picture on a slide and make it as big as the slide or something smaller. Make a copy of this slide. In the copy, draw a rectangle on top of the picture that is a bit smaller than the picture. Remove the border line ("Line Color" >> "No Line") and choose a dark color for the fill. Set this color as "Semitransparent". Now insert a normal text box and type your text there, using a light text color such as white, yellow or gray. If you want a better effect, apply a transition between the two slides, like "Wipe right". Rehearse your show and see the effect. Your audience will first see the picture clearly, without anything on top and with no watermark effect. Then a colored but semitransparent box with some text on it will appear partially covering the picture, displaying your content and allowing the audience to continue to see the picture in the background. This is definitely a great effect when you don't want to watermark a picture, but you still want your text to be perfectly readable. Instead of a rectangle with a dark background, why not try to apply a semitransparent white or light gray color instead? It will look kind of "watermarked"... Selecting Small Objects Hit the ESCAPE key to insure that nothing is current selected, and then repeatedly hit the TAB key, which will toggle you through a selection of all of the objects on a slide. This is useful for selecting very small objects, or objects that are covered up by other larger objects. How to Make Documents Linked Inside a PowerPoint Presentation Open Up In a Foreground Active Window

QUESTION: When I create a Hyperlink to an existing Word or Excel document and then run the slide show, I cannot get the hyperlink to consistently open the linked document to view on screen - i.e. it opens in the background and one has to exit the slideshow to view the linked document. This does not happen each time but I cannot work out what makes the difference. This is no good if one wants continuity with the presentation. ANSWER: If another application (Word, Excel) is open in Windows, the hyperlink will open the requested document in that application, but while leaving it in the background. On the other hand, if the application is not open, then the hyperlink will open the document as a new active window, which is what you want! Import Outlines from Word Open the document in Word Click on File > Send To Select Microsoft PowerPoint to export the outline to PowerPoint This will help to have the outline property formatted with Word heading styles.

Printing How can I print handouts useful for review by others? OR Print options for handouts and print materials First of all, let me spend a few words about the "Print" icon that you find in PowerPoint. Like in other Office products, if you click that icon when you want to print, you print all the slides in the presentation and you don't have the option to customize your type of print.


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Instead of using that "Print" icon on the left side of the Standard toolbar, I suggest you get the habit of clicking on "File" >> "Print" and then selecting in the "Print" dialog box all the custom options you need: current slide, all the slides, number of copies and so on. This way you have a better control of what you are printing, even if it takes a few seconds more. Once you get the "Print" dialog box, let's see in detail all you can do. First, make sure that you are printing to the right printer. You may have more than one printer connected, maybe you also have a color printer, so here is where you select the printer you will be using. Click on the "printer name" drop-down list and select the appropriate printer. Second, you can choose the "Print range": do you want to print the whole presentation? Or do you need just a few slides? Maybe you only need the current slide, so here is where you can change it, saving time and trees in case you really don't need to print the entire presentation. Third, at the bottom of the dialog-box, you can finally select what you can print. By clicking on the "Print what:" drop-down list, you will be able to choose: a) Slides b) Handouts c) Notes pages d) Outline view a) Slides If you choose this option, you will print each slide on a separate A4 (or maybe "letter" for US users) sheet. The slide will fill completely the paper. This option may be useful in case you want to show your presentation to someone to have feedback on the graphic and visual aspect of it. If you have a 50(or more)-slide presentation you probably don't want to use this option to deliver printouts that have this format. Reasons may be: a. very costly in terms of toner/ink used b. uses of a lot of paper c. time consuming Remember also that, in case you have been using "pseudo- animation" effects You may end up having an incredible number of slides used to create the "cartoon" effect. It's pointless to print them all. b) Handouts When you select handouts, you will have more sub-options that will let you decide how many slides you want to print in one page. You can choose 2 slides per page, 3 slides per page (very versatile option since PowerPoint will place, besides each slide miniature, some blank lines where you or your colleagues can add notes or comments), 4 slides per page, 6 and even 9 slides. The more you choose, the smaller they will be, thus reducing readability. Regardless of which one of these options you will choose, this is the best print solution when you want to deliver a printed handout to your colleagues for their feedback. c) Notes pages This option lets you print one slide per page, reduced to half of its size, with the second half of the sheet reserved for the speakers note that you have typed in your presentation. Printing this way can be useful for you, so your colleagues can have a visual reference and see your notes. Remember anyway that a 50-slide presentation, printed this way, will give you 50 sheets, and you will not be able to fit more that one slide per page.


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d) Outline view Printing the outline is a great idea when you want to share it with your colleagues and you are not interested in the graphic aspect. It's easier to focus on the content and besides you do not waste ink. You can also deliver an outline to your colleagues, in case you think that they should not focus on the "look" of your presentation but just on its content. Making Slides Print Correctly PowerPoint has certain defaults to determine how it prints each object on the page. You can see over-ride these defaults. Go to View/Black and White; this will show you a gray-scale preview of how your slide will print. To change the print settings for any given object, right-click on it, then click "Black and White", and then choose the appropriate print option for that object. Master objects can be selected by going to the Master page View.

PowerPoint Mysteries Check Out the People Who Made PowerPoint (2000 only) Click Help > About PowerPoint. Hold Down Ctrl + Alt + Shift and click on the background of the text box. This will show the team responsible for making PowerPoint. How can I send a presentation to others to see, if they don’t have Powerpoint installed in their machines and I want the fonts, transitions, etc to look the same. PowerPoint has some great features for sharing presentations. If you want to simply run the presentation over a LAN, you can simply click Slide Show > Online Broadcast > Begin Broadcast. However, with this everyone viewing the presentation must have PowerPoint installed. A simple solution to this is to use the PowerPoint Viewer. This is a small installation just for viewing PowerPoint slide shows. You can have your presentation carry the fonts used along with it, if the fonts do not have license restrictions. Click File > Save As to save the presentation. In the Save As dialog box, click Tools > Embed TrueType Fonts. The best way to distribute presentations is to use the Pack and Go feature. This creates a self-extracting archive of the presentation so that it can be sent by mail and you can optionally include the viewer along with it as well as embed fonts. Click File > Pack and Go and simply run through all the screens. If you don’t have PowerPoint Viewer, download it from Internet where it is available freely. How To Create An Effective Information Graphic To make a good information graphic is not an easy thing. It is fundamental to know what purpose it serves and to whom it is addressed, but it's also convenient to follow a coherent process in order to correctly make it. In this issue we describe this process. Recently I had the opportunity to prepare and give a course on information graphics for a financial entity. The subject of the course was to explain what you have to take into account when preparing a graphical presentation, especially when the data is quantitative. So the idea wasn't to explain how to make business charts with Excel or PowerPoint, even though we should use these ubiquitous tools to build them, but what techniques we should use in order to make the charts clearer and easier to understand. Surprisingly enough there is very little literature on the topic. (At the end of this article you can consult a list of interesting books). The available books and information can be divided (in a rough approximation) into two categories.


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Catalogues of types of graphics and charts commonly used. Information on the theory and aesthetics of quantitative charts. It's difficult to distil elementary but general principles that summarize the best practice in performing business graphics or, in general, graphic presentations. And this is so for several reasons. The audience. You cannot unlink the charts from the audience they address. It's quite different making a chart show the evolution of sales for a meeting of sales people than presenting a marketing campaign to the board of directors, even though the data can be the same. The objective the chart hopes to achieve. Information graphics can be done for several reasons. Among them we can highlight the following ones. To transmit or communicate a message. Sales have improved but we are still behind budget... To present large amounts of information in a compact and easy to understand way. A road map is an archetypical example of this type of objective. To reveal the data. Discovering cause-effect relations, knowing what's happening. It appears that in the business environment people think more about information graphics in order to show what is already known rather than discovering what is still unknown. To periodically monitor the evolution of certain parameters. For example the evolution of stock exchange, sales, budget... *The process of making an information graphic* It appears that the pressure of everyday work and the little time that we have means that when we are about to perform an information graphic we adopt the tactics of immediacy. We start Excel, throw in some data and select a chart type, accepting the terrible colours that Excel gives us by default. The process is divided into three parts: 1) What is it for? The reason why we make the graphic representation . This determines the type of data to gather and about which we have to ask what type it has to be (quantitative, sequential categorical...) and more importantly: are they relevant for what we want? 2) How? In what way we will represent the data. A fundamental aspect of this section is that information graphics are interesting because they reveal differences. For this reason refining them and representing the data derived from their statistical treatment often reveals aspects that otherwise would result confusing. Once data is refined we have to choose the most effective visual metaphor. Sometimes, for a little data, a table or even a sentence can be clearer that a chart. In certain occasions changing the colour palette or the type of chart can clarify the situation enormously. 3) Does it work? We can obtain a nice and elegant chart but, if it doesn't fit the goal that we have defined in the first step, we will have failed. The key resides in revising and experimenting with what we have done until we find an improvement. Varying the colours, reducing the saturation of what is less important and increasing it for the most relevant data, modifying the typography, the size of fonts, eliminating everything that doesn't contribute to showing and clarifying the data (irrelevant grids, redundant data, and unnecessary labels) without losing relevant information sometimes provides surprisingly improved results.


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In the end, making a good information graphic consist of facilitating the understanding of complexity, instead of complicating what is simple. And this cannot be achieved without the clear understanding of what goal we pursue, who our audience is and a good deal of work and reflection. by Juan C. Dürsteler InfoVis.net http://www.infovis.net/ MasterView International by Luigi Canali De Rossi

Powerpoint Add Ins How can I e-mail my presentation if the file is too big? Use online collaboration and exchange services In case you need to send the entire presentation as an attachment to your e-mail message, you may run into troubles if the presentation file is too big. In general, organizations and companies have custom limits on the size of email that can be sent or received. Also, most users have a precisely set "quote" of space in their email inbox. If they go over it, following email will be bounced back until the assigned file space is freed up. You will find plenty of tricks to compress any file, split it, or to anyhow reduce its size. I would like to remind you here the versatility of an online free service like Yahoogroups, that allows you to upload files in a private Web area (each group has 20 Mb of space available) and to be able to access them from anywhere in the world by anyone who you have elected to be a member of that private Web "group". The good advantage of using Yahoogroups for online collaboration and file sharing, in general, is that you are not overloading your email box with heavy messages, but you can upload a file in the yahoo "Files" area and have your colleagues download it only if and when they need it. Nevertheless, the limit of this "File" area is 5 Mb per file, for a maximum of 20 Mb. A new service that you can use, for free, is called "SmartGroups". It is similar in its features to Yahoogroups, and its file size limit is 4 Mb for a maximum of 20 Mb of total space. The URL of this free service is http://www.smartgroups.com; you only need to register, and it's done. You can start using its services right away. In case 4/5 Mb are still too small for you, I can suggest you another good service, though is not for free. Its name is WhaleMail, and its URL is http://www.whalemail.com With yearly fees that vary from $75 to $750, you can purchase from 100 Mb to 1 Gb of space you can use to upload files and send email. It works like Yahoogroups since you can upload files in a dedicated space in their service, send a notification to the recipients and then have the recipients download the file without file size restrictions. There are also customized corporate accounts that you may want to check. NXPowerLite is a software which compresses your presentations upto 60% of the original size. You can use it to compress your presentation and send it.


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PowerPoint Keyboard Shortcuts

Text Formatting To do this: Windows Keyboard: Change Font CTRL+Shift+F, then use up/down arrow keys, click Enter when done Change Point Size CTRL+Shift+P, then use up/down arrow keys, click Enter when done Increase Font Size CTRL+Shift+> Decrease Font Size CTRL+Shift+< Bold CTRL+B Underline CTRL+U Italic CTRL+I Superscript ALT+CTRL+Shift+> Subscript ALT+CTRL+Shift+< Plain Text CTRL+Shift+Z Spelling Checker F7 Center Paragraph CTRL+E Justified Paragraph CTRL+J Left-Aligned Paragraph CTRL+L Right-Aligned Paragraph CTRL+R Change Case Shift+F3 toggles selection through lower case, upper case, initial caps with each press of keys Create Hyperlink CTRL+K

Deleting and Copying Delete Character Left Backspace Delete Word Left CTRL+Backspace Delete Character Right Delete Delete Word Right CTRL+Delete Cut CTRL+X Copy CTRL+C Paste CTRL+V Undo CTRL+Z Create a copy of the text CTRL+Drag

Navigating in Text Blocks Character Left Left Arrow Character Right Right Arrow Line Up Up Arrow Line Down Down Arrow Word Left CTRL+Left Arrow Word Right CTRL+Right Arrow End of Line END Beginning of Line HOME Paragraph Up CTRL+Up Arrow Paragraph Down CTRL+Down Arrow End of Text Block CTRL+END Start of Text Block CTRL+HOME

Navigating and Working With Objects To Previous Object TAB To Next Object Shift+TAB Select All Objects CTRL+A Drag and Drop Copy CTRL+Select and Drag Create a Duplicate Object CTRL+D Create another Duplicate with same offset as first Duplicate CTRL+D, move new copy to desired location, then use CTRL+D repeatedly to create more copies


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Outlining, in All Views Promote Paragraph ALT+Shift+Left Arrow or TAB from beginning of Paragraph Demote Paragraph ALT+Shift+Right Arrow or Shift+TAB from beginning of Paragraph Move Selected Paragraphs Up ALT+Shift+Up Arrow Move Selected Paragraphs Down ALT+Shift+Down Arrow

Outlining, in Outline View Collapse to Titles ALT+Shift+1 Expand Text under a heading ALT+Shift+Plus Collapse Text Under a Heading ALT+Shift+Minus Show All Text and Headings ALT+Shift+A Display Character Formatting Keypad / (numlock off)

Selecting, in Text Character Right Shift+Right Arrow Character Left Shift+Left Arrow End of Word CTRL+Shift+Right Arrow Beginning of Word CTRL+Shift+Left Arrow Line Up Shift+Up Arrow Line Down Shift+Down Arrow Select All CTRL+A or F2 Select Any Text Drag with left mouse button depressed Select Word Double-Click Select Paragraph Triple-Click Drag and Drop Select and Drag Drag and Drop Copy CTRL+Select and Drag

Working with Slides and Presentation Files New Presentation CTRL+N Open a Presentation CTRL+O, CTRL+F12 Save CTRL+S, F12 Save As F12 Print CTRL+P Find CTRL+F Replace CTRL+H New Slide (menu) CTRL+M New Slide like last one, no menu Shift+CTRL+M Exit/Quit CTRL+Q or ALT F4 Move from Title to Text CTRL+Enter Move from Body text to Title of Next Slide CTRL+Enter

Working with Presentation Windows Go to Previous Window CTRL+Shift+F6 Go to Next Window CTRL+F6 Size Presentation Window (Un-Maximize) ALT+F5 Maximize Application Window ALT+F10 Maximize Presentation Window CTRL+F10 Restore Presentation Window to Previous Size CTRL+F5 Put Presentation in its own Window CTRL+F5

Drawing & Formatting Show/Hide Guides (toggle) CTRL+G Switch from Normal View to Master View Shift+Click Slide View Button Group CTRL+Shift+G Ungroup CTRL+Shift+H Regroup CTRL+Shift+J Resize while Maintaining Proportions Shift+Resize


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Resize from Center CTRL+Resize Resize from Center while Maintaining Proportions CTRL+Shift+Resize Rotate in 15 degree increments Shift+Rotate tool Rotate from Corner CTRL+Rotate tool Rotate in 15 degree increments from Corner Shift+CTRL+Rotate tool Extend Line along same angle Shift+Resize Make Straight Segment while Using Curve Tool CTRL+ALT+click (using curve tool) Nudge object one grid unit Arrow Key Nudge object one pixel CTRL+Arrow Key Temporarily Release Grid/Guide Snap ALT Create Multiple Guides CTRL+Drag Guide

Controlling Slides in Slide Show Go to Slide <number> <number> ENTER Black/Unblack Screen B or Period White/Unwhite Screen W or Comma Show/Hide Pointer A or = End Show ESC, CTRL+Break, Minus, END Erase Screen Annotations E Advance to Hidden Slide H Advance to Next Slide Mouse Click, Spacebar, N, Right Arrow, Down Arrow, Page Down Return to Previous Slide Backspace, P, Left Arrow, Up Arrow, Page Up

Getting Help & Programming Tools Help F1 Menu and Dialog Explanations Shift+F1 Right Mouse Click without Mouse Shift+F10 Bring up Visual Basic Editor ALT+F11 Macro Recorder ALT+F8


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Microsoft PowerPoint is a powerful tool to create presentations and slide shows. These presentations are typically laid out in a storyboard fashion, where individual slides are created & formatted with text & images. Microsoft PowerPoint allows you to create amazing presentations either from scratch or by using the easy-to-use wizard. This book is a step-by-step guide on creating business presentations. It also tells you things about PowerPoint that you always wanted to know, but did not know whom to ask.

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