Ms Office Tune Up

Saving a presentation to the Web (as described earlier, see “Publishing a Slide Show to the Web”) is a great way to enable nonPowerPoint users to see your material. However, this isn’t a perfect solution. For one thing, your user might not have access to the Web when he wants to view your presentation (a person might be on a plane, for example). For another, the Web version of a presentation never looks as good as the original, so much of your for­matting work is lost, which can detract from your message.

To create a version of your presentation that non-PowerPoint users can view without an Internet connection and that appears exactly as you designed it, you need to use PowerPoint’s Package for CD command. This feature takes your presentation and its asso­ciated files and works with your computer’s CD burner to burn the files to a disc. (Note that you can only burn to a CD, not to a DVD.) PowerPoint also includes the PowerPoint Viewer 2007 utility, which enables anyone to view any PowerPoint file (including files cre­ated with earlier versions of PowerPoint: 2003, XP, 200, and 97). The CD also comes with an AutoRun feature, so all the other user has to do is insert the CD, and the slide show runs automatically.

Here are the steps to follow to burn a copy of your presentation on a CD:

1. Choose Office, Publish, Package for CD.
2. Depending on your presentation, PowerPoint might display a dialog box letting you know that it will convert your files to the PowerPoint 97-2003 format. If so, click OK.
3. In the Package for CD dialog box (see Figure 1), use the Name the CD text box to type a name for the CD. Read the rest of this entry »

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If you want put your presentation on the Web, you should know that PowerPoint doesn’t include animations when it converts a presentation to a Web page file. This helps improve the performance of the slide show, particularly for users running a dial-up connection. If you want the animations included in your Web page (for example, if you know that most of your users have a broadband connection), you need to follow these steps to set this up:

1. Choose Office, PowerPoint Options to open the PowerPoint Options dialog box.
2. Click Advanced.
3. Click Web Options to open the Web Options dialog box.

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If you are in the Save As dialog box and you have selected either the Single File Web Page or the Web Page file type, you can also get to the Web Options dialog box by clicking Publish and then clicking Web Options.

4. Click the General tab.
5. Click to activate the Show Slide Animation While Browsing check box.
6. Click OK to return to the PowerPoint Options dialog box.
7. Click OK.

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Ever since Microsoft’s belated 1995 realization that the Internet was something big that ought to factor into the company’s plans, it has crammed the Office suite with Net-friendly features and added Office-friendly features to Internet Explorer. The goal has always been to blur the previously hard-edged distinction between here-your computer and your LAN-and there-the Web, FTP sites, and other online locations.

What do you do if you have existing documents, worksheets, and presentations that you want to mount on the Web? Internet Explorer can work in conjunction with Office to dis­play these files, but all your readers might not have that capability. To make sure anyone who surfs to your site can access your data, you need to convert your files into the Web’s lingua franca: HTML. Fortunately, Office applications make this easy by including features that convert documents from their native format into HTML.

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Before you save your presentation as a Web page, you might want to tell PowerPoint which browser or browsers your users surf with because this determines the features PowerPoint uses to render the Web page XML or HTML. For example, if you tell PowerPoint that your users browse with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or later, PowerPoint disables the MHTML format (described in the steps that follow). Choose Office, PowerPoint Options, click Advanced, click Web Options, and then display the Browsers tab. Use the People Who View This Web Page Will Be Using list to click your target browser. Note, too, that you can use the check boxes in the Options list to customize the Web page features.

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If you want other people to view your presentation without you, the easiest way is to either send the presentation file via email as an attachment or to place the presentation file in a shared network folder. The users can then open the presentation in PowerPoint and use the standard Ribbon commands or keyboard methods to run the slide show.

The drawback with this method is that the other users have the presentation open in PowerPoint, so they can make changes to it. If you don’t want that to happen, one solution is to set up the presentation with a modification password. This means that the user cannot change the presentation in any way without providing the correct password. Here are the steps to follow to set this up:

1. Choose Office, Save As (avoid the arrow) to open the Save As dialog box.
2. Choose Tools, General Options to open the General Options dialog box.
3. Type a password in the Password to Modify text box.
4. Click OK. PowerPoint displays the Confirm Password dialog box.
5. Type the password again and click OK.
6. Click Save. PowerPoint asks if you want to replace the existing file.
7. Click Yes.

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In the previous section, you learned how to navigate to a hidden slide by using the Go To Slide command or by clicking a text hyperlink or an action button. That works well, but in almost all cases, when you are done with the hidden slide, you should return to the slide you previously viewed. Again, PowerPoint offers two methods:

• Display the slide show menu and choose Last Viewed.
• Set up an action button that, when clicked, takes you to the previously viewed slide.

Here are the steps to follow to create such an action button:

1. Display the slide on which you want to display the action button.
2. Choose Insert, Shapes to display the Shapes gallery and then click an icon in the Action Buttons section. (In this case, a suitable shape is the Back or Previous button.)
3. Click and drag your mouse on the slide to create the action button. When you release the mouse button, PowerPoint displays the Action Settings dialog box.
4. Click the Hyperlink To option.
5. In the list under the Hyperlink To option, click Last Slide Viewed.
6. Click OK.

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When you put together your presentation, part of your preparation should always involve anticipating possible audience questions, comments, or concerns. This enables you to pro­vide quick and accurate responses, which impresses a lot of people and enhances the overall message of your presentation.

Most of the time, you can write down possible questions, answers, and other material in the notes pages of your slides. However, you might think of an audience question that requires a more formal response in the form of a separate slide. The only problem is that you don’t want to include that slide in your presentation because the question or comment that leads to it might never come up. The solution is to include the slide in the presentation anyway but mark it as hidden. This means that the slide doesn’t display in your slide show and doesn’t print in your handouts.

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If you want to print your hidden slides, choose Office, Print to display the Print dialog box. Click to activate the Print Hidden Slides check box and then click OK.

To hide a slide, select it in the Normal or Slide Sorter view and then choose Slide Show, Hide Slide. PowerPoint lets you know a slide is hidden by displaying a rectangle with a diagonal slash behind the slide number. (In Normal view, a hidden slide looks as if it is washed out in the Slides tab.)

How do you view a hidden slide when you need it? PowerPoint gives you two methods: Read the rest of this entry »

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Most of the time, you use your mouse to operate and navigate a slide show. You can use these two basic techniques:

• Click to move to the next slide in the presentation or to run the next animation in the current slide.
• Turn the mouse wheel backward (toward you) to move to the next slide in the presen­tation or to run the next animation in the current slide; turn the mouse wheel forward (away from you) to advance to return to the previous slide in the presentation or to reverse the most resent animation in the current slide.

For more control over the slide show, either click the Slide Show Menu icon or right-click the slide show. The menu you see contains the following commands:

• Next-Moves to the next slide in the presentation.
• Previous-Moves to the previous slide in the presentation.
• Last Viewed-Jumps to the last slide that you displayed in the presentation. Note that this won’t be the same as the presentation’s previous slide if you used the Go to Slide command (see the next item in this list), a hyperlink, or an action button to jump to the current slide from elsewhere in the presentation.
• Go to Slide-Displays a menu of the slides in the presentation. When you click a slide in the list, PowerPoint jumps to that slide. Read the rest of this entry »

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When you run a slide show, the operative phrase is “What You See Is What They Get.” In other words, what you see on your monitor is what your audience sees on the projection screen. That’s not a problem if the slide show goes smoothly, but if you have to access the slide show menu during the presentation (for example, to select a different pointer or to navigate to another slide), the appearance of the menu not only distracts your audience, but it also looks unprofessional. This is doubly true if you need to access something in another Windows program (by pressing Ctrl+T during the slide show), resulting in the sudden intrusion of the Windows taskbar and Start menu into the proceedings.

You can work around this problem by using PowerPoint’s Presenter view on a system that has two monitors attached. Presenter view displays the full-screen slide show on one moni­tor, and on the other its displays a special Speaker view, which divides the screen into three sections: the current slide, the current slide’s Notes page, and a strip containing thumbnail images of the presentation’s slides. You can use the Speaker view to navigate the slide show and change options, and the audience members are none the wiser because they just see the current slide.

To use Presenter view, first attach a second monitor to your computer and then configure that monitor in Windows, as described in the following steps: Read the rest of this entry »

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The content you have in a slide show isn’t always suitable or appropriate for every audi­ence. For example, a slide show about your company might contain secret corporate data. That’s fine for internal use, but it’s not something you would want to show in a public forum. Similarly, a financial slide show for company executives might contain sensitive pay­roll data that you wouldn’t want to appear if you also presented the show to lower-level managers.

For these and similar situations, you don’t need to build multiple versions of your presenta­tion with material tailored to each audience. Instead, PowerPoint enables you to work with a single presentation file, but build custom slide shows from that file. A custom slide show is a show that displays only those slides that you specify.

Follow these steps to create a custom slide show:

1. Choose Slide Show, Custom Slide Show, Custom Shows. PowerPoint displays the Custom Shows dialog box.
2. Click New. PowerPoint displays the Define Custom Show dialog box.
3. Type a name in the Slide Show Name text box.
4. In the Slides in Presentation list, click a slide that you want to add to the custom show. (If you want to add multiple slides, hold down Ctrl and click each slide.) Read the rest of this entry »

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PowerPoint enables you to add a sound file that plays automatically when you navigate to a slide. These are normally short audio clips that play sound effects, messages, or snippets of music. However, there might be times when you prefer to play a longer sound clip. For example, you might want a particular song to accompany a slide, or you might want to play several cuts of music during a break in the slide show. The best way to set up these longer sound effects is to have PowerPoint play them directly from a CD. Here is how it works:

CAUTION

The license that comes with a commercial audio CD probably doesn’t allow you to play large chunks of the disc in a public setting. Short samples are fair use, but you need to be careful when using longer bits.

1. Insert the CD containing the audio track or tracks you want to use. (If you see the AutoPlay window, click the Close button or press Esc.)
2. In PowerPoint, navigate to the slide into which you want to insert the CD audio.
3. Choose the Insert, click the bottom half of the Sound split button, and then click Play CD Audio Track. PowerPoint displays the Insert CD Audio dialog box, shown in Figure 1. Read the rest of this entry »

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