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 forÂmatting 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 assoÂciated 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 creÂated 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:
NOTE
Bear in mind that the name you give to the CD is the name that is next to the CD drive letter in Windows Explorer when the user inserts the disc.You have a maximum of only 16 characters to work with when naming the disc, but try to make the name as descriptive as you can.

Figure 1 A PowerPoint presentaÂtion published as a Web page.
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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:
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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.
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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 disÂplay 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.
Publishing a PowerPoint presentation to the Web is becoming increasingly common. After a conference, for example, many people make their presentations available online for those who did not attend. Also with business travel budgets tightening, “presenting” online saves the expense of either traveling to the audience or bringing the audience to you.
PowerPoint gives you extensive page-publishing options, as the following steps show:
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To save the supporting files in the same folder as the Web page, choose Office, PowerPoint Options, click Advanced, click Web Options, display the Files tab, and deactivate the Organize Supporting Files in a Folder check box.

Figure 1 Use the Publish as Web Page dialog box to conÂfigure your presentaÂtion’s Web page options.
PowerPoint sets up the presentation Web page with an ActiveX control that displays the slide show content. By default, Internet Explorer doesn’t display ActiveX controls for secuÂrity reasons (and browsers such as Firefox don’t display them at all). Therefore, when you launch the presentation Web page, Internet Explorer displays the Information Bar, which tells you that the program prevents an ActiveX control from running. Click the Information Bar, click Allow Blocked Content, and then click Yes when Outlook Express asks if you are sure. Figure 2 shows a published presentation.

Figure 2 A PowerPoint presentaÂtion published as a Web page.
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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:
Now when another user opens the presentation, he sees the Password dialog box. The user must either enter the correct password or must click the Read Only button.
Applying a modification password keeps the presentation safe from unwanted changes, but it still means that another user can open the file in PowerPoint and see your notes, animaÂtion settings, and other design features. If you’d like to avoid that, or if the other user is a PowerPoint novice who does not know how to start a slide show, you can save your presenÂtation as a separate file that uses the PowerPoint Show (PPS) format (which has the .ppsx file extension; normal PowerPoint files have the .pptx extension). When the user launches the PPS file (by double-clicking it in Windows Explorer, for example), PowerPoint runs the slide show right away without displaying the PowerPoint interface. When the user finÂishes the slide show, PowerPoint exits.
Follow these steps to save a copy of your presentation as a PowerPoint Show file:
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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:
Here are the steps to follow to create such an action button:
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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 proÂvide 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:
If you want to configure some text in one of your slides as a hyperlink that takes you to the hidden slide, follow these steps:

Figure 1 Use the Insert Hyperlink dialog box to set up a text link to your hidden slide.
If you don’t want a link to appear in your presentation text, you can create a separate action button instead. An action button is a small graphic image that you configure to run a parÂticular action when clicked. In this case, you want the action button to display your hidden slide. Here are the steps to follow:

Figure 2 Use the Action Settings dialog box to set up an action button to link to your hidden slide.
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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:
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:
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You can jump back to the first slide by holding down the left and right mouse buttons for a couple of seconds.
Besides these mouse-based techniques, there are also several keyboard techniques you can use to navigate and operate a slide show. Many presentation gurus have these keyboard shortcuts memorized because this enables them to avoid the slide show menu, which can be distracting and looks unprofessional, and using the keyboard is almost always faster than using the mouse. Table 1 lists PowerPoint’s slide show keyboard shortcuts.
Table 1 Navigating a PowerPoint Slide from the Keyboard Key Description
| N | Advances to the next slide or runs the next animation. PowerPoint also supports the following keys for this task: spacebar, Enter, right arrow, down arrow, or Page Down. |
| P | Returns to the previous slide or reverses the most recent animation. PowerPoint also supports the following keys for this task: Backspace, left arrow, up arrow, or Page Up. |
| n | Jumps to slide number n. |
| S or + | Pauses or resumes an automatic slide show. |
| B or . | Toggles the black screen on and off. |
| W or , | Toggles the white screen on and off. |
| A | Toggles the mouse pointer and slide show navigation tools on and off. |
| Ctrl + A | Changes the mouse pointer to an arrow, if the mouse is currently displayed as a pen or eraser. |
| Ctrl + T | Displays the Windows taskbar. |
| Esc | Ends the slide show. PowerPoint also ends the slide show if you press hyphen [-] or Ctrl+Break. |
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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 moniÂtor, 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:
Now that Windows knows about your second monitor, the next step is to tell PowerPoint that you want to use another monitor during your presentation. Here are the steps to follow:

Figure 1 First you need to tell Windows that a second monitor is attached to your computer.

Figure 2 Use the Slide Show tab’s Monitors group to set up your presentation to run on two monitors.
The next time you start the slide show, PowerPoint uses the Presenter view: The monitor you selected in Step 2 displays the current slide in full-screen mode, whereas the other monitor gives you the Speaker view, which is shown in Figure 3.
Most of today’s video adapters come with a graphics coprocessor, a microprocessor that perÂforms graphics chores such as 2D and 3D rendering which would otherwise be handled by the computer’s CPU. This can help speed up the display on your monitor. If you have this type of hardware in your computer, click the Slide Show tab and then click Set Up Slide Show to display the Set Up Show dialog box. Click the Use Hardware Graphics Acceleration check box and then click OK.

Figure 3 In the Presenter view, you see the Speaker view, which includes the current slide, its notes, and slide thumbnails.
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The content you have in a slide show isn’t always suitable or appropriate for every audiÂence. 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 payÂroll 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 presentaÂtion 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:

Figure 1 Use the Define Custom Show dialog box to creÂate a custom slide show that includes a subset of the current presentaÂtion’s slides.
To play a custom show, choose Slide Show, Custom Slide Show, Custom Shows to display the Custom Shows dialog box, click the custom show you want to play, and then click Show.
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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.

Figure 1 Use the Insert CD Audio dialog box to specify the CD tracks you want to play with the current slide.
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If you want to play only part of a single track, specify the track’s number in both the Start at Track spin box and then End at Track spin box.Then use the Time spin box next to End at Track to specify the length of the clip.
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