Ms Office Tune Up

At times, you might need to set up an unattended slide show that runs automatically and continuously. In a trade show booth, for example, you might want to run a slide show next to a product display. You might also want a slide show to run continuously in a store win­dow or in a kiosk. None of these situations is conducive to having a person around to stop and restart the show, much less to actually present the material. In such cases, it’s better to configure the slide show to run automatically until it’s interrupted. The following steps show you how this is done:

1. Rehearse the slide show to set up the timings, as described earlier (see “Rehearsing a Slide Show”).
2. Add narration to the slide show, if needed, as described earlier (see “Adding Narration to a Slide Show”). At the end of the show, be sure to click Don’t Save so that PowerPoint doesn’t overwrite your slide show timings.
3. Choose Slide Show, Set Up Slide Show. PowerPoint displays the Set Up Show dialog box, shown in Figure 1. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 6% [?]

Not all slide shows are presented in person. As you learn in the next section, you can set up a slide show to run automatically in a kiosk or booth. More commonly, you might share a presentation with remote users. For example, you can send a presentation to another per­son as an email attachment or on a CD, you can put the presentation on a shared network folder, or you can publish the presentation to a Web site. In all these scenarios, you obvi­ously cannot present the slide show in person. However, you can do the next best thing and record narration to go along with each slide. When remote users open your presentation and run the slide show, they hear your voice along with each slide. PowerPoint can also store slide timings with your narration.

CAUTION

Note that unlike Rehearse Timings, PowerPoint’s Narration feature doesn’t give you any way to start over on a particular slide.Therefore, make sure you’re comfortable with your presentation before you begin.You might want to have your notes or handouts on hand,just in case you need them.

Here are the steps to follow to add narration to a slide show:

1. Plug in your computer’s microphone, if you haven’t done so already.
2. Choose Slide Show, Record Narration. PowerPoint displays the Record Narration dia­log box, shown in Figure 1. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

When I discussed the rationale behind using the Rehearse Timings feature at the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned that it helps you look for slide times that are out of whack with the rest of the presentation. You can usually do this by eyeballing the slide times in Slide

Sorter view. However, in more complicated presentations, it might help to know the aver­age slide time, which you can then use as a comparison for individual slides.

If you write down the total time after you complete a rehearsal, you can divide that time by the number of slides in the presentation. However, dividing minutes and seconds by an integer value is not a straightforward calculation, and it is unlikely anyway if you adjust your slide timing by hand or by using the macro shown in the previous section.

To get quick and easy slide time averages, use the VBA macro shown in Listing 1. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

When you use the Rehearse Timings feature as described in the previous section, you might get interrupted during a slide and forget to click the Pause button in the Rehearsal toolbar. Rather than starting from scratch, you can complete the slide show and then adjust the time for the interrupted slide by hand. To do this, navigate to the slide (either in Normal view or Slide Sorter view), choose the Animations tab, and then adjust the time displayed in the Automatically After spin button.

TIP

When you specify a time using the Automatically After control, it’s often faster to use the text box to type the time.That is, you select the entire displayed time and then type the new time using the mm:ss format, where mm is the number of minutes and ss is the number of seconds.

What if you need to adjust the time of multiple slides? If want to assign the same time to each slide, select all the slides and then edit the time displayed in the Automatically After control. PowerPoint assigns that time to all the selected slides.

A more likely scenario is that the slides you want to change require different times. In this case, you don’t have any choice except to modify the slide times one by one using the Automatically After control.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 2% [?]

Good public speakers can tell you that one of the secrets to their success is that they always rehearse a speech, usually several times. This helps them learn their material, discover problem areas (too-long sentences, tongue-tripping phrases, and so on), and internalize the speech to the extent that when they finally get up in front of their audience, their deliv­ery sounds unforced, natural, and conversational.

Good presenters also rehearse their slide shows, and they get the same benefits as their speech-giv­ing colleagues. However, PowerPoint also comes with some technology that gives you even more benefits for rehearsal. This technology is PowerPoint’s Rehearse Timings feature, which enables you to run through your presenta­tion and keep track of how long you spend on each slide and the total presentation time. There are several ways you can take advantage of this information to improve your slide show:

• You can look for slides that take substantially more time than the other slides in your presentation. For example, you might find that most of your slides take 3 or 4 minutes, but you have one slide that takes 10 minutes. That’s almost always an indication that the longer slide contains too much information or is too complex. You should consider dividing the slide into two or three shorter or simpler slides. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

If you create a Top 10 Most Requested Effects list, at or near the top of that list is the dis­play scrolling credits on the last slide. It’s always a good idea to acknowledge those who had a hand in creating a presentation, and scrolling credits look professional. The good news is that PowerPoint makes this easy to set up with a built-in Credits effect that sets things up for you automatically. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Insert a blank slide at the end of the presentation. (The easiest way to do this is to right-click below the last slide and then click New Slide.)
2. Choose Insert, Text Box, and then draw the text box placeholder. Be sure to position the text box in the horizontal center of the slide. (An easy way to do this is to choose Format, Align, Align Center.) PowerPoint preserves the text box’s horizontal position when running the animation, so centered text looks best.
3. Type your credits into the text box and format the text as desired.
4. Choose Animations, Custom Animation to display the Custom Animation pane.
5. With the text box selected, choose Add Effect, Entrance, More Effects to display the Add Entrance Effect dialog box. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

When you put together and present a PowerPoint slide show, you should avoid a malaise that is sometimes called triple delivery-having the same text on the screen, on a handout, and spoken aloud. Most presenters avoid the triple delivery problem by making their bullet points relatively terse and then expanding on the point orally. Unfortunately, when your speech departs significantly from the bullet text, your audience may forget which bullet is the current one. You can solve that problem by reiterating the bullet text from time to time or by pointing at the text as you speak.

Neither of these solutions is that great because you need to remember to perform them while you’re extemporizing. A much better solution is to have the current bullet point emphasized by, say, bold or underlined text or by applying a different font size or color. These effects are available in the Emphasis category. However, you need to be careful: In most cases, PowerPoint doesn’t reverse the effect automatically. Ideally, you want the emphasis applied to only one bullet at a time. That is, when you apply the emphasis effect to the next bullet, PowerPoint should remove the effect from the previous bullet.

The easiest way to set this up is to use the Change Font Style effect, which enables you to emphasize bullet text by applying bold, -italic, or underline. Best of all, the Change Font Style effect comes with a property that enables you to automatically remove the font style from the current bullet when you move to the next bullet. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

When you display a slide, it’s often desirable to play a short video clip to introduce the slide content. This might be a short movie related to the slide’s topic, a message from the com­pany president or other person, an animated clip that demonstrates the task described in the slide, and so on. To add a movie to a slide, choose the Insert tab, click the top half of the Movie split button, and then use the Insert Movie dialog box to select the video file you want to play on the slide.

TIP

PowerPoint (indeed, all of the Office 2007 applications) comes with a large number of animated GIF images. (An animated GIF is essentially a sequence of GIF still images combined into a single file.) These are part of Office 2007’s Clip Art collection.To add an animated GIF to your slide, choose the Insert tab, click the lower half of the Movie split button, and then click Movie from Clip Organizer. In the Clip Art window that displays, you see a clip for all the available animated GIFs.

In this kind of situation, it’s ideal to display the slide, run the video, remove the video from the slide, and then display the slide’s regular content. This requires several animation effects, as described in the following steps: Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 2% [?]

When you display a slide, it’s often desirable to play a short video clip to introduce the slide content. This might be a short movie related to the slide’s topic, a message from the com­pany president or other person, an animated clip that demonstrates the task described in the slide, and so on. To add a movie to a slide, choose the Insert tab, click the top half of the Movie split button, and then use the Insert Movie dialog box to select the video file you want to play on the slide.

TIP

PowerPoint (indeed, all of the Office 2007 applications) comes with a large number of animated GIF images. (An animated GIF is essentially a sequence of GIF still images combined into a single file.) These are part of Office 2007’s Clip Art collection.To add an animated GIF to your slide, choose the Insert tab, click the lower half of the Movie split button, and then click Movie from Clip Organizer. In the Clip Art window that displays, you see a clip for all the available animated GIFs.

In this kind of situation, it’s ideal to display the slide, run the video, remove the video from the slide, and then display the slide’s regular content. This requires several animation effects, as described in the following steps: Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 2% [?]

In “Hiding a Slide Master Object On One Slide” I present a technique that enables you to hide a Slide Master object on a single slide by covering it with a rectangle shape that has a fill that matches the slide background. You can use a similar technique to hide different parts of an image, and you can then use animation to uncover each part one at a time.

For example, your graphics department might have come up with an image split into, say, four quadrants with a sales result, product image, or contest winner in each quadrant. PowerPoint doesn’t have a feature that can break up an image into parts that you can ani­mate separately. (The exception is clip art, which you can ungroup into its component parts; see “Animating Separate Elements of a Clip Art Image,” next.) However, by covering the image with rectangles or other shapes formatted to look like the slide background, you can apply animation to those shapes to get the effect you want. This technique works best with a slide that has a solid-color background or a texture.

Here are the steps to follow:

1. Choose Insert, Shapes and then click the shape you want to use to hide part of the image (this is the Rectangle in most cases).
2. Draw the shape on the slide so that it covers the part of the image you want to hide. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]