Ms Office Tune Up

If you have a slide that contains a lot of interesting information or that has content that fits well with other material you have, you might want to display that slide in a document you create in another application, or perhaps add it to a Web page. There’s isn’t a direct way to embed a PowerPoint slide in another document. However, there’s a trick you can use to make a copy of the slide as a graphics file, which you can then paste into any document that accepts images, or you can display it on a Web page. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Display the slide you want to convert to an image.
2. Choose View, Notes Page. PowerPoint switches to the Notes Page view.
3. Right-click the slide image and then click Save as Picture, as shown in Figure 1. PowerPoint displays the Save As Picture dialog box. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

As you probably know from hard-won experience, crafting a PowerPoint slide that’s both attractive and effective is a great deal of work. Getting the fonts, colors, and alignment just so, tweaking the layout, adding transitions and animations, and, of course, writing the text can all add up to a serious chunk of time. So what happens when you’re working on another presentation and realize you need to use the same slide that took you so long to craft? Office gurus know that the cardinal rule of Office productivity is to avoid reinventing any wheels. In this case, this means you shouldn’t recreate the same slide from scratch. Instead, PowerPoint gives you several ways to reuse slides.

The most straightforward method is the good old copy-and-paste technique:

1. Open the presentation containing the slides you want to reuse.
2. Select the slides you want to reuse, and then press Ctrl+C to copy them to the Office Clipboard.
3. Open the presentation to which you want to copy the slides.
4. In the Navigation pane, click the slide below which you want to insert the copied slides.
5. Press Ctrl+V to paste the slides. PowerPoint inserts the copied slides. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

When you choose Office, New, PowerPoint displays the New Presentation dialog box. In the Blank and Recent category, there is a Blank Presentation icon. When you click this icon and then click Create, a new presentation that uses PowerPoint’s default blank presen­tation starts. This presentation has the following characteristics:

• It uses the Office Theme.
• It includes a single slide based on the Title Slide Layout.

TIP

You can quickly create a default blank presentation by pressing Ctrl+N.

This gives you a nice blank slate from which to get started. However, what if you always perform certain customizations when you start a new presentation? For example, you might always change to a particular theme, add a specific number of slides that use certain layouts, add an icon or logo to the Slide Master, set the footer text, and so on. Repeating these and other tweaks every time you start a new presentation is pure drudgery and a waste of valu­able time.

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Consistency among your slides is a laudable presentation goal, but it’s not an absolute one. There is not a law that says you must make every slide look exactly the same. In fact, some of the most interesting and effective presentations I have seen apply different designs to groups of slides that are related in some way. Here are some ideas to help you get started thinking about this:

• For a budget or financial presentation, use a green color scheme on income-related slides and a red color scheme on expense-related slides.
• For a presentation that includes confidential or sensitive material, add “Confidential” or “For Internal Use Only” text to those slides.
• For a presentation that covers multiple products, place a small picture of the product on each slide related to that product.
• For a presentation that has two or more authors, display the author’s name, signature, or picture on each of the slides he worked on.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Party Tricks.

There’s a category of software functionality that, despite the best intention of the designers and developers, somehow never seems to make it into general use.

Sometimes these are essential features, and that’s a really bad thing because a customer’s failure to find an essential feature means the developers wasted their efforts. We don’t blame the customer, we blame ourselves and try to fix things down the road. Luckily we’re pretty good about usability testing and don’t have many of those in PowerPoint.

Other times they’re not essential features, they’re quick access or alternative methods for accessing functionality that is easily found elsewhere. Because users can find these features in obvious locations, the failure to find the quick access method isn’t all that bad. And it’s kind of fun to expose them to users, see the delight in their eyes… kind of like party tricks.
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The following is a set of common questions that have recently been asked to Microsoft Powerpoint Developer team. Check this out:

In case you don’t find your favorite question below, you can check additional references and resources for getting your questions answered at the end of this post.

Q. In PowerPoint 2007, lines seem to work more like connectors from the previous versions. Is this intentional?

A. Yes, all lines are now, in fact, connector lines. This means that when you are drawing a line it will try to snap to the corner or mid-point of other shapes on the slide. You’ll see these points “light up” on a shape as you approach it when drawing or moving a line. This is a great feature, providing an exacting match-up of your line and the shape that can be repeated with other lines and shapes in a crisp and professional manner.

However it is possible that you may want to get a line near a shape but not actually connect to it, and may feel that the magnetic attraction between the two is getting in your way. This can be exasperated by a second setting in PowerPoint called Snap to Grid. The Snap to Grid setting is in the Home ribbon, under the Arrange command, in the submenu Align. Look for the Grid settings. In that dialog, you can both make the grid visible and turn off the snapping behavior. Making the grid visible will make the behavior more obvious, and won’t affect the appearance of your slides when printing or presenting. However, turning off the snapping will allow you a little more freedom in where you place lines and shapes on your slide.

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A transition is a visual (and sometimes auditory) effect that plays during the switch from one slide to another. The most common transition is a fade, where the next slide begins as a black screen and then gradually displays. Similarly, in a push transition it appears as though the slide is being pushed onto the screen. PowerPoint 2007 comes with more than 50 pre­set transitions, and you can see them when you choose the Animations tab and click the More button in the Transition to This Slide group. Hover the mouse pointer over a transi­tion, and PowerPoint demonstrates the effect on the current slide.

Most transitions occur silently, and that’s as it should be for the vast majority of presenta­tions. However, there are times when you want a sound effect to accompany a particular transition, such as:

• A slide that announces a major new product or service might transition with a drum roll.
• A transition to a slide containing a photo might be accompanied by a camera shutter that clicks.
• The transition to the last slide in the presentation might merit an applause effect (if only to encourage your audience to follow suit).
• A presentation to young children might add a variety of sound effects-chimes, explo­sions, lasers, wind, and so on-to keep the youngsters engaged.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

There are quite many people out there who have multiple monitors attached to their computers. It seems that many of them are powerpoint users who think this new configuration (or luxury) should be more useful to them than it is. Well, they’re right, and now let me show you a simple technique to gain an advantage of using multiple monitors.

Since laptops are now just as powerful as most desktops, you can also take the benefit from using multiple monitors with your laptop. Do you have a left-over monitor from your previous system? Well, there you have it. Connect it to your laptop and taste the difference.
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If you add a shape, image, or other object to the Slide Master, it displays on all the presen­tation’s slides. This is a great way to add an image that’s common to all the slides, such as a logo, a project or department emblem, or a piece of clip art that relates to the presentation subject. However, you might find that the object isn’t appropriate on some slides. For example, you might want to use a certain background color or image on a particular slide, and the Slide Master object might clash with that background.

PowerPoint gives you three ways to remove a Slide Master object from an individual slide:

• To remove all the Slide Master images from the slide, display the slide, choose the Design tab, and then click to activate the Hide Background Graphics check box.
• To remove a single Slide Master object from a slide that uses a solid-color background, display the slide, and then choose Insert, Shapes, Rectangle. Draw the rectangle on the slide so that it completely covers the object you want to hide. You now need to use the following steps to format the rectangle:

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Each new PowerPoint presentation comes with a slide master that determines the overall look and layout of the presentation. If you change the slide master’s fonts, bullets, or theme, PowerPoint applies those changes to every existing slide as well as every new slide you add. You can also add images and text to the slide master, and those elements display on every slide. Working with the slide master is a great way to ensure a consistent design for your presentation, and all PowerPoint gurus should be comfortable using the Slide Master view (choose View, Slide Master).

However, a PowerPoint presentation is also populated with a number of layout masters, which are master slides that control the look and configuration of the various layouts that you can apply to your slides. There’s a Title Slide Layout master for title slides, and Title and Content Layout for title and content slides, and so on. To see these layout masters, choose View, Slide Master. As you can see in Figure 9.9, the layout masters are located below the Slide Master in the Navigation pane. In Figure 1, the Title Slide Layout is selected. Read the rest of this entry »

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