By admin
When you start with a blank presentation, advancing from one slide to the next is a simple on-or-off propositiona slide is either 100 percent visible, or 100 percent hidden. There’s nothing wrong with simple, but by applying a slide transitiona named effect that makes slide content fade, drop, swirl, or gallop into viewyou can convey a mood that supports your presentation (sobriety, sophistication, whimsy, and so on).
Note: Although PowerPoint lets you add slide transitions to individual slides, doing so can make your presentation look amateurish and disorganized. Instead, stick with the same slide transition to every slide. Doing so lets your audience focus on your content, not wondering which direction the next slide is going to come from.
1. Types of Transitions Read more »
By admin
It’s rare that you’ll want to use an image file or piece of clip art as-is. If nothing else, you’ll probably want to resize it or crop it to make it fit with the text and other elements on your slide. To be sure, PowerPoint isn’t Photoshop, so don’t expect editing miracles. In addition, your editing options are fewer when you use certain types of images (like photos) as compared to others (line-and-shape drawings you create in PowerPoint). Still, for most purposes you find PowerPoint’s editing options more than adequate.
| DESIGN TIME
Using Clip Art Creatively |
|
Clip art is convenient, but sometimes the problem is, well, it looks like clip art. If you want people to take your presentation seriously, you must avoid having your slides look like you plunked down the first cheesy stock image you found. PowerPoint doesn’t enforce good graphic design principles, but if you follow these no-fail tips, you can turn cheese into fromage:
-
Keep it small. Try to keep your clip art small and off to one side of the slide, leaving the bulk of the space for text, as shown in Figure 9-25 (top).
-
Make it transparent. Applying a 75% or higher transparency effect to backgrounds, clip art, and even the basic shapes you add to your slides lets text shine through. (See Figure 9-25, bottom). If you use clip art, you need to avoid hard-to-read-text sitting on a busy background.
-
Not everything has to line up. Sometimes, tilting an image just a little results in the rakish, attractive effect shown in Figure 9-26 (top).
-
Consider filled text boxes. Applying a contrasting fill color to your text boxes doesn’t just make text stand out; it also adds an appealing design element to your slides (Figure 9-26, top).
-
If all else fails, use contrasting text. If you’re using a strong, stylized image as a slide background, you can get away with pasting text on topas long as you use a bold, contrasting font and color as shown in Figure 9-26 (bottom).
|
Tip: The way you select, resize, reposition, rotate, and align pictures is the same way you modify the shapes and lines you draw directly onto a slide. But some formatting is picture-specific, and that’s the formatting this section acquaints you with: how to tweak a picture’s brightness, apply special effects, and more. Read more »
By admin
Instead of drawing your own image directly onto your slide, you can insert a scanned photo, digital picture, professionally drawn sketch, one of the stock images that come with Microsoft Office, or any other image you have stored on your computer.
 |
Figure 9-20. Because turning on snapping affects how PowerPoint lets you position objects when you’re dragging them, most folks tend to either hate it or love it. Turning on the “Snap objects to grid” affects object positioning even when the gridlines aren’t showing.
|
|
The upside of using a canned picture, of course, is that it’s easier than rolling your own. And depending on your artistic skills, the results could be more professional looking, too. The downside is that some folks are tempted to fill their presentations with generic imagesdollar signs, handshakes, spinning globes, and so onjust because they have access to them. Read more »
By admin
ust as you erase and redraw the sketches you make on paper, you can erase and redraw the drawings you add to your PowerPoint slides. This section shows you how to modify individual lines and shapes. The next section shows you how to layer, align, and group multiple lines and shapes.
9.2.1. Selecting Lines and Shapes
Before you can modify a shape or line, you first need to do one of the following:
-
Select a single shape or line, mouse over it until your cursor changes from a normal, single-headed arrow into a four-headed arrow; then click.
-
Select multiple shapes or lines, click the first shape or line to select it, and then hold down the Shift key as you click additional shapes and lines. Read more »
By admin
The Internet’s filled with photos and art you can use in presentations but sometimes you need a picture that’s so specific you need to sketch it yourself. Imagine you’re a defense attorney building a PowerPoint slideshow to present at trial, and you want to describe the route your client took from his desk to the bank vault. You can use stock images of desks, customers, and the bank vault, but you need to draw your own arrows to show your client’s route.
Or say you’re giving a presentation to management that explains why your department is over budget. You’ve created a chart that clearly shows the problem, but your audience (management, remember), needs things spelled out more clearly. You can use PowerPoint’s drawing tools to place a big red circle around the negative total. And, right where the chart shows your department’s performance taking a nosedive in October, draw a cartoon balloon with the words “Plant #2 burned down 10/15.” Read more »
By admin
Printing an outline version of your presentation is useful for the same reason as examining your presentation in Outline view is: It pares away all the formatting and lets you focus on the organization of your content, which is the heart of any good presentation. You might want to print an outline as a proofing tool, to help you double-check that you’ve included all the material you wanted to include. But you can also use a printed outline as a hard-copy backup of your presentation and even (in a pinch) as an audience handout.
To print an outline of your presentation, choose Office button 
Print Print Preview. From the “Print what” drop-down menu, choose Outline View (see Figure 8-7), and then send your outline to the printer.
 |
Figure 8-6. PowerPoint won’t automatically print speaker notes attached to hidden slides, so if you’ve hidden any slides but still want to see all of your speaker notes, make sure you turn on the radio box next to Print Hidden Slides in the Print dialog box shown in Figure 8-3.
|
|
 |
Figure 8-7. Instead of reading through all the text on each and every slide, try printing an outline of your spreadsheet to double-check that you’ve included all the important points you wanted to include in your presentation.
|
By admin
Speaker notes, are notes you can attach to any slide of your presentation to remind yourself of things you want to say but don’t want your audience to read, like “Remember to tell the joke about the priest, the rabbi, and the lawyer before you start this slide” or “Haul out the flip chart when you get to bullet #2.”
The last couple of posts shows how you can set up an extra computer screen to display your speaker notes while you’re running your presentation from your main computer. But in most cases, simply printing your speaker notes and keeping them with you while you give your presentation is sufficient.
To print speaker notes:
-
Choose Office button 
Print Print Preview.
The Print Preview ribbon appears.
-
From the Print What drop-down menu, choose Notes Pages.
The Notes pages you’ve attached to your slides appear in the Preview area (Figure 8-6).
-
To double-check your speaker notes, click Next Page and Previous Page (or use the scroll bars that appear next to the Preview area to flip through your notes pages).
-
When you’re satisfied, click Print.
The Print dialog box appears.
-
Click OK.
PowerPoint prints your speaker notes.
By admin
Overhead transparencies, also known as foils or just plain overheads, are see-through sheets of plastic you slap onto an overhead projector. In the old, pre-PowerPoint days, overheads (and chalkboards) were the only means folks had to deliver presentations. But even today, with PowerPoint 2007 at your disposal, you may have occasion to print your presentation onto overheads.
For example, imagine you’re on a plane, headed for the most important presentation of your entire career. You’re settling into a taxi when you discover you left your laptop in the airport terminal. When you get to the conference center, there’s not enough time to get your office to email a copy of the presentation and then wrestle it onto an unfamiliar computer. If the conference center has an overhead projector (most do) and you’ve got a stack of overheads in your briefcase, you’re golden. Read more »
By admin
In PowerPoint-ese, a handout is a printout designed to accompany your presentation. There are two major differences between printing handouts and printing slides: You can only print slides one per page, but you can print handouts anywhere from one to nine slides per page. Also, when you print handouts (even one slide per page), PowerPoint automatically adds a basic header and footer and leaves good-sized margins for note taking.
Theoretically, your audience can jot down notes on their handouts during your presentation and be left with useful information they can refer to days or weeks afterward. The problem with this theory is that most slides make terrible handoutsfor two reasons: Read more »
By admin
The most straightforward to way to print your presentation is to print each individual slide on a separate piece of paper. You can keep paper printouts in a file, bring them with you to the presentation as a failsafe, or use them to practice your spiel or proof your slides (some errors are easier to spot in plain black and white).
When you commit your slides to paper, you have a few extra decisions to make. For example, onscreen slides don’t usually have a footer with a page number and date, but that kind of information is mighty handy on a hard copy. You can also choose exactly which slides to print, whether to print in black and white or color, and more. The following tutorial walks you through all your options.
Tip: A super-fast way to print one slide per page is to select Office button Print Quick Print. But because choosing this option tells PowerPoint to begin printing immediatelywithout giving you a chance to inspect or change your print settingsyou probably don’t want to use it unless you’ve printed your presentation at least once following the steps in this section.
To print your slides: Read more »
