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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 »
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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.
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Using Clip Art Creatively |
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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:
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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).
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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.
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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).
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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).
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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).
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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 »
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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.
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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.
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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 »
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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:
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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.
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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 »
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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 »
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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Choose Office button 
Print Print Preview.
The Print Preview ribbon appears.
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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).
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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).
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When you’re satisfied, click Print.
The Print dialog box appears.
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Click OK.
PowerPoint prints your speaker notes.
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Optimization in PowerPoint means keeping file size as small as possible. Depending on the number of slides, images, sound clips, and animated effects you include in your presentation, you could be looking at a hundred-megabyte-plus PowerPoint file. That’s big enough to cause slow-downs and other glitches if you’re trying to deliver your presentation on a laptop. But if you plan to deliver your presentation over the Web or email it to each of your department heads for sign-off, it could very well bring your network (or your recipients’ virtual in-boxes) to their knees. Fortunately, you can pare down the size of your PowerPoint file by applying the strategies outlined in the following sections.
7.9.1. Go Easy on the Bling
Images and embedded sounds (specifically, .wav files) are the primary cause of PowerPoint file bloat. Use them if they’re the most effective way to communicate whatever it is you have to say. But if you can get the same point across using a couple of bullet points or an anecdote, do it.
7.9.2. Pare Down Objects Outside of PowerPoint
PowerPoint isn’t a jack-of-all trades programit doesn’t let you edit or optimize sound, video, or animation files. To rein in file size for these types of objects, you’ll need a specially designed program, like video- or image-editing software.
PowerPoint does let you compress images after you’ve added them to your slides. But you’re still better off optimizing your images in a program that’s specifically designed for working with images (such as Adobe Photoshop) before you add those images to your slides.
Read more »
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You have seen how to save presentations as self-running shows and Web pages. But PowerPoint lets you save your presentation in a ton more formats, includingnew to PowerPoint 2007PDF, XPS, and XML. You want to convert your presentation to one of the formats in Table 7-2 if, for example, you wanted to add thumbnails of your slides to a printed newsletter (in which case, save your slides as image files so you can work with them in a page-layout program).
Note: Before you can save your slideshows as PDF or XPS files, you first need to download and install a Microsoft PowerPoint add-in. You can find it by surfing to
www.microsoft.com/downloads and searching for PDF or XPS.
Table 7-2 gives you an overview of all the different file formats you can convert your PowerPoint presentation to without leaving the program; Table 7-3 describes the programs and PowerPoint add-ins you can buy that let you convert your presentation into Flash, Java, and video formats.
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In the best of all possible worlds, you might want to deliver every presentation in person, but it’s not always practical. Say, for example, you need to deliver a presentation to a team whose members are scattered all over the globe. Or say you’ve created a tutorial in PowerPoint that you want your audience to be able to access at its leisure, 24 hours a day. (For help deciding whether the Web is right for your presentationand vice versasee the box below.)
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When to Use the Web |
Sure, PowerPoint makes it easy to package up your presentation to deliver over the Web, but should you? Some presentations work well on the Web; others don’t. If you’re considering delivering your presentation over the Web, make sure that at least several of the following statements are true:
- Getting your audience together in the same room at the same time would be too difficult or expensive.
- Your audience is highly motivated to view your presentation. Without you there to guide them, an unmotivated audience might skip slides (or skip viewing your presentation altogether).
- Your slideshow is your presentation. Over the Web, your audience won’t see your body language, hear the excitement in your voice (unless you record voiceover narration), be able to participate in a face-to-face Q&A, or have handout material placed in their hands. If you presentation relies on any of these non-slideshow factors, rethink your delivery method.
- Your presentation is interactivein other words, you’ve peppered it with links and actions. Presentations like tutorials and quizzes are a good choice for Web delivery because audiences are familiar with the pick-and-click format.
- Your presentation doesn’t rely on images, animations or videos, link colors, or anything else that your audience can turn off in their Web browsers.
- Your presentation doesn’t contain top-secret content. While PowerPoint provides security options, nothing you put on the Web is safe from hackers.
- Your presentation is evergreen. The Web is a time- and cost-effective delivery method for presentations that are useful to multiple audiences over a long period of time, such as course content.
In cases like these, putting your presentation on the Web is the most efficient way to reach your audience, in part because virtually everyone already has a Web browser and knows how to use it. |
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