PowerPoint Tutorial

1. Beveled BoxesThis quick tutorial guides you through how to draw quick beveled boxes in all versions of Powerpoint. It's great for:

• Adding a quick professional touch to your presentations • Creating cool boxes that you can use on titles, section breaks and diagrams • Making your own style of boxes that you can re-use • Impressing your fellow powerpoint users

2. Text EffectsThis tutorial is more of a demonstration of what text effects can be achieved just by using standard powerpoint wipes. It's great for:

• Exhibition stand graphics to attract visitors • Conference openers (especially good with music) • Conference breakout screens • Divider or section headers in presentations • General presentation ideas

3. GraphicsThe graphics tutorial guides you through how to get the best from bitmap graphics for "On-screen" PowerPoint presentations. It's great for:

• Reducing the file size of power point presentations and hence keep them to a manageable size • Shrinking presentations from 10mb to 1mb • Speeding up the display of graphics • Speeding the loading and saving of presentations • Learning about all the common different graphic file formats • If you use a scanner or digital camera then this tutorial is for you

4. AnimationsThis tutorial is more of a demonstration of what cool custom animation effects can be achieved just by using the standard powerpoint 2002 / XP / 2003 wipes. The ideas explored are great for:

• Impressing your boss and influencing people • Exhibition stand graphics to attract visitors • Conference openers (especially good with music) • Conference breakout screens • Divider or section headers in presentations • General presentation ideas

5. TransparencyThe transparency tutorial guides you through how to use transparency in your presentations. How to create graphics that include transparency, and how to use powerpoints inbuilt transparency tool. It's great for:

• Removing that annoying white rectangle around your logo • Achieving effects you didn't know were possible • And generally making your presentation look more professional

6. LoopingThe looping tutorial guides you through how to link different powerpoint presentations together, but with the added advantage of being able to choose which presentations will loop continuously until you press the "Esc" key. It's great for:

• Having a looping presentation at the beginning of a show while the audience gets into a room. e.g. Advertisers logos looping until the presentation is ready to start

• Telling the audience when the presentations will start • Keeping all the different presentations separate and at a manageable size • Avoiding the annoying black screens in between presentations like you get with the list (.LST)

method using the powerpoint viewer • It doesn't require you to click on any hyperlinked buttons to call up any of the presentations,

just press the "Esc" key to stop the looping presentation. Simple!

7. MenuThis tutorial guides you through how to add an interactive menu in your own Power Point presentations. It's great for:

• Jumping to a "range" of slides and returning to the menu • Providing a menu for a live presentation, that presenters can control themselves • Learning about the "custom show" feature of powerpoint • Providing a great startup menu screen, so that people can interactively select what

presentations to view. It adds a very professional touch for post conference CDs • Giving your presentations more of a multimedia feel • And generally making your presentations look more professional

8. LinkingThe linking tutorial guides you through how to link different powerpoint presentations together. It may be used to work around some of the limitations of PowerPoint®. It's great for:

• Mixing presentations that use different templates / styles without all the slides getting badly mis-formatted

• Displaying several presentations in what appears to be one show • Keeping all the different presentations separate and at a manageable size • Avoiding the annoying black screens in between presentations like you get with the list (.LST)

method using the powerpoint viewer • The LOOPING tutorial explains how to loop certain presentations but not all of them! • It doesn't require you to click on any hyperlinked buttons to call up any of the presentations!

9. PowerPoint to VideoThis tutorial guides you through how to convert your Powerpoint presentations to a video file. Such as AVI, MOV, WMV etc. It's great for:

• Showing presentations without the need for powerpoint • Distributing your slideshows to friends and colleagues • Converting your powerpoint presentation to video file e.g. AVI MOV GIF • Converting your powerpoint presentation to streaming movie clip to show on the internet e.g.

WMV SWF RM • Converting your powerpoint presentation to an exe file • Packaging your presentation to a CD • Unattended exhibition presentations that automatically repeat/rewind • And generally making you look more professional

10. PowerPoint to DVDThis tutorial guides you through how to convert your PowerPoint presentations to play on a home dvd player. It's great for:

• Showing presentations without the need for a computer • Distributing your slideshows to friends and colleagues • Unattended exhibition presentations, that automatically repeat/rewind • Giving your presentations more of a TV feel • And generally making you look more professional

11. Powerpoint hints, tips and resources

1. Beveled boxesThis quick tutorial guides you through how to draw quick beveled boxes in all versions of Powerpoint. It's great for:

• Adding a quick professional touch to your presentations • Creating cool boxes that you can use on titles, section breaks and diagrams • Making your own style of boxes that you can re-use • Impressing your fellow powerpoint users

Quick Beveled Boxes in PPT

1 Start Powerpoint.

Open your slideshow, or create a New Blank Presentation.

These are the four easy steps you are going to do...

2 Make sure the 'snap on grid' is switched ON. The setting for the Snap-On-Grid is located on the Draw Menu. For powerpoint 97: Draw > Snap > To Grid For powerpoint 2002: Draw > Grid and Guides > Snap objects to grid

3 Draw a rectangle on your slide big enough to hold your text.If your rectangle has an outline color, give the shape no line color. Line Color > no line

4 Fill color > Fill Effects

5 Gradient > One Color > choose a nice mid bright color (eg. Navy Blue or Red)Tick Diagonal Up and choose the 1st Variant. Shown here with the red circle. Then click OK

6 Draw another rectangle on your slide, but this time draw it slightly smaller on top of the existing rectangle. The snap on grid will help you get the size just right

7 Choose the same fill colour, but this time tick the 2nd variant. Shown here with the yellow circle. Click OK

8 While the 2nd text box is still selected, Press F2 on your keyboard to enter your text. Just start typing.

9 Select the Color, font and align your text as normal

10 That's it. We told you it was quick

11 Experiment with other autoshapes, colors and fill types.

2. Text effectsThis tutorial is more of a demonstration of what text effects can be achieved just by using the standard powerpoint 97 / 2000 wipes. It's great for:

• Exhibition stand graphics to attract visitors • Conference openers (especially good with music) • Conference breakout screens • Divider or section headers in presentations • General presentation ideas

Theory:Theory? There is no theory to this tutorial just imagination!

Just download the sample file below, load the presentation into powerpoint and display it as a slideshow

Then if you like what you see just press the "Esc" key to stop the presentation. Go to a particular page and just see how we have done it. Then copy and paste the text into your own presentations.

Clever Tricks:We have only used one trick that is not available in the standard powerpoint package. See if you can spot it. We're not going to tell you how we achieved this!

The following assumptions were made for this tutorial:

• You are using powerpoint 97 or above. • This tutorial is best for "on-screen" presentations and not printed presentations • The same effects work if you are projecting your presentations using an LCD Projector

3. Graphics, bitmaps, scanning & digital camerasThis tutorial guides you through how to get the best from bitmap graphics for "On-screen" or projected PowerPoint® presentations. It's great for:

• Reducing the file size of presentations and hence keep them to a manageable size • Shrinking presentations from 10mb to 1mb • Speeding up the display of graphics • Speeding the loading and saving of presentations • Learning about all the common different graphic file formats • If you use a scanner or digital camera then this tutorial is for you • If you're asking "what's the best dpi for powerpoint" this tutorial is also for you

Theory:You can insert most types of graphics files into powerpoint.

• This tutorial deals with the type of graphics commonly called "bitmaps". These graphic files are all made up of dots. They can come from all sorts of places, digital camera, scanners, photo libraries & paint packages

• The other sort of graphic files are "vector" graphics, these commonly come from powerpoint clip-art or Corel Draw clip-art. This tutorial is not for this type of graphic

The tutorial is based on a using Photoshop as the graphics editor. But don't be put off by this, the principle is the same no matter what graphics software you use. It works with all the common graphics software such as:

• Photoshop• PaintShop Pro• Corel PhotoPaint• Microsoft Photo Editor

Basically you need to get the right quality of bitmap into powerpoint for an "on-screen" show.

Pixels:Pixels, dots, those little square that make up a bitmap image. This is the important thing. Remember the name. PIXELS. Forget anything else anyone has told you about "Dots Per Inch" or DPI or "Lines Per Inch" LPI. Forget DPI remember Pixels!

A computer screen is made up of pixels. The more pixels the better the quality.

MORE PIXELS = MORE QUALITYBut. . .MORE PIXELS = BIGGER FILES

Show me the MoneyTo see what quality or how many pixels your computer is set to:

• Right click on a blank area on your Windows Desktop • Select "Properties"

• Click the "Settings" tab along the top edge of the new window that popped up • The two important bits are "Screen area" and "Colors" (more on colors later)

The most common screen areas are (width x height):

640 x 480 VGA Low quality800 x 600 SVGA Think of this as a medium quality1024 x 768 XGA High quality, this is what we will use for this tutorialImagine that you have a scanned image that is 2000 pixels wide. If you display this image on a computer monitor (or project the image), that can only display 1024 pixels wide, then some of these pixels have got to go somewhere. They can either be cropped or lost!

You could quite easily insert this image into powerpoint and display it. Job Done! But....by doing this you're wasting PIXELS and making your files unnecessarily BIG. There are toooooo many pixels for the resolution of your computer.

So what we need to do is reduce the number of pixels that are in that image. But I hear you say "Pixels = Quality". Yes, that's true but if your computer (or projector) has 1024 pixels wide and you reduce the number of pixels in our image to 1024 . . .

THERE WILL BE NO LOSS OF QUALITY!The powerpoint files will be smaller!Sounds complicated? Then follow this step by step tutorial:What to aim forReducing the PixelsDigital CamerasPowerpoint - how to insert an imagePowerpoint - I've got a presentation that's too big how do I make it smallerScanningColour / ColorChange the picture to 256 ColoursGraphic File Formats

Step by Step Tutorial:

What to aim for:1 If your computer (or projector) is running at a resolution of 1024 pixels wide x 768 pixels tall,

then it's no point having any images with more pixels than this.

2 If you are going to be displaying the image full screen, i.e. occupying the whole page area in powerpoint, then aim for about 1000 pixels wide. Why 1000 and not 1024...it's easier to remember! Also it doesn't have to be exactly 1000 pixels, just over or just under, doesn't really matter.

If you are only showing a picture that will occupy half the width of the screen then half it. e.g. aim for about 500 pixels wide.

Landscape images:

3 If your particular image is "portrait" e.g. it's taller than it is wider, then aim for an image that is about 750 pixels tall, or for a half size image about 375 pixels tall.

Portrait images:

4 If your computer is set to a different resolution:

640 x 480 Aim for: 640 pixels wide for a full screen landscape image

480 tall for portrait

800 x 600 Aim for: 800 pixels wide for a full screen landscape image600 tall for portrait

Adjust these sizes if the image will appear smaller on the finished powerpoint "on-screen" page

Reducing the Pixels:To resize your bitmap pictures use your favourite graphics software. These instructions are for Photoshop

1 Load your image into Photoshop

2 Click on the "Image" menu

3 Select "Image Size" and adjust the "Width" size. The Height will adjust automatically.If the pixels numbers are grayed out then tick the "resample image" tick box.(In PaintShop Pro this is labelled "Re-size")

4 Then click OK

5 Save it as a .PNG (See graphic formats)

Digital Cameras1 Most cameras have a setting for resolution. Some common ones are

640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x960, 2048x1536Some cameras have a quality setting, this is normally just how much .JPG "compression" to apply. Generally the more compression the more information is lost with .JPG files.

2 Think pixels. Set it to 1024x768 as this is the closest to what you computer is set to.

3 If you are going to be cropping the images or you cannot get close enough to the subject when you take the picture, then set the resolution to something higher, so you can still crop the image but still end up with enough pixels.

4 Copy the images to your computer (see the instructions that came with your digital camera)

5 Manipulate them using your graphics software, applying the same principles as "What to aim for"

6 Save it as a .PNG (See graphic formats)

Powerpoint - How to insert an image1 First load up your presentation

2 Click on the "Insert" menu

3 Select "Picture", "From File..."

4 Navigate to where you image is located, and click on the filename. e.g. awesome-background.png

5 Click "Insert"

6 PowerPoint will insert the image slap bang in the middle of the page.Sometimes it will be too big and fill the screen (This is normally caused by too many pixels in the bitmap).

If it does this then click on the page zoom button and choose a really small number. You will then be able to zoom out to see the whole image.

7 To scale the image without distorting it, click and hold with the left mouse button on any one of the corner "handles" and drag the handle to re-size the image smaller or bigger.

If you want to distort the image then click and drag any of the side "handles"

8 If you want to manipulate the image further it's generally better to do it using your graphics software, e.g. Photoshop, PaintShop pro etc. But for some basic options you need the "Picture Toolbar". Right click the image and choose "Show Picture Toolbar"

9 The picture toolbar:

Starting from left to right:

1 A quick way to insert a picture from a file without going through all the menus2 Some pre-set tricks to alter the look of the image3 & 4 More/Less Contrast5 & 6 More/Less Brightness

7Crop tool.Tip: It's always better to crop the image using the original bitmap and your graphics software. Otherwise you're making your powerpoint file contain pixels you're not using

8 Add a border color9 Re-color image. Only works for images with 64 colors or less10 Pops up the "Format Picture" menu

11Sets a transparent color. Click this and then select one color in your bitmap, it will then appear see-through. Useful for making a bitmap not a rectangle. Tutorial all about transparency and transparent images in powerpoint

12 Resets the bitmap back to normal

10 By copying an image in powerpoint onto another page in the same presentation will not make your presentation filesize much bigger. So the more images you can re-use the better

11 Job Done!

Powerpoint- I've got a presentation that's too BIG how do I make it smaller?

1 Load the massive presentation

2 Make sure you're on the slide view

3 Press the PageDown (PgDn) key to advance through the presentation one slide at a time

4 If you notice one particular bitmap/picture/image takes a fraction of a second to display, then chances are this is the offending item. It's got TOO MANY PIXELS in it.

To make doubly sure this is the offending item. Display the "picture toolbar" and "Reset" the bitmap to its original size. If the bitmap is guilty it will reveal itself by growing to an enormous size, most probably off the page! If this is the case then continue....

5 First of all you need to get that bitmap out of powerpoint at the best quality, before we reduce the number of pixels in it

6 a) Select the imageb) Copy it to the clipboardc) Load up Microsoft Photo Editor (You may have to install it from the original powerpoint or Office CD)d) Click the "Edit" menu and click "Paste"e) Save it as a .PNG (see graphic formats)

7 Load up your favourite graphics software, Photoshop, PaintShop pro etc.Open the bitmap you saved using MS Photo Editor.Select the menu that displays how many pixels the image contains (info, image size etc)You will probably find that it contains lots and lots of pixels. ie. more than 600(See Reducing the Pixels)

8 Select the menu that will change the image size (re-size, re-sample, image size or similar)And make the number of pixels the correct amount. (See What to Aim for)

9 To make the presentation even small consider changing the bitmaps to 256 colors (see changing the pictures to 256 colors)

10 Save it as a .PNG (see graphic formats)

Scanning:Because we cannot show all the different scanning software screens. We'll tell you about it.

1 Put your photo/image etc on the scanner and do a preview using your scanning software

2 On most scanning software there is normally an option called resolution or Dots Per Inch/DPI. If you are lucky it will also show you how many PIXELS the image will contains

3 If your scanning software does not show you how many pixels the scan will be then you'll have to get the ruler out and do some basic maths

4 Before you scan it you need to adjust the "Resolution" or "DPI". As you adjust it hopefully the number of pixels displayed will also change

5 Another bit of theory. Lets say our original image on the scanner is 5 inches wide. We want to end up with an image about 1000 pixels wide, as we are going to fill the powerpoint screen with our scanned image

If we set the scanner to scan at 300 DPI (Think of it as Pixels Per Inch!) we will end up with a bitmap image that is 1500 pixels wide. Too many. ( 5 x 300 = 1500) (Physical size x DPI = pixels)

6 So set the scanner at 200 DPI. So for every inch we will end up with 200 pixels.(5 x 200 = 1000)

7 Draw around the image you require

8 Scan itWe should end up with an image that is 1000 pixels wide. Great for a full screen landscape image.

Tip: It's always better to scan the image at the correct pixel size in the first place, as re-sizing the image (especially bigger) will produce bad results

9 Save it as a .PNG (see graphic formats)

Colour / ColorIn the beginning there was only black & white. Then came 4 colors. Then there was 16 colors. Then 256 colors. Then 16,000 colors, Then 64,000 colors. Then 16 million colors. Then even more colors than the eye can see.

1 It's the same rules as pixels really. See what your computer is set to, then make your images the same. To see what your computer is set to by using the same method as finding out the resolution. (Click here if you missed it)

Numberof colors Name Comments

16 4 bit Don't even go there256 8 bit Awful for powerpoint, most old laptops will be set to 256 colors

65536 16 bit orHi-Color Probably the optimum setting for powerpoint presentations

16 million24 bit orTrue Color

Overkill - Looks great but it sure as hell slows things down

2 So if your computer is set to 16 bit color (the most common setting). Then reduce the number of colors in your images to the same number of colors. As you will not gain any quality advantage by having more colors in your images than the computer or projector can display.

Or you can take it a lot further...If filesize is crucial to your presentations then read on...

Change the pictures to use 256 colors.Commonly called "Indexed" or "8 bit" color

Reducing your graphics to use less colors will dramatically reduce the filesizes:We've had them reduced to 10% of their original size, but typically 40%And you will probably not notice any difference to the look of the images in powerpoint.It also speeds everything up, from display images with wipes, to loading and saving

1 Using Photoshop (or similar) open your image

2 Click on "Image"

3 Select "Mode", "Indexed color" and a menu will pop up.Make sure the Palette is set to "Adaptive", this makes Photoshop choose a set of 256 colors to best represent your image, so if your image is predominately red, then it will choose a nice set of red colors based on your image.

(In PaintShop Pro, this is under "Decrease color depth - 256 colors". Make sure the Palette is set to optimised)

4 Click "OK" and see what your image looks like.If it looks acceptable then save it as a .PNG (see graphic formats)

5 If the original picture contained lots of the same color e.g. a graduated blue, then probably the image now looks awful. Click on the "Edit" menu and choose "Undo"

Repeat from step 2, but this time change the "Dither" option to "Diffusion" and Click "OK"(In PaintShop Pro, this is called "Error Diffusion"Chances are your image will now look acceptable. Remember that powerpoint smoothes images out when they are inserted into it, so this will make the image look even better.

Save it as a .PNG (see graphic formats)

Graphic File FormatsThere's loads of them. We'll concentrate on the main ones. BMP.JPG.PNG.GIF

.PNG - Portable Network Graphic- Our Favourite for powerpoint. The BEST!- Does not lose any information- Works with all the different numbers of colors (256, 16 bit, 24 bit, grayscale)- A Compressed file (smaller filesize, especially 256 color files)- Widely compatible- Takes very little time to de-compress in powerpoint

.JPG - Joint Photographic Expert Group (Pronounced JAYPEG)- OK for powerpoint (even better for email and websites!)- Loses information. But you do have control when you save it how much information is lost- Only works with 24 bit colors (16 million)- A highly compressed file (very small files)- Widely compatible- Takes longer to de-compress in powerpoint than .PNGs - Also puts a higher load onto the processor to de-compress

.BMP - Windows Bitmap- OK for powerpoint (even better for windows wallpaper!)- Does not lose any information- Works with all the different number of colors- Can be compressed but not 24 bit colors. Very BIG files- Widely compatible- Very fast to load and display in powerpoint

.GIF - Graphics Interchange Format- OK for powerpoint (even better for web pages)- Loses information as it can only have a maximum of 256 colors- Only works with 256 colors- Compressed format- Widely compatible- Doesn't take anytime to de-compress as it's not compressed

Note: Although we recommend .PNG files throughout this tutorial, you can of course use any. We use .PNG because....well because....WE JUST DO - ALRIGHT!

The following assumptions were made for this tutorial:

• You are using powerpoint 97 or above. For powerpoint 2000 and XP the principle is the same except some of the menus will look slightly different.

• Photoshop 4.0 or PaintShop Pro 4.15 was used • All your presentations should have the page size set to "on-screen" • This tutorial is best for "on-screen" presentations and not printed presentations • The same rules apply if you are projecting your presentations using an LCD Projector.

See what resolution the projector can cope with and use this as a guide.

4. AnimationsThis tutorial is more of a demonstration of what cool custom animation effects can be achieved just by using the standard powerpoint 2002 / XP / 2003 wipes.Follow the journey of presentations from AtoZ. The ideas explored are great for:

• Impressing your boss and influencing people • Exhibition stand graphics to attract visitors • Conference openers (especially good with music) • Conference breakout screens • Divider or section headers in presentations • General presentation ideas

Theory:Theory? There is no theory to this tutorial, just our creative imagination!

Just download the sample file below, load the presentation into powerpoint 2002 / XP / 2003 and run the slideshow

Then if you like what you see just press the "Esc" key to stop the presentation. Go to a particular page and just see how we have done it. Then copy and paste the text into your own presentations.

Be amazed as you travel through the A to Z of powerpointing:• Animating • Attending • Autoshaping • Bouncing • Building • Counting • Distributing • Downloading • Editing • Educating • Exploring • Flipping

• Gripping • Hyperlinking • Inserting • Jumping • Keying • Linking • Listing • Moving • Navigating • Numbering • Organizing • Pack 'n' Going

• Projecting • Questioning • Running • Smiling • Sparkling • Talking • Uploading • Voting • Warning • X-Rating • Yawning • Zooming

You'll believe powerpoint can fly!The following assumptions were made for this tutorial:

• You are using powerpoint 2002 / XP / 2003 or above. • This tutorial is best for "on-screen" presentations and not printed presentations • The same effects work if you are projecting your presentations using an LCD Projector

5. Transparency optionsThis tutorial guides you through how to achieve transparent graphics in PowerPoint®

presentations. It's great for:• Removing that annoying white rectangle around your logo • Achieving effects you didn't know were possible • And generally making your presentation look more professional

Theory:You can insert most types of graphic files into powerpoint.

• This tutorial deals with the type of graphics commonly called "bitmaps". These graphic files are all made up of dots. They can come from all sorts of places, digital camera, scanners, photo libraries and paint packages

• The other sort of graphic files are "vector" graphics, these commonly come from powerpoint clip-art or Corel Draw clip-art. This tutorial is not for this type of graphic

The tutorial covers both Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro as the graphics editor. But don't be put off by this, the principle is the same no matter what graphics software you use. It works with all the common graphics software such as:

• Photoshop• Paint Shop Pro• Corel PhotoPaint

Transparency - What is transparency?:When you insert any type of bitmap graphic into powerpoint there are always four sides to the image. Sometimes you just want to see your logo or graphic without the background being visible. With transparency you can achieve this.

Powerpoint has two methods of using transparency:

• Method one (the easy one!) is to use powerpoint's inbuilt transparency icon. • Method two (the complicated one) is to include the transparency information (Alpha channels)

into the graphic file before it is imported into power point

Sounds complicated? Then follow this step by step tutorial:

Step by Step Tutorial:

Method One:The easy way - Part 1

1 In powerpoint, import your picture from a file, choose "Insert", "Picture", "From File"

2 PowerPoint will insert the image in the middle of the page.

3 Right click the image and choose "show picture toolbar", the following toolbar will appear:

Click the transparency button, number 13 on our list

4 Your pointer will now look like the transparency button itself. Click an area of the image that you want to make disappear. In this case we clicked on the slightly off white area around our logo.

5 Job done!

6 If on closer inspection, the image has some unwanted artifacts (furry edges!), around the image then continue to part two . . .

Method One:The easy way - Part 2

The unwanted artifacts are a result of something called "anti-aliasing". Anti-aliasing is a clever technique to make bitmaps appear smoother to the eye, than they really are. Which in most cases is fine, but in this case the anti-alias effect is smoothing to a background color of white. Our presentation has a background color of blue. So we need to make the image have a similar blue background to our powerpoint background before we insert it into power point.

1 Load your image into photoshop or paint shop pro or your favorite graphics package (pixel basher)

2a If the image is layered then simply select the background layer.Then go to step 3

2b If the image is not layered then you need to select the white background using whatever methods you are comfortable with. We tend to use the "Magic Wand Tool" to select areas of similar color. Just select the tool and click in the area you want to select.

In Photoshop we set the tolerance setting to 1 and the anti-alias option was turned ON in photoshop.In Paint Shop Pro we set the tolerance setting to 100 and the feather to 0.

Once you have the area selected you need to fill this area with a blue color . . .

3 How do you decide what shade of blue to use?The blue needs to match the overall, or predominant, background color in powerpoint. In photoshop or paint shop pro make your foreground color the blue you need.

eg. if your background fades from black (red,green,blue=0,0,0) to blue (rgb=0,0,255), then make your background color a midpoint between the two values (rgb=0,0,128). If your logo or bitmap graphic is going to go in the bottom right corner, then obviously make the blue as close to this color as possible. In this case it would need to be about 0,0,240.

One way of finding the exact blue is to display your presentation in powerpoint as a slideshow, do a screengrab with the "Print screen" key, then paste this image into photoshop or paint shop pro, then use the "Eyedropper" tool to find out what the color is.

4 To fill the area with blue color:Photoshop: Choose "Edit", "Fill" and make sure "foreground color" is selected and 100% opacity. Click "OK" to fill the selected areaPaint Shop Pro:Use the "Flood Fill" tool, with these settings. Tolerance = 200, Opacity = 100

It should now look like this

5 Save the image as a .png or .tif file (do not use .JPG). Flatten or Merge the image before saving if you still have more than one layer.

6 The image is now ready for importing into powerpoint. Repeat steps 1 through 5 of Part One above.

This time around any artifacts will be minimal.

Method Two:The hard way

This method creates bitmaps, with the transparency information already in them, before they go into powerpoint. This information is called an "alpha channel"

1 Load your image into photoshop or paint shop pro

2a If the image is layered then simply delete the background by dragging that layer into the wastebin

You should now see something similar to this.

Notice the checkerboard pattern, this is the transparent area. Photoshop users can go to step 4. Paint Shop Pro users go to step 2c.

2b Photoshop users only:If the image is not layered then you need to select the white background using whatever methods you are comfortable with. We tend to use the "Magic Wand Tool" to select areas of similar color. Just select the tool and click in the area you want to select.

In this case we set the tolerance setting to 1, and the anti-alias option was turned ON in photoshop.

Once you have the area selected you need to delete this area. But before you do delete it, check that your layer name is not called "Background" in italics.

If it is called "Background", then go to the "Layer" menu, choose "New", then "Layer from background". Failure to do this step will make your transparent areas the same color as your background color in photoshop.

Press the "delete" key on your keyboard. You should now see something similar to this.

Notice the checkerboard pattern. This is photoshops way of showing the transparent area.

2c Paint Shop Pro users only:If the image is not layered then you need to select the white background, if the image was layered then selected the transparent area. Use whatever methods you are comfortable with. We tend to use the "Magic Wand Tool" to select areas of similar color. Just select the tool and click in the area you want to select.

In this case we set the tolerance setting to 100 and the feather option to 0.

Once you have the area selected go to the "Selections" menu and choose "Invert".

Go to the "Selections" menu and this time choose "Save to alpha channel". Then click "OK" twice.

4 Save the image as a .png file (do not use .JPG). Do NOT Flatten the image in photoshop.

5 The image is now ready for importing into powerpoint.

6 Job done!

The following assumptions were made for this tutorial:

• You are using powerpoint 97 or above. For powerpoint 2000 and XP the principle is the same except some of the menus will look slightly different

• Photoshop 6.0 and Paint Shop Pro 7.0 was used • All your presentations should have the page size set to "on-screen" • This tutorial is best for "on-screen" presentations and not printed presentations

6. LoopingThis tutorial guides you through how to link different presentations together, but with the added advantage of being able to choose which presentations will loop continuously until you press the "Esc" key. It's great for:

• Having a looping presentation at the beginning of a show while the audience gets into a room. e.g. Advertisers logos looping until the presentation is ready to start

• Telling the audience when the presentations will start • Keeping all the different presentations separate and at a manageable size • Avoiding the annoying black screens in between presentations like you get with the list (.LST)

method using the powerpoint viewer • It doesn't require you to click on any hyperlinked buttons to call up any of the presentations, just

press the "Esc" key to stop the looping presentation. Simple!

Theory:This technique works by having what we will call a show presentation. The show presentation effectively calls up all the other linked presentations and then displays them. The trick is to have a common slide that is identical on all the presentations. The common slide must be the very first and last slide of all the linked presentations. The linked presentations can be using any template, it simply doesn't matter. When you display the show presentation, powerpoint will display the common slide (from the show presentation), when it has displayed the common slide, it will then load up the next linked presentation and display it automatically, again it will show the common slide. This is how it makes it seamless. You don't have to click any buttons on the screen. You don't have to stop the presentation and load up the next one. Sounds complicated? Then follow this step by step tutorial:

Step by Step Tutorial: 1 For this tutorial we will create a directory / folder on our computer called C:\Tutorials\Looping

2 Put all your presentations, for this project, in this directory. For this tutorial we will just have two presentations that we will link to, (Looping.ppt is the presentation that will loop, and linked01.ppt is the actual presentation) and our show presentation.

3 Using powerpoint, save one of your presentations as "Show01.ppt". This is the presentation that will call up all the other presentations.

4Make a common screen as the first slide in this presentation. You can delete any other slides, at this point, in this Show01.ppt presentation.It's important that any background images are actually on this page and not on the "slide master".

It's also important that this slide is using the layout called "blank", as this stops powerpoint from re-formatting your common slide when you paste it into other presentations. To apply the blank layout do thisFormat menu > Slide Layout > Content Layouts > Blank > Apply to select slides

5 Now for the clever stuff!Choose the Insert Menu,

Click on Object and the following will appear

6 Click on Create from file and the following will appear

7 Click on the "Browse" button and navigate to your first presentation that you want displayed when you run the show.

8 Click on your first presentation (in this case Looping.ppt) and click OK.

9 Click on "Link" and you should see the following

Note: The option to "link" is not available on the mac version of powerpoint. However, it is still possible to chain presentations together.

10 Click on "Display as icon" and then click the "OK" button

11 The following powerpoint icon will appear in the middle of your current slide

12 Click and drag the icon off to the edge of your slide area. You may have to zoom out (view menu > zoom) to see the blank area off the current page.

13 Add a note to yourself (or anyone else know may use this presentation), just use a regular textbox. Again position it off the edge of the screen, just above the powerpoint icon. For example:

14 You've successfully linked a presentation into your show presentation.

Now to tell powerpoint to display the linked presentation automatically.Right click the informative textbox and select "Custom Animation"

The powerpoint custom animation task pane will appear

15 Click on the "Add Effect" button, make the "Entrance" effect set to "Box".

16 Click on the "Start" drop down, change the "On Click" to "With Previous".

17 Right click the ppt icon, we added earlier, and select "Custom Animation"

18 Click on the "Add Effect" button, make the "Entrance" effect set to "Appear".

19 Click on the "Add Effect" button again, change the "Object actions" to "Show". This tells powerpoint to show the presentation

20 You should have 3 entries in the custom animation timeline. Select the 2nd entry (the green star - object 6 in our case) then click on the "Start" drop down, change the "On Click" to "After Previous".

21 Select the 3rd entry (the two gears - object 6) then click on the "Start" drop down, change the "On Click" to "With Previous". This tells powerpoint to automatically open and show your linked presentation without any user intervention.

22 To link in the rest of your presentations. Copy this slide by choosing the "Insert" menu, and select "Duplicate Slide". Delete the powerpoint icon at the edge of the screen. Then Repeat steps 5-21

23 For each linked powerpoint presentation you must add the "common" slide as the first and last slide. So powerpoint will display the same slide when it jumps from each linked presentation and back to the "show01.ppt" presentation.

24 To make your "looping" presentation actually loop:

Choose the "Slide Show" menu, click on "Set Up Show", make sure "Loop continuously until Esc" is ticked in the "show options" section.

Under "Advance Slides" tick "Use timings if present"

25 To tell powerpoint how long to display each of the looping slides:

Choose the "Slide Show" menu, click on "Slide Transition", Under the "Advance slide" settings, Tick "automatically after 00:05 seconds":

Typically about 5 seconds is long enough to display a logo.10 seconds for a couple of lines of text.15 seconds for a page full of text.

Make sure the "On mouse click" is ticked also. This will give you to option of advancing the slides using the keyboard or mouse if you so require.

Click "Apply to all slides" to make each of the looping slides dispay for 5 seconds.

Save It

26 Linking Tips

To display the actual show, all you need to do is load the file called "show01.ppt" and display it. Please note when you load the presentation powerpoint will display "this presentation contains links to other files - Do you want to update them"...Always choose "Update Links" to this question. Powerpoint will do the rest.

To stop the looping presentation just press "Esc" on the keyboard once and powerpoint will exit from the looping presentation back into show01.ppt. press the right cursor key/left mouse button to continue the presentation as you normally would and your into your next presentation.

Just use the mouse button or the right cursor key to move forward through the presentation. Remember that to move from a linked presentation to the next presentation you will have to click 3 times for powerpoint to display the next presentation.

The first click will move back to the "show01.ppt" presentationThe second click will move to the next slide in "show01.ppt", powerpoint will then automatically load the next presentation. So you may want to wait half a second before pressing for the 3rd click.The third click will move from the "common" slide in the linked presentation to the first real slide.

If your "common" slide has animations, that's OK, but the 1st slide in any linked presentations should be a 'static' version.

If you have any housekeeping slides, it makes sense to put them in the show presentation.

If the running order of the speakers gets changed at the very last minute, all your need to do, is move the linking slides in the Show presentation using the slide sorter, which takes all of 2 seconds.

If a particular presenter cuts short their presentation, pressing the Home or Esc key will make powerpoint go to the last slide in their presentation, which if you've followed the tutorial, will be the Common slide. So you can seamless quickly finish a presentation and the audience will never know the presenter forgot their last few slides

One last tip.... never set a link from a linked presentation back to the linking presentation, instead set the action to "End show". Otherwise you will have more than 2 presentations open at the same time, and that's very bad!

The following assumptions were made for this tutorial:

• You are using powerpoint 2002 (aka XP) or above. Powerpoint versions 97 2000 looping tutorial

• All your presentations should have the page size set to "on-screen". • You have your presentations already made. • You can put your presentations in any folder you like, but to be on the safe side it's best if you

replicate the directory structure on any computer you transfer the presentations to. • You can use filenames longer than the 8.3 convention

7. MenusThis tutorial guides you through how to add an interactive menu in your own PowerPoint®

presentations. It's great for:• Jumping to a "range" of slides and returning to the menu • Providing a menu for a live presentation, that presenters can control themselves • Learning about the "custom show" feature of powerpoint • Providing a great startup menu screen, so that people can interactively select what presentations

to view. It adds a very professional touch for post conference CDs • Giving your presentations more of a non-linear or multimedia feel • And generally making your presentations look more professional

Theory:Any object (text, boxes, pictures, graphs etc) in powerpoint can have what's called an "action" applied to it. An "action" is just an instruction for powerpoint to do something when someone clicks on a that object.

For example:• Jump to the last slide• Go back one slide• Go back to the last slide "viewed"• stop the presentation• etc etc.

The tutorial is broken down into two "Methods"

Method OneUsing this technique all the individual slides stay in one presentation. You then tell powerpoint that certain slides should be grouped together to form a custom show (or a range of slides), the menu then jumps to named "custom shows", then returns back to the menu

Method one is best for: • Shorter presentations • All the slides using the same slide master or template • The number of slides in each presentation will not change often

Method TwoUsing this technique all the individual presentations stay as separate files. You then tell powerpoint to jump (link) to a certain named presentation from your menu

Method two is best for: • Longer (individual) presentations • Presentations that do not adhere to one slide master for all the slides, so you can use multiple

templates • When the number of slides in each presentation will change frequently

• Providing a menu for a live presentation, that presenters can control themselves • Providing a great startup menu screen, so that people can interactively select what presentations

to view. It adds a very professional touch for post conference CDs

Both methods make use of powerpoint action settings . . .Sounds complicated? Then follow this step by step tutorial:Creating the interactive menu (for both methods)Method OneMethod TwoDownload the Tutorial

Step by Step Tutorial:

Creating the Menu:Read this for both methods

1 Remember that any object can have an "action" assigned to it. Create your menu with this in mind.

2 If you will be using method one, then make your menu slide in the same presentation as all your other slides. It makes sense to have the menu before your custom shows

If you will be using method two then your menu slide will be an individual slide in an individual .ppt file.

3 Here we have a menu slide with 4 options to choose from.

4 To create the menu slide we used the "Title Only" layout

We entered the title of "Menu"

5 Then we added 4 separate text objects, asking powerpoint to automatically distribute them vertically using this little known button

See make your own toolbar

That spaces them out nicely

6 Next we added 4 buttons to the left of the text. We've used round graphic images, but you can use anything. The easiest thing to use is either text or an "autoshape". These buttons will be assigned an "action" to make them interactive. When we've finished, anyone clicking on the relevant button during a slideshow, will tell powerpoint to jump to a particular section or presentation.

Again we ask powerpoint to automatically distribute them vertically.

Method One:Custom shows

1 Assuming you have already created your menu slide, you now need to define the slides that make up each custom show (Think of each custom show as "a section" if it helps you)

2 Probably the easiest way to define each custom show (section) is to switch to the slide sorter view of powerpoint by clicking this button to show the slide miniatures

The slide sorter view will help you locate what slides are in which section

3 Click on the "Slide Show" menu, and select "Custom Shows"

4 Click on "New..." to create your a custom show (or section)

5 Change the wording "Custom Show 1" to something more meaningful

We've called ours "History"

6 Next tell powerpoint what slides make up this custom show (or section) called History

You do this by clicking on the slide titles in the left hand list. Click the "Add" button for each slide you want to add to this custom show (or section). It makes life easier if your slides are in sequential order in the first place.

7 Click OK when you have finished adding all the slides that make up your first custom show (or section)

8 Repeat from step 4 for all the sections you will need to create. In our case we made four custom shows. We named them History, Heart, Pregnancy and Future

9 Click "Close" when you have finished creating all your custom shows

10 Go to your menu slide that you created earlier. Right click the first button and choose "Action Settings"

Here you can tell powerpoint what happens when the mouse clicks on an object, or when the mouse moves "over" an object.

11 You can set other options on this menu also, such as...getting powerpoint to "highlight" the button when the option has been clicked, or playing a sound when the object is clicked. Both of these options provide good feedback to the user. It's important to provide feedback so the operator knows a) the button is interactive and b) they've clicked it.

We've chosen to both highlight a click and play a small .wav sound file

12 We click "Hyperlink to:" and choose "Custom Show..."

13 Power Point should list all your custom shows that you created earlier. Click the section name that you want to associate with this button. In our case it's "history".

14 Very important step....tick the "Show and return" option. This tells powerpoint to show this custom show, then when it's finished return from where it came. In our case it jumps back to our menu.

15 Repeat from step 10 for all your buttons.

16 A nice feature for the presentation would be to add a button on each slide that allows you to jump back to the main menu at any time. This is easily done by adding a button on each slide, right clicking it, then choosing "action settings"

17 This time we tell powerpoint to "Hyperlink to:" a particular "Slide..."

18 Select your MENU slide and click OK

19 Our final touch is to add a "quit" or "exit" button on our main menu slide.

Clicking this quit button on our main menu slide will stop the presentation

20 We give this the action of "End Show", by right clicking the quit button and choosing "action settings"

21 Save your presentation and test it. Each button should jump to a different custom show and then return to the menu slide, when that presentation finishes, you click the "menu" button, or you press the "Esc" key.

Method Two:Linking to a separate presentation

1 Put all your separate presentations, that you will be linking to, all in the same folder (directory)e.g. C:\mywork\presentations\This is best done with Windows Explorer. The reason to put all the .ppt files in the same folder is to save complications later, particularly if you transfer this presentation to a CD or another PC.

2 Go to your menu slide that you created earlier. Right click the first button and choose "Action Settings"

Here you can tell powerpoint what happens when the mouse clicks on an object, or when the mouse moves "over" an object.

3 You can set other options on this menu also, such as...getting powerpoint to "highlight" the button when the option has been clicked, or playing a sound when the object is clicked. Both of these options provide good feedback to the user. It's important to provide feedback so the operator knows a) the button is interactive and b) they've clicked it.

We've chosen to both highlight a click and play a small .wav sound file

4 We click "Hyperlink to:" and choose "Other PowerPoint Presentation..."

5 Navigate to where your presentation is, that you want to jump to, with this button

Click the filename, then click OK. In our case we want to link to the "history.ppt" presentation. Click OK

6 After you click OK, a new menu will pop up, asking you what individual slide do you want to jump to when you jump to your linked presentation

To keep things simple, it's better to always jump to the first slide. In our case "The history of smoking"

7 Repeat from step 2 for all your buttons.

8 During a slideshow, if you click any of our interactive buttons, powerpoint will display whatever presentation we have told it to, over the top of our main menu. Our menu is always there in the background. It does this seamlessly. The audience never get to see you loading another presentation by hand. Very professional.

9 A nice feature for the presentation would be to add a button on each slide that allows you to jump back to the menu at any time. This is easily done by adding a button on each slide (in the linked presentations). Right click the button, then choose "action settings"

10 This time we tell powerpoint to "Hyperlink to:" - "End Show"

So what is really happening here is that you click a button on your menu. Power Point jumps to another presentation. If you click the "menu" button, then powerpoint will "End Show", or in other words "Quit back to where it came from". In our case it will return to the menu.

11 Our final touch is to add a "quit" or "exit" button on our main menu slide.

12 We give this the action of "End Show", by right clicking the quit button and choosing "action settings"

Clicking this quit button on our main menu slide will stop the presentation

13 Save your presentation and test it. Each button should jump to a different presentation (powerpoint file) and then return to the menu slide, when that presentation finishes, you click the "menu" button, or you press the "Esc" key.

Experiment with different "hyperlink to" settings. You can mix and match jumping to custom shows and other powerpoint presentations. You can even hyperlink to other programs by using the "Other file" option. Or you can hyperlink to webpages on the internet by using the "hyperlink to" "URL".

A word of warning.....try not to interlink presentations to each other, as not only will powerpoint get confused, but you will also. You could end up with more than 2 presentations, in slideshow mode, both running at the same time....This is not good!

The following assumptions were made for this tutorial:

• You are using powerpoint 97 or 2000. For powerpoint XP the principle is the same except some of the menus will look slightly different

• You have a basic knowledge of powerpoint • All your presentations should have the page size set to "on-screen"

8. LinkingThis tutorial guides you through how to link different presentations together. It may be used to work around some of the limitations of PowerPoint®. It's great for:

• Mixing presentations that use different templates / styles without all the slides getting badly mis-formatted

• Displaying several presentations in what appears to be one show • Keeping all the different powerpoint files separate and at a manageable size • Avoiding the annoying black screens in between presentations like you get with the list (.LST)

method using the powerpoint viewer • The LOOPING tutorial explains how to loop certain presentations but not all of them! • It doesn't require you to click on any hyperlinked buttons to call up any of the presentations!

Theory:This technique works by having what we will call a show presentation. The show presentation effectively calls up all the other linked presentations and then displays them. The trick is to have a common slide that is identical on all the presentations. The common slide must be the very first and last slide of all the linked presentations. The linked presentations can use any template, it simply doesn't matter. When you display the show presentation, powerpoint will display the common slide (from the show presentation), when it has displayed the common slide, it will then load up the next linked presentation and display it automatically, again it will show the common slide. This is how it makes it seamless. You don't have to click any buttons on the screen. You don't have to stop the presentation and load up the next one. You don't have to toggle between presentations. Sounds complicated? Then follow this step by step powerpoint tutorial:

Step by Step Tutorial: 1 For this tutorial we will create a directory / folder on our computer called

C:\Tutorials\Linking

2 Put all your presentations, that you want to link together, in this directory. For this tutorial we will just have two presentations that we will link to, and our show presentation.

3 Using powerpoint, save one of your presentations as "Show01.ppt". This is the presentation that will call up all the other presentations.

4 Make a common screen as the first slide in this presentation. You can delete any other slides, at this point, in this Show01.ppt presentation.It's important that any background images are actually on this page and not on the "slide master".

It's also important that this slide is using the layout called "blank", as this stops powerpoint from re-formatting your common slide when you paste it into other presentations. To apply the blank layout do thisFormat menu > Slide Layout > Content Layouts > Blank > Apply to select slides

5 Now for the clever stuff!Choose the Insert Menu,

Click on Object and the following will appear

6 Click on Create from file and the following will appear

7 Click on the "Browse" button and navigate to your first presentation that you want displayed when you run the show.

8 Click on your first presentation (in this case Linked01.ppt) and click OK.

9 Click on "Link" and you should see the following

Note: The option to "link" is not available on the mac version of powerpoint. However, it is still possible to chain presentations together.

10 Click on "Display as icon" and then click the "OK" button

11 The following powerpoint icon will appear in the middle of your current slide

12 Click and drag the icon off to the edge of your slide area. You may have to zoom out (view menu > zoom) to see the blank area off the current page.

13 Add a note to yourself (or anyone else know may use this presentation), just use a regular textbox. Again position it off the edge of the screen, just above the powerpoint icon. For example:

14 You've successfully linked a presentation into your show presentation.Now to tell powerpoint to display the linked presentation automatically.Right click the informative textbox and select "Custom Animation"

The powerpoint custom animation task pane will appear

15 Click on the "Add Effect" button, make the "Entrance" effect set to "Box".

16 Click on the "Start" drop down, change the "On Click" to "With Previous".

17 Right click the ppt icon, we added earlier, and select "Custom Animation"

18 Click on the "Add Effect" button, make the "Entrance" effect set to "Appear".

19 Click on the "Add Effect" button again, change the "Object actions" to "Show". This tells powerpoint to show the presentation

20 You should have 3 entries in the custom animation timeline. Select the 2nd entry (the green star - object 6 in our case) then click on the "Start" drop down, change the "On Click" to "After Previous".

21 Select the 3rd entry (the two gears - object 6) then click on the "Start" drop down, change the "On Click" to "With Previous". This tells powerpoint to automatically open and show your linked presentation without any user intervention.

22To link in the rest of your presentations. Copy this slide by choosing the "Insert" menu, and select "Duplicate Slide". Delete the powerpoint icon at the edge of the screen. Then Repeat steps 5-21

23 For each linked powerpoint presentation you must add the "common" slide as the first and last slide. So powerpoint will display the same slide when it jumps from each linked presentation and back to the "show01.ppt" presentation.

24 Save It

That's it!

Linking Tips

To display the actual show, all you need to do is load the file called "show01.ppt" and display it. Please note when you load the presentation powerpoint will display "this presentation contains links to other files - Do you want to update them"...Always choose "Update Links" to this question. Powerpoint will do the rest.

Just use the mouse button or the right cursor key to move forward through the presentation. Remember that to move from a linked presentation to the next presentation you will have to click 3 times for powerpoint to display the next presentation.

The first click will move back to the "show01.ppt" presentationThe second click will move to the next slide in "show01.ppt", powerpoint will then automatically load the next presentation. So you may want to wait half a second before pressing for the 3rd click.The third click will move from the "common" slide in the linked presentation to the first real slide.

If your "common" slide has animations, that's OK, but the 1st slide in any linked presentations should be a 'static' version.

If you have any housekeeping slides, it makes sense to put them in the show presentation.

If the running order of the speakers gets changed at the very last minute, all your need to do, is move the linking slides in the Show presentation using the slide sorter, which takes all of 2 seconds.

If a particular presenter cuts short their presentation, pressing the Home or Esc key will make powerpoint go to the last slide in their presentation, which if you've followed the tutorial, will be the Common slide. So you can seamless quickly finish a presentation and the audience will never know the presenter forgot their last few slides

One last tip.... never set a link from a linked presentation back to the linking presentation, instead set the action to "End show". Otherwise you will have more than 2 presentations open at the same time, and that's very bad!

The following assumptions were made for this tutorial:

• You are using powerpoint 2002 (aka XP) or above. Powerpoint versions 97 2000 linking tutorial

• All your presentations should have the page size set to "on-screen". • You have your presentations already made. • You can put your presentations in any folder you like, but to be on the safe side it's best if you

replicate the directory structure on any computer you transfer the presentations to. • You can use filenames longer than the 8.3 convention

9. Convert powerpoint to video fileThis tutorial guides you through how to convert your Powerpoint presentations to a video file. Such as AVI, MOV, WMV etc. It's great for:

• Showing presentations without the need for powerpoint • Distributing your slideshows to friends and colleagues • Converting your powerpoint presentation to video file e.g. AVI MOV GIF • Converting your powerpoint presentation to streaming movie clip to show on the internet e.g.

WMV SWF RM • Converting your powerpoint presentation to an exe file • Packaging your presentation to a CD • Unattended exhibition presentations that automatically repeat/rewind • And generally making you look more professional

This tutorial is not about recording your powerpoint to a DVD videoThis tutorial is not about recording your powerpoint to a VHS video

Theory:Powerpoint shows your presentation on-the-fly, by this we mean it assembles each screen from the objects you have chosen each time you show the slideshow. For example a bullet list building up line by line, waiting for a mouse click between each build up. A video file however is assembled in one go and generally plays from start to finish, at a set rate or time, and with no user intervention. This tutorial will show you how to convert your powerpoint presentations to a video file in 2 easy steps.

Step One - Capture the slideshowMost powerpoint slideshows have movement and animation. We want to preserve this animation on the video. For this we will use a product called Camtasia to grab the slideshow and save it to a video file. You can read more about all the software we have used at the end of this tutorial.

Step Two - ConversionThe original capture of your slideshow will always be an AVI video file. Step Two shows you how to convert your AVI to other formats or sizes. For this we will use Camtasia Producer

Please Note:We do not make, sell or support, the Camtasia or Nero software, we just wrote this tutorial to help powerpoint users.

Optimizing your computer before you start:To get the best results from Camtasia while grabbing your slideshow, keep these points in mind:

• Turn off any software you have running in the background. e.g. Virus checkers. Pressing Ctrl-

Alt-Del will show you what is running. • Run Scandisk and Defrag (Programs > Accessories > System Tools) • Turn off something called "graphics hardware acceleration". Click here for details • Make sure your graphics card "drivers" are the most up-to-date • Read the camtasia FAQ pages • For specific questions regarding camtasia studio please use the companies support forum • Do the capturing on your quickest PC

Step 1: CaptureStep 2: ConversionCreating an exe fileThe software used and tips to get the best results

Step by Step Powerpoint to Video Tutorial:

Step 1: Capture (powerpoint to avi)With video and streaming files there is always a trade off between quality and speed. Better quality = slower speed & bigger filesizes. Choose the best quality and things will slow down.

So without getting too technical we suggest setting your computer to a quality (resolution) of 800x600 pixels. We feel 800x600 will be fine for most projects...

1 Change the desktop resolution to 800x600 by right clicking a blank area of your desktop, choose "Properties".

2 Click the "Settings" tab, then move the "Screen Area" slider to 800x600 pixels.

3 Change the "Colors" to your highest setting. Ideally set it to (True Color) 32bit, 24bit will also work. Click "OK". Then follow your particular on-screen instructions to finish changing the desktop resolution

4 Start Powerpoint.

Open your slideshow. We recommend having a totally blank first and last slide, or a slide that follows your template but with no content.

5 Select the "Insert" menu and choose "New Slide", select the "Blank" Layout from the "slide layout" on the right of your screen.Then go to your current last slide by holding down the "CTRL" key then press "End".

Then repeat step 5 to add a new last slide.

6 Go back to your first slide (CTRL-Home), and select the "slideshow" menu, and choose "Slide Transition", make sure that "On mouse click" is ticked.

This will make the first slide pause before we start capturing our slideshow.

Then save your presentation. "File" > "Save"

7 To give your PC less to do while capturing your slideshow save your presentation as a "presentation show"...

Select the "File" menu, choose "Save As...."

Change the "Save as type" to "powerpoint show (.pps)". Click "Save"

Quit out of powerpoint.

8 Now we are ready to capture the slide show. Start Camtasia Recorder. Check that it is set to record the "screen" by selecting the "Capture" menu, choose "Input" and select "Screen".

9 This step is optional, but we found it gave much better results with our particular presentation.In Camtasia Recorder, click "Tools", then "Options", click the "AVI" tab along the top. On this page turn off "Auto Configure". Set the frames/sec to 10.0

Click "Video Setup". Untick "Key Frame Every 80 frames". Click OK.

Click the "Program" tab, Then tick "Boost priority during capture". Click OK.

10 Navigate to your powerpoint show (the .pps file from step 7) using windows explorer or "my computer".

Double click your file e.g. mypres.pps

11 The 1st slide will be displayed until you press a key to move on to the next slide.Tip: We got better results if we went through the presentation once, before doing the actual capture. This allowed the PC to cache the presentation in its memory.

12 When you press F9 Camtasia Recorder will start recording everything that happens on the screen. When you are ready, press F9, then press the space bar to start your presentation proper.

13 If your presentation is set to wait for a mouse click to move through each slide, remember to give the audience time to read each slide, before pressing the space bar to move to the next slide. One way of doing this is to read the slide out aloud.

14 When you reach your last blank slide, Press F10 to tell Camtasia Recorder to stop recording. You will be prompted to save the captured slideshow, so choose a directory and enter a filename.

Click "Save". Camtasia will save your capture as an .AVI file.

15 That's it for Step One. We told you it was easy!

If you are only ever going to play this captured video clip on the same computer, then you can stop now. Your Finished. If not, continue with Step two...

Step 2: Conversion1 Start Camtasia Producer

2 Using the "File Explorer" of producer, navigate to where you saved your original captured AVI file

When you click on the correct directory, producer will show small icons that represent the 1st frame of your video clip.

3 Drag and drop the small icon to the "Storyboard" area of producer (looks like a filmstrip).

4 If you want to add any kind of soundtrack or music to your video clip, this is the time to do it. Right click the video clip in the storyboard, and choose "Open in Video Editor"

Click the "Show Timeline" button

Right click on the "audio" area of the timeline and choose "Insert Audio"

Then navigate to your existing sound file (wav), select it, click "Open". You may have to use an audio editor to adjust the length of your music.

5 Click the "File" menu, choose "Produce Movie"

6 Click the small "down triangle" to choose what video format you would like to make.

You can choose from avi, swf, gif, camv, rm, mov and wmv

7 Click the "Directory browse" button to choose where to save your video file

8 Navigate to a directory, in this case "powerpoint-to-video". Then type in a filename. e.g. Converted-AVI-file

9 Click the "Options" button. The last 3 tabs along the top "Size - Info - Watermark" stay the same no matter what video type you choose. The 1st tab changes depending what video type you choose, in this case it's AVI. It has all the settings unique to this video type.

The options for AVI files, include color, frame rate and audio settings.

10 Click "Video Setup". This screen is very important for AVI files. Choose the wrong codec and chances are other people will not be able to view your video file.

We recommend using the "TechSmith Screen Capture Codec" for the ultimate quality (see later for creating an exe). Choose "Cinepak Codec by Radius" for maximum compatibility but results in a reduced visual quality

Click "OK"

11 Click the "Size" button. On this screen you can choose to

- Keep the video the same size- Choose from standard sizes- Or re-scale the clip to any other size

Please see the tips at the end of this tutorial for scaling tips

Click OK

12 When you are happy with all the options click the "Produce" button. Camtasia Producer will then convert your captured slideshow to your chosen format.

This is the process we like best, as it takes time, so that means it's coffee time!

13 That's it! Experiment with different formats and settings.

14 View an example file that was saved as a flash file (swf)

This section is for creating an EXE file only1 Start Camtasia Producer

2 Click the "File" menu, and choose "Pack and Show"

3 Choose your video clip that you want to turn into an exe in the 1st box

Producer will automatically call the exe file same name in the 2nd box

4 Click "Next", this next screen is very important

If you choose to use the "default player" then you should always tick "install TSCC codec", otherwise when people go to view your powerpoint video clip, it may not show.

5 Click "Next", Click "Finish" after choosing your options,

6 Producer will then create the exe file for you. It's normally pretty quick, so no coffee at this point.

We used the following software:This is a list of the software we used in putting a powerpoint presentation on to a video. Although you can use other software for the capturing and conversion.

• Powerpoint 2002 / XP by Microsoft(More details)

• Camtasia by TechSmith(More details - 30 day demo available for download)

We particularly wanted to preserve the animations and wipes in powerpoint, that's why we opted for Camtasia.

We also looked at a product called TMPGEnc This software can convert the original camtasia capture to MPEG1 MPEG2 SVCD and VCD formats

See these pages from the techsmith site that will help you with your audioRecording audio - Great soundOr add your sound or music using camtasia producer after you have captured the video

Optimizing your presentations for video files:The playback computer for your video files may not be as fast as yours, or have the same resolution, therefore keep the following in mind

• Avoid capturing at a higher resolution than will be shown on the target machine (e.g. don't grab at 1024x768 to show on a 800x600 PC)

• The original captured video file will always scale down better than scaling up when re-saving as other formats

Optimizing your presentations for streaming internet files:The target audience for your streaming video files may not have an internet connection as fast as yours, therefore keep the following in mind

• The smaller the filesize the better for streaming files. Things you can do to keep the filesize smaller include keep your backgrounds one solid color, avoid unnecessary animations

• Avoid very small text. Aim for no smaller than 30 point font sizes • Avoid very thin lines. Aim for at least 3 point line sizes • Avoid very skinny / lite / thin / serif fonts. Aim for Arial (sans-serif), bold and black weights

10. Convert powerpoint to dvdThis tutorial guides you through how to convert your PowerPoint presentations to play on a home dvd player. It's great for:

• Showing presentations without the need for a computer • Distributing your slideshows to friends and colleagues • Unattended exhibition presentations, that automatically repeat/rewind • Giving your presentations more of a TV feel • And generally making you look more professional

Theory:You would think that you could just write your powerpoint file to a DVD and it would just work. We're sorry to report that's not the case. But we're pleased to report that it's not that difficult. This tutorial will show you how to put your powerpoint presentations on to a dvd in 3 easy steps.

Step One - CaptureMost powerpoint slideshows have movement and animation. We want to preserve this animation on the dvd. For this we used a product called Camtasia to grab the slideshow and save it to a video file. You can read more about all the software we have used at the end of this tutorial.

Step Two - ConversionWithout getting too technical, your PC runs at a certain resolution (or quality), DVD's run at another resolution. Therefore we need to convert the captured video file to DVD quality. For this we will use a product called Nero Vision Express. We will create a nice DVD menu at the same time.

Step Three - Writing the DVDWe've capture the slideshow, converted it to DVD resolution, created a nice DVD menu, now all that is left is to write (burn) the DVD disc.

Please Note:We do not make, sell or support, the Camtasia or Nero software, we just wrote this tutorial to help powerpoint users.

Optimizing your computer before you start:To get the best results from Camtasia while grabbing your slideshow, keep these points in mind:

• Turn off any software you have running in the background. e.g. Virus checkers. Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del will show you what is running.

• Run Scandisk and Defrag (Programs > Accessories > System Tools) • Turn off something called "graphics hardware acceleration". Click here for details • Make sure your graphics card "drivers" are the most up-to-date

• Read the camtasia FAQ pages • For specific questions regarding camtasia studio please use the companies support forum • Do the capturing on your quickest PC

Step 1: CaptureStep 2: ConversionStep 3: Writing the DVDThe software used and tips to get the best results

Step by Step Powerpoint to DVD Tutorial:

Step 1: CaptureAs mentioned in step 2 above, dvd has a resolution of 720x480. So we need to capture our slideshow at a similar resolution. In our case 800x600 is a close match to capture at, as we cannot set our PC to 720x480. Also 800x600 will scale down better than 640x480 will scale up.

1

Change the desktop resolution to 800x600 by right clicking a blank area of your desktop, choose "Properties".

2 Click the "Settings" tab, then move the "Screen Area" slider to 800x600 pixels.

3 Change the "Colors" to your highest setting. Ideally set it to (True Color) 32bit, 24bit will also work. Click "OK". Then follow your particular on-screen instructions to finish changing the desktop resolution

4 Start Powerpoint.

Open your slideshow. We recommend having a totally blank first and last slide, or a slide that follows your template but with no content.

5 Select the "Insert" menu and choose "New Slide", select the "Blank" Layout from the "slide layout" on the right of your screen.Then go to your current last slide by holding down the "CTRL" key then press "End".

Then repeat step 5 to add a new last slide.

6 Go back to your first slide (CTRL-Home), and select the "slideshow" menu, and choose "Slide Transition", make sure that "On mouse click" is ticked.

This will make the first slide pause before we start capturing our slideshow.

Then save your presentation. "File" > "Save"

7 To give your PC less to do while capturing your slideshow save your presentation as a "presentation show"...

Select the "File" menu, choose "Save As...."

Change the "Save as type" to "powerpoint show (.pps)". Click "Save"

Quit out of powerpoint.

8 Now we are ready to capture the slide show. Start Camtasia Recorder. Check that it is set to record the "screen" by selecting the "Capture" menu, choose "Input" and select "Screen".

9 This step is optional, but we found it gave much better results with our particular presentation.In Camtasia Recorder, click "Tools", then "Options", click the "AVI" tab along the top. On this page turn off "Auto Configure". Set the frames/sec to 10.0

Click "Video Setup". Untick "Key Frame Every 80 frames". Click OK.

Click the "Program" tab, Then tick "Boost priority during capture". Click OK.

10 Navigate to your powerpoint show (the .pps file from step 7) using windows explorer or "my computer".

Double click your file e.g. mypres.pps

11 The 1st slide will be displayed until you press a key to move on to the next slide.Tip: We got better results if we went through the presentation once, before doing the actual capture. This allowed the PC to cache the presentation in its memory.

12 When you press F9 Camtasia Recorder will start recording everything that happens on the screen. When you are ready, press F9, then press the space bar to start your presentation proper.

13 If your presentation is set to wait for a mouse click to move through each slide, remember to give the audience time to read each slide, before pressing the space bar to move to the next slide. One way of doing this is to read the slide out aloud.

14 When you reach your last blank slide, Press F10 to tell Camtasia Recorder to stop recording. You will be prompted to save the captured slideshow, so choose a directory and enter a filename.

Click "Save". Camtasia will save your capture as an .AVI file.

15 View what we grabbed from powerpoint. How did we do that? We used Camtasia Producer to save our captured video file to a flash (swf) file. Trust us, when we say this powerpoint to flash is a very powerful feature of Camtasia.

Step 2: Conversion1 Start Nero Vision Express 2

2 Click "Make DVD" and choose "DVD-Video"

3 Click "Make New Movie

4 Click the "Browse for media" button. Navigate to where you saved the original camtasia captured video file. Select the File and click "Open". Nero will display an icon to represent your video clip.

5 Right click the newly added video clip icon and choose "Add to Project"

6 Nero will add your video to it's storyboard

You can add transitions before and after each video clip using nero if you want to. We didn't.

7 If you want to add any kind of soundtrack or music to your video clip, this is the time to do it. Click the "Show Timeline" button

Then simply browse to your existing audio clip, then drag it from the media list to the "timeline" area marked "Audio 1".

8 Click the "Next" button.

If you want to add any more powerpoint slideshows, then repeat steps 3 through 6. Obviously you will also have to capture each presentation using camtasia by following Step 1: Capture.

9 Click the "More>>" button

Click the "Video Options" button

10 Change the "Video mode" to NTSC for the United States, or scroll down the list to your country for other modes (e.g. Select PAL for the UK).

Click the "Next" button.

11 The "Create Menu" page is where you design the 1st screen people will see when they view your DVD.

You can add backgrounds, change colors, fonts, etc. It's all fairly self explanatory.

For our DVD creation we choose "Layout 2", a still background image, and added a title of "Select a video show".

Click Next

12 The "Preview" screen allows you to view and test your dvd. Clicking the Menu button on the

remote control will always bring you back to this 1st screen.

Click "Back" if you would like to change how your DVD will look or Click "Next" to continue.

13 That's it for the conversion and the DVD menu creation.

Step 3: Writing the DVD1 You should now be on the "Burn Options" screen. This screen allows you to decide whether to

write the data to your cd-writer now, or to a Folder on your hard disk for writing to a disk later.

2 Click "Burn To" to choose your CD or DVD writer. Select the device that you would like to use.

3 Double check "Recording Settings" are to your liking. e.g. Turn on the "buffer underrun protection".

4 When you are ready. Click the "Burn" button

5 Nero will start the process of converting your original powerpoint slideshow video to a DVD compatible format. It will then write the DVD disc. It can take quite some time. So go and get yourself a coffee.

6 If you choose the option to write the data to an "image recorder", then nero will ask for a directory and a filename to save the "disc image".

Click "Save". The disc image can be written to a DVD at a later date.

7 Click "Save" if you want to save this dvd project to use again.

8 That's it for writing the dvd. Be sure to read this last section to get the best results.

We used the following software:This is a list of the software we used in putting a powerpoint presentation on to a DVD. Although you can use other software for the capturing, conversion and writing the dvd.

• Powerpoint 2002 / XP by Microsoft(More details)

• Camtasia by TechSmith(More details - 30 day demo available for download)

• Nero Vision Express 2 by Ahead(More details - 30 day demo available for download)

We particularly wanted to preserve the animations and wipes in powerpoint, that's why we opted for Camtasia. If you did not want to preserve the animations and wipes, then you could export your powerpoint presentation as a series of still images (bitmaps, jpgs, etc), then use Nero Vision Express to create a simple slideshow.

We also looked at a product called TMPGEnc that does do a better job of converting the original grab

to a dvd format than nero. But to keep this tutorial as easy as possible, we decided to use nero's in-built convertor. Also a lot of people tend to have nero bundled with there cd or dvd writer. The makers of TMPGEnc also make DVD authoring software.

See smooth animations and powerpoint to dvd from the techsmith site that will help you achieve a really smooth capture by utilizing the "time lapse" feature of camtasia studio

See these pages from the techsmith site that will help you with your audioRecording audio - Great soundOr add your sound or music using camtasia producer after you have captured the video

If you are a mac user you will probably know that Camtasia does not work on Apple Mac's. These two products do screen recording for mac users:Screenography and Snapz Pro

If you're budget is tight, then you may be interested to know that there is a free screen capture software called CamStudio. We've not used it so we don't know if it's any good.

Optimizing your presentations for dvd video and TV:The quality (resolution) of a TV is not as good as a computer monitor. Keep these points in mind to get the best results.

• Avoid putting information too close the edge of your slides, otherwise this information may be cut off when viewed on a TV

• Avoid very small text. A lot depends on the quality of the TV and how far back the TV will be viewed from. Aim for no smaller than 30 point font sizes

• Avoid very thin lines. Aim for at least 3 point line sizes • Avoid certain colors. Red is notoriously bad for video • Avoid very skinny / lite / thin / serif fonts. Aim for Arial (sans-serif), bold and black weights • Aim for dark backgrounds (dark blue), and light colored text (white / yellow)

11. Powerpoint hints, tips and resourcesA preview of the goodies you can expect with the new powerpoint 2007

Have you seen the coolest powerpoint animations ever?

Looking for our awesome powerpoint tutorials ?

Looking for our awesome graphics for powerpoint sister website ?

Have you played the PPT Drum Machine ?

All versions of powerpoint• The best tip you can have about powerpoint is to use the "Slide Master" page to design the

style of your pages BEFORE you start designing your presentation. This is the place to put your company logo, instead of placing it on every single slide put it on the slide master. This is also the place to set up all your fonts, size, and "slide color scheme". This will save you hours of extra work formatting every single slide.

• Upgrade to powerpoint 2000. Or at least upgrade to powerpoint 97. If you are still using powerpoint 4 upgrade!. If you are using powerpoint 95 upgrade!. Just the smaller file sizes and faster loading and saving make it worthwhile. Other vast improvements are they ability to animate any object and fine tune build-up slides. Also the ability to add a hyperlink to any object is also very handy.

• If you are considering upgrading to powerpoint 2002/XP/2003, we have some great news. Microsoft PowerPoint XP (2002) now has a new viewer to go with it. It's free to download the viewer from the microsoft website. PowerPoint XP has much improved control over the animation of objects, including smooth fades, the ability to have enter and exit animations.

• Keep backups of your work (common sense really!) Try to think of how long it would take to replace your work... instead of thinking about how long it would take to do the backup!

• Keep saving versions of your presentation eg. AwesomePresentation-V01.ppt eg. AwesomePresentation-V02.ppt This way if anything horrendous happens (such as the power going off half way through saving the presentation that took you weeks to design, or saving over important files by mistake) you can go back to the previous version. Get the free automatic sequential save add-in.

• Use the right quality. If you are including scans in your on-screen presentations, only scan your images at the appropriate resolution. For example - If your presentation will only ever be shown on a PC at SVGA (800x600) resolution. Then why bother scanning anything higher than 800x600 pixels? Also try changing the number of colors in the pictures to 256 colors (indexed color). This saves time, disk space and your presentations will run a lot faster and smoother. You might even be able to email them to people now that they are a lot smaller!.

• Learn the quick keys. Creating a lot of powerpoint presentations? Then download this printable quick key and shortcuts reference sheet. (Right Click, Save Target As....) Print it out, attach it to your monitor, impress your boss with your speed improvement using these shortcuts.

• Speed up your slideshows... Turn off "Render 24-bit bitmaps at highest quality" from the "Tools","Options", "Advanced" menu.

Powerpoint 97, 2000, 2002 / XP and 2003• Turn off "Fast Saves" This will make your actual .ppt files smaller. This is especially useful

when trying the fit them on a floppy disk or to email them.

• An extra tip to squeeze your powerpoint file even smaller.... Choose "File", "Properties" and turn off the "save preview image". This also speeds up saving the file, as powerpoint does not have to make up the little image preview.

• Consider using a third party utility to automatically reduce the resolution of your scans in your presentation. One such great utility is the excellent The RnR Presentation Optimizer.

• To get the best possible black & white hardcopy from powerpoint. From the "view" menu choose "black & white". This will show you what your hardcopy will look like. To alter the way any object will print, simply right click on that object, and then choose the appropriate option. ie. "Black with White Fill". No more saving two versions of a presentation (one for black & white, one for die). Now there is no excuse for those dreadful solid black background hardcopies!

• To copy an object on your page quickly and easily instead of using cut & paste, try this instead. Select the object you want to copy by clicking on it. Hold down the "CTRL" key on the keyboard. Click (with the left mouse button) and drag the object to the new position. Simple & quick. Now try it again but press the "Shift" key at the same time as the CTRL key, this will keep the objects aligned. Great for making diagrams etc.

• Quick Zoom. If you are lucky enough to be the proud owner of a "wheel mouse" (wow!), then the following tips is just for you. While you are editing your lovely presentation (in slide view mode) simply wheel the mouse forward while pressing the CTRL key. Instant zoom! To zoom into a particular object, then select that object beforehand.

• If you type in a lot of presentations containing all those weird characters, you know the ones, the sub-scripts and superscripts, the ± © ® ™ ½ ÷ and all those other symbol that are just not on the average keyboard.....well today is your lucky day....here's what you do in PowerPoint...Tools menu, Customize, Commands, Scroll down the list on the left, Click on "Insert", scroll down the list on the right until you see a lovely Omega symbol (like an upside down horseshoe), Click and drag this symbol into any toolbar you like. Click "Close". Then next time you want a symbol just click it, then if you don't see the character you require just change to one of the other popular symbol fonts, such as:

• Symbol• Wingdings• Webdings

• Common BulletsOne word of warning: If you are giving out your presentation to other people stick to these common fonts as they will be installed on most modern PCs.

• Still on a similar theme to the above tip... why not make your own toolbar, particularly if your a "power" user. It will save you a lot of time, particularly if you use the "Draw" menu a lot. To do this do the following: Tools menu, Customize, Toolbar, New, Enter a name e.g. My ToolBar, Then it's just a case of clicking on the Commands tab, and selecting each button and dragging it to the "My Toolbar". You can also rename certain options, and also change the icons, experiment, have fun! Here's ours . . . . . . . . . . . . Note: LS=Line Spacing. The Yellow Smiley face, "Camcorder" and "Speaker" icon are for "inserting pictures, movies and sound from file". The "empty smiley" is for setting transparency on a picture. IO=Insert Object, Cc=Change Case, and the Omega symbol is for inserting all those characters that are not on the keyboard!

• Get those original bitmaps. OK, you've been sent a presentation with some scans/bitmaps in. Maybe screen grabs of a piece of software or something similar. You want the original bitmaps but you don't have them. All you have is the powerpoint file. You want those bitmaps badly. You want them out of powerpoint and into your image editor. But the crucial thing is you want them in their original resolution. You've tried copying them to the clipboard and pasting them into PhotoShop / PaintShop Pro and you get the bitmaps but it just isn't the same resolution as the original bitmaps. There either too big or too small, you've tried setting the size of the images in powerpoint to display best at 640x480 or whatever, and your getting nowhere fast!. Here's what you do:

1. Select the image 2. Copy it to the clipboard 3. Load up MicroSoft Photo Editor.

Why this method does not work with photoshop and paintshop pro I don't know. I just know Photo Editor works a treat for this.(You may have to install it from the original powerpoint CD)

4. Edit menu, Paste. 5. Save the bitmap.

This method even takes into account any clipping or brightness/contrast effects you have applied in powerpoint, to cancel these effects, first display the "picture toolbar" in powerpoint, then choose the "reset picture" icon. Then follow step 1.You can then edit the saved bitmap how you like. You can even downsize the image to make your powerpoint files smaller.

• To compare two presentations for any changes...do the following:(This trick does not work in ppt 2002/XP.)

1. Load both presentations into powerpoint 2. Make sure you're on normal slideview (edit mode) 3. And both presentations are on page one. 4. Set the page zoom to "Fit" 5. Here's the clever bit . . . Hold down the CTRL key 6. Press the "Tab" key - (that's the one next to the "Q" key OK!) 7. Press it repeatedly or even hold it on

8. Any changes between the two presentations will stand out like a pink piglet flying across the sky.

9. Repeat for all pages

• To create an instant agenda or summary slide: 1. Open your presentation in powerpoint 2. Click the "View" menu 3. Select "Slide Sorter" 4. PowerPoint will then display a miniature view of all your slides in your presentation.

You may like to choose a smaller viewing size to display all your slides. This is done by clicking the "edit" menu, select "zoom" or by clicking the "zoom" button Then enter a really small number, like 25

5. Select every slide that you would like to include in the summary slide: To select multiple slides, press and hold: - use the "shift" key for powerpoint 97 - use the "Ctrl" key for powerpoint 2000 2002 XP while you select the slides you would like to include with the left mouse button

6. When you have selected all the slides. Click the "Summary Slide" button. 7. PowerPoint will then create a summary slide from all the "Titles" of the slides you

selected. It will be placed in front of the first slide that you selected.

• To find out all the slides that have a certain word on them. 1. Open your presentation in powerpoint 2. Click the "View" menu 3. Select "Slide Sorter" 4. PowerPoint will then display a miniature view of all your slides in your presentation.

You may like to choose a smaller viewing size to display all your slides. This is done by clicking the "edit" menu, select "zoom" or by clicking the "zoom" button Then enter a really small number, like 25

5. Click the "Edit" menu 6. Select "Find" 7. In the new window that pops up, enter the word you would like to find. e.g..

"presentation" 8. Then click "Find All", use the "match case" and "find whole words only" as appropriate.9. PowerPoint will then highlight, with a black border, around all the slides that have the

word "presentation" on them. So you can see at a glance how many slides have that word on them. You can also search for multiple words e.g.. "sample presentations".

10.If you want to take this further and have the ability to keyword search individual slides in many presentations on your local drives or networked drives. Then the "PowerSearch" plug-in will make your life easier.

• To scale text and objects at the same time.Normally when you select several objects and text (e.g. a diagram), and scale them, powerpoint scales the objects as you would expect, but it leaves the font size the same. To get around this problem:

1. Select all your objects and text 2. Click the "Edit" menu, choose "Cut" 3. Click the "Edit" menu, choose "Paste Special" 4. From the "As:" options choose "Picture", Click "OK" 5. Now when you scale this group of objects and text, they will scale exactly as they

should. Be sure to hold the Shift key down, and scale the object using the "corner" handles, to keep everything in proportion

6. If you need to edit the actual text, simple choose "ungroup" from the "draw" menu

• To make an AutoShape go smaller than normal.You've drawn an AutoShape and it will simply not go any smaller by sizing it manually. e.g.. a circle indicating places on a map

1. Select the AutoShape with the mouse 2. Right click it and choose "Format AutoShape" 3. Then either enter a new "height" and "width" or 4. Enter new values in the "scale" boxes (e.g. height 50% and width 50% will half the size

of the shape)

• To finely adjust the space between the bullet point and the text Sometimes you just cannot get the spacing just right between the bullet point and the text. And when you adjust it, it's either just too much or too little. To adjust it finely:

1. Turn the ruler on, by selecting the "View" menu 2. Make sure there is a tick next to "Ruler" to display the ruler 3. Select the text object that you want to adjust 4. On the ruler move the lower part of the paragraph indentation. It's

called the "Left Indent". It looks like a small house. But to adjust it finely. . . . Press and hold the CTRL key while moving the paragraph spacer on the ruler

• To remove the white text shadow on text. If you have the Text shadow option ON for your text, and your background is Black (RGB=0), and your text is any other color, then powerpoint will add a "White" text shadow, which in most cases looks horrible. If you want to keep the text shadow turned on, but want a black shadow, make your background color either RGB all equal to 16, or just make the blue value = 16. The background will still look black!

Workaround bugs & limitations• If you get these error messages when you try to drag and drop an AVI video clip. "Video not

available, cannot find vids:mjpeg decompressor" or "Cannot display this type of sound or movie" or "MMSYSTEM006 There is no driver installed on your system". Or if you "insert movie from file" and powerpoint simply ignores you. Then try this mjpg mpeg tip that is so simple even we were gobsmacked/astounded.Rename the file from a .AVI to .MPG - That's it!(even renaming the file to .QT .MOV .m1v works). We found that you tend to have a greater success rate with AVI files from digital cameras that create movies. We believe this is because most of them use the Motion jpeg codec or mjpeg for short.If you still have problems then read this multimedia tutorial Still stuck?.. A logical approach to troubleshooting video in powerpoint. A great powerpoint utility PFCMedia will apply its magic to make sure your video clips WILL Play For Certain Software called gspot will tell you what codecs (audio and video) are being used in your video

files

• If you find yourself losing your speaker notes text then upgrade to Service Release 1 (SR-1). Available for download from the microsoft web site. Also never save the presentation while in "notes view". Better to use "slide view"

• You've pasted an Excel spreadsheet and the right hand side is clipped off.... 1. Go back to Excel and select the spreadsheet again but this time slightly less 2. Re-paste it 3. Go back to Excel and select the rest of the spreadsheet continue until you have all the

parts pasted into PowerPoint 4. Group the parts together in PowerPoint. 5. Re-size them as necessary 6. Un-group them and position them correctly

• If you open a presentation and start seeing a Big Red X then try some of these options: • Certainly don't save the presentation. • Check for a service release of Office Update • If you have the original bitmap save it as a .BMP file and not a .PNG or .TIF or .JPG,

then try re-inserting it • Try shrinking the offending image until it will display properly... • Then press and hold the "Alt Gr" key • Press the "PrtScn" key. • Choose "Edit", "Paste-special", "picture", "OK" • If you still see the "Big Red X"....take a break!