Power Pointers for PowerPoint Slide Shows
By Jim Pile, TipWorld
Your completed PowerPoint slide show for tomorrow’s big presentation is finally ready. All that’s left to do is to give it a final once-over before you step into the spotlight--and maybe a nice promotion. Here are a few last-minute tweaks that could mean the difference between a presentation that’s picture perfect and one that’s perfectly disastrous.
Automatic Slide Shows
If you like to double click on a PowerPoint file and have it open directly as a slide show rather than having to wait for PowerPoint to open and then choose View, Slide Show, all you have to do is save the file in the right format. When you ready to save the PowerPoint file, choose File, Save As. When the Save As dialog box opens, click the arrow to the right of the Save as Type box to expand the list. Select PowerPoint Show and type a name into the File name box. Click OK to close the dialog box. The document will be saved as a .pps file.
When you double click a .pps file, PowerPoint opens it in Slide Show mode. It displays the slide show as you instructed it to and, when the show is finished, PowerPoint closes. To modify the show, all you have to do is open it from within PowerPoint by choosing File, Open.
Text and Pictures in PowerPoint
When you have text and pictures on the same PowerPoint slide, you may want to move them together as one unit. You can do this by including the text in a group with the picture. To do this, click the text to select it. Now hold down the Shift key and click the picture. Choose Draw, Group to merge the text and picture. To ungroup your objects, select the group and select Draw, Ungroup.
Fill It Up
You can make a text box in a PowerPoint slide stand out by filling it with a lighter shade of the slide background color. To do this, right-click on the text and choose Format Text Box. Under Fill, click the Color list box to expand it, and then select white as your fill color. Now select the Semitransparent check box, then click OK. This allows the slide background color to show through. For special effects, try experimenting with other colors.
Make a Note
To keep personal notes in a PowerPoint slide, choose View, Notes Page. You can type in anything you want and nobody but you will see it. Notes are often very helpful during the slide show development period.
Slides Need to be Spelled Correctly, Too
Spell checking isn’t limited to word processing programs. When you generate slides in PowerPoint, be sure to press F7 to invoke the spelling checker.
