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© 2006 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
PowerPoint’s biggest problem? It’s easy to learn. That means that hundreds upon thousands of new users proclaim themselves proficient on a daily basis…and then go forth to commit multimedia homicide. If you are still learning PowerPoint, do us all a favor and recognize the simple fact that you are capable of considerable embarrassment to self and harassment to those around you for at least another year…
Figure 1: Poorly-designed slides can be incorporated into a nicely-designed presentation by ensuring that Keep Source Formatting is turned off when you merge. 
Figure 2: Your boss' slides, rescued from the depths of dog-meatdom... |
Question 1: My boss’s presentation needs to be merged with mine, but whenever I try, I create dog meat out of it. How can I do that and still save my job?
There are two routes to take to merge presentations and two options to take in either route…which means four ways to create dog meat unless you think ahead. First question: Do you want your boss’s presentation to keep the design it currently has, or do you want it to take on the look and feel of your presentation once it becomes incorporated?
Figure One provides the answer: your nicely-designed introductory slide is on the left, while your boss’s dreadful presentation is on the right (he made the background gray in an attempt to make it look attractive). You most decidedly do not want to inherit his formatting when you merge. From your presentation, go to Insert | Slides from Files, and navigate to his presentation. When you find it, choose the specific slides you want to copy in, or click Insert All to grab the entire presentation. But first, make sure that the Remove Dog Meat, sorry, that should be Keep Source Formatting box is unchecked. Figure Two is the happy result.
You can also use the Clipboard to copy and paste selected slides from his to yours; in that case, after you paste, you’ll be prompted to choose whether to keep the source formatting or not.
Question 2: I get so tired of setting animation on every slide that I end up just not using any. Isn’t there a better way?
No, there is no better way. Please keep on removing animation from your presentations. That way, nobody will ever suffer Death by PowerPoint at the hands of one of your presentations. You'll be just one step away from achieving world peace.
Okay, if we tell you the better way, do you promise not to load up each slide with 15 different animation types?
Figure 3: The slide master is your best route to reducing tedium and increasing consistency of design. |
Your holy grail is the slide master. It is there that you can make design, layout, and animation decisions that can be applied to an entire presentation. Go to View | Master | Slide Master to begin, and note that virtually every command and feature that you are used to using during slide editing is available when designing a master. Change the background…set typefaces…apply animation (carefully!)…these changes can then ripple through every slide in your presentation. Figure Three shows the Slide Master view for the presentation that rescued the boss from Dog Meat Hell. This background, the clean bullets, and the white rules will appear on every slide, including those incorporated from other presentations (as long as Keep Source Formatting wasn’t asked for).
Notice that there are actually two sets of slide masters—one for the presentation and one to make printouts. In versions 2001 and more current, you can create more than one set of masters and apply them to selected slides.
Not-so-super-secret Tip: When in Doubt, think Wipe and Fade
Without a doubt, the area of a presentation that is subject to the most scrutiny is inappropriate use of animation. You can always tell when somebody either a) just learned about a new animation effect, or b) got bored – that’s when ill-conceived and out-of-place animation appears for no apparent reason. When you do that, you call into question your own sensibilities, and if a member of your audience begins to question whether you understand what is important and what is not, your credibility takes a big hit.
From now on, constrain your use of animation to Wipe and Fade, the two effects that do not offend or annoy anyone. Wipe is clean, Fade is elegant and neither one forces your audience members to track movement across the slide. In the history of PowerPoint, no job, sale, or contract has been lost due to a person using Wipe or Fade. And in the era of Death by PowerPoint, that’s no small statement…
Question 3: We want our presentations to mirror our website, and for when we send it out on its own, we want the hyperlinks to work. Can this be done?
Figure 4: Any object that you can select on a slide can be turned into a hyperlink. |
With ease. Any object that you create or import can have an action associated with it, ranging from navigation through the current presentation, the playing of another presentation, the running of a program, or yes, the opening of a URL. Just select the object and go to Slide Show | Action Settings. The dialog box, shown in Figure Four is very easy to operate, with one exception: If you select text and assign an action to it, the text will change color and inherit an underline, like a traditional hyperlink. Few people today like the hokey look of underlined text, but undoing that is practically like brain surgery. Therefore, the better way to go is to draw a rectangle over the text, assign the action to the rectangle, and then make the rectangle invisible by removing its outline and fill. Harkening back to the previous question, create a group of hyperlinks on a slide master, and presto, instant menu on every slide.
Super-Secret Tip: Hidden Hyperlinks Help Fight Hurry-Up Hell
You can’t always control the time it takes to give a presentation and you can’t always guarantee that you’ll have the amount of time you were originally promised. When life intervenes, the last thing you want is to have to hurry through your final slides, especially if you’ve been saving your best work for last. You need a bail-out strategy, and Action Settings can help you create it. Identify two or three slides in your presentation that represent important sections that you want to make sure to cover. Then create hyperlinks to those sections. You can either build those links into the design of your slides, or you can keep them hidden by stashing invisible rectangles into the corners of your slides (remember, if you place them on the master slide, they’ll be available on every slide).
If time grows short, click your hidden hyperlink to immediately jump to a particular section. This will make your presentation appear more seamless, give you more confidence as a presenter in control, and above all, allow you to cover the material you identify as most important.
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This article originally appeared in MacAddict magazine, which explains our break from the conventional in our choice to use screen images from PowerPoint running on OS/X...
Copyright 2006, All rights reserved. Have an opinion? Share it with the Corel community at the Graphics Unleashed Discussion Forum. There is already quite a bit of discussion about this story. Join in.
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