It's Show Time!

Home Office Computing, Jan, 1999 by Helen Bradley

Put these presentation tips to work and your audience won't know what hit them

IF YOU'VE SEEN ONE SLIDE SHOW, YOU'VE SEEN THEM all. That's the way it feels, anyway, thanks to Microsoft's ubiquitous PowerPoint, a presentation application that takes most of the hassle out of preparing a keynote address or sales pitch. However, if you just do a by-the-numbers, template-based slide show, your audience will be thinking about their lunch plans while you're interpreting yet another bar graph. Here are some quick tips that'll help you streamline your preparation and polish your presentation. The first six are specific to PowerPoint (www.microsoft.com); the rest apply equally to PowerPoint, Lotus Freelance Graphics (www.lotus.com), and Corel Presentations (www.corel.ca).

Annotating slides It's often handy to draw attention to something on a slide by marking directly on the image. PowerPoint takes the mystery out of this seemingly complicated process: Select the menu at the bottom left of the screen to change the mouse pointer to a pen and "write" on a slide using your mouse. The notes are temporary and disappear when you select the next slide.

Don't reinvent the wheel Include a slide from a previous presentation in your current show by selecting Insert, Slides from Files. Select the Find Presentation tab, select Browse, locate the file, and select Open. Select Display, find the slide to insert, select it, and click Insert. The slide will appear in your current presentation--automatically formatted to correspond with the current layout.

Tell the whole story Add narration to a slide by selecting it and choosing Insert, Movies and Sounds, and Record Sound. The buttons, from left to right, are Play, Stop/Pause Recording, and Record. Click the Record button to begin recording and click the Stop button to finish. The sound will play whenever the slide is shown. To temporarily disable narrations, select Slide Show, Set Up Show, and select the Show Without Narrations checkbox and select OK.

Liven it up Animate a chart so you can build it while you speak. Select the chart, select Slide Show, Custom Animation, and the Chart Effects tab. From the Introduce Chart Elements drop-down list, select an option, such as "by Elements in Series." From the Entry Animation and Sound options make your selections--e.g., "Wipe Right, [No Sound], Don't Dim." Select the Timing tab and select either Animate On Mouse Click or Automatically and set a time delay. Preview shows you a thumbnail of your animation and Slide Show; View Show shows you the final version.

Presenting on the Web Publish your presentation on a corporate intranet or the Web by selecting File, Save as HTML, and following the subsequent Wizard commands. You'll find your files stored in a folder with the same name as your PPT file. Before uploading the presentation, test it offline by opening the file named index.htm in your browser using File, Open Page.

Pack and Go When you're e-mailing a presentation or taking it to another computer, run Pack and Go from the File menu. This compresses the presentation and stores all slides, linked files, fonts, and a PowerPoint viewer onto floppy disks. When you reach your destination, simply run the file pngsetup.exe from the first floppy.

Personalize the background Give your presentation a unique look with a photo background. In PowerPoint, select Format, Background, select Fill Effects from the drop-down list, and select the Picture tab. Select the Select Picture button, locate the photo file, and add it to all slides by selecting Apply to All. In Corel Presentations, select Format, Background Gallery, select Browse, select File Type: All files (*.*), locate the photo image, select Insert, and apply it to all slides. In Lotus Freelance, select Presentation, Edit Backdrop, then select Create, Add Bitmap to insert an image on all slides.

Think it through Plan your presentation before you create your slides. Determine the goal of your presentation and the main points you need to make. Organize these into an outline format--each heading can become a slide rifle, and for each you'll likely need three to six pieces of relevant information. In PowerPoint use View, Outline; in Freelance use View, Outliner; and in Presentations use View, Slide Outliner.

Know your audience Your audience will often determine the best way to make your presentation. In-house training materials can be presented over a corporate Intranet, whereas a large live audience will require a projector. A presentation where you're not on hand--for example, on the Internet--requires more information on each slide, because you aren't present to interpret and explain the data.

Prepare for disaster Test your presentation on the computer and projector you'll be using and make sure your audience can see it clearly. If possible, do this by duplicating the conditions present at the actual presentation site. Always have a fall-back plan in case of computer failure--for example, print a set of slides onto transparencies.