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Back to Basics: Starting From Scratch, Part 2

Introducing a new series on the basics of presentations and PowerPoint. This article covers the six steps you need to follow to turn the ideas your presentations into reality in the easiest way possible!

This article covers Steps 4 (Multimedia), 5 (Movement), and 6 (Test) of the process of creating your presentation.

Continued from Back to Basics: Starting From Scratch, Part 1

Step Four: Multi-Media

Pictures, movies, sounds... All of these are very popular in presentations. Used correctly, they can be a help to understanding what is being presented. Use incorrectly, they can be over bearing, intimidating, and just plain confusing.

To add graphics and sounds, you are going to use the sub-menus of the "Insert" menu. This will allow you to add:

• Clip art

• General graphics

• Movies

• Sounds

• Verbiage

• Music

• Other presentations

• Objects built with other applications

Adding these objects is fairly easy and straight forward. However, because it is so easy, you need to be careful to avoid pages like this:



 

Instead, go for a simpler look, like this:



Once you have added the multimedia elements, play through the slide to see how they look. Some common problems, such as flashing movies, a black screen, and stutters in sounds and music can be caused by hardware acceleration or video acceleration being set too high. Another common cause for these is not having the most recent drivers on your system.

If you are planning to have the presentation presented using different machines than the one used to develop it, always design for the slowest, oldest machine. Newer faster machines will generally run a presentation just as well as an older machine, but the reverse is seldom true.

Step Five: Movement

The next set of decisions for you to make are about how the text, graphics, and slides will appear and change. There are two separate tools for setting up the movement of elements in your presentation.

The first of the two tools is the "Transition" tool. This tool determines how you will move from slide to slide while your presentation is running. This tool is found under the "Slide Show" menu. Transitions can be applied to an individual slide while viewing that slide, or to a number of slides after selecting them when they are being viewed in the gallery. In either case you will be making three basic decisions:

1. How do you want the next slide to appear? This is the actual transition mechanism. You can choose from a large number of effects such as cover, box, appear, etc. For many of the transitions, you can also choose the speed of the transition. You need to decide how you want to get from one slide to the next and how distracting of a transition you wish to use. (If you are using PowerPoint 2002, you have even more choices than in the older versions, but it still comes down to the same ideas.)

2. Will you have a sound with each transition? You can choose to have a sound play with each transition. However, before you choose to do that, listen to the sound ten times in a row. Are you sick of it yet? That is how your audience will feel after you move through 10 slides. Sounds used sparingly are a good thing. They can act as a trigger that something important or different is about to be covered. Sounds used constantly get annoying and tend to get tuned out. Once the audience has tuned out the sounds, they are not very far from tuning you out as well.

3. What mechanism will be used to move between slides? You can set the transitions up to happen after a certain amount of time, on a mouse click or on either. In addition, if you are running a kiosk show, you can turn all clicks off and instead have buttons on your slides to cause the transitions to occur. Which choice will work best for any given presentation depends on the answers to the questions you asked yourself before you built your outline.

The other tool you will use to incorporate movement into your presentation is the "Custom Animation" tool. This tool is used to animate each element on the slides. You can animate elements on the master slide and on individual slides. You can not apply animations to multiple slides at once, as the animations go on the elements not the slides.

When you animate elements, you work with both how elements appear (entry effects) and what happens when you move to the next element (exit effects). For entry effects, you decide how they will appear, when they will appear, and what will happen as they appear. For text elements in placeholders, you can also determine how much of the text will appear at once. For example, will you bring in all of the text in the placeholder at once, or will you bring it in a line at a time. For exit effects, you decide whether the element will still be visible when you are done with it and if it will be changed in any manner.

If you are using PowerPoint 2002, you also have the option of determining a "Motion Path" for elements. For example, you could choose to have a graphic move across the screen as you speak, with set stopping points along the way. This new option can create some very nice effects, but again ? don't overuse it.

Step Six: Test

You are almost done preparing your presentation. However, before you give it in front of any participants or let anyone else sit down and run through it, I recommend you test it several times. Go into a room and run the presentation in an environment similar to the environment where it will actually be used. If you are speaking with the presentation, give your speech as you go through the slides. If you are creating a stand-alone presentation, pretend you have never seen it before and are trying to learn from it. Watch for glitches, annoyances, and problems. Repair anything you find and test again. Repeat this process until you feel the presentation is ready for general viewing.

Having completed all six steps, your presentation is ready to be given. Have fun giving it and know that you have done your best.

Copyright 2002