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Four Quick PowerPoint Hints


This article reprinted with permission from All 'Bout Computers.

Tip One: Animate your masters


For those of you who created presentations with the same animation on each slide (or most slides), try putting your animations on the master slide instead of on each slide. It will save you time and effort, and make changing the presentation later much easier.


PowerPoint XP users can take this one step further. If you only need a set of animations on certain slides, create a master with that animation sequence and use it for the slides needing animating. Some users have reported problems with adding the master animations after the slide is completed. If you have this problem, create a new slide based on the master with the animation, then copy your desired content from the existing slide to the newly created slide. Don't forget to delete the old copy, or you will have duplicates.



Tip Two: Turn on the outlining toolbar

Would you like to see your outline formatted? Turn on the "Outlining" toolbar by right clicking in any toolbar and clicking on the word "Outlining" The toolbar will appear down the left side of your screen and allows you to:


• Quickly promote and demote bullets
• Create a summary slide
• See your outline as formatted text, rather than just as the default Arial text

Tip Three: Create a summary slide

Once you have turned on the Outlining toolbar, you can create summary slides with the click of this button:


This button will only be active when you are viewing the outline. It will run through your presentation and create a single slide containing the title of each slide. However, if it hits a slide without a title, it will stop processing. (If you don’t want the title to show on a specific slide, create a title anyway and drag it off the slide.)

For large presentations, you will need to do some formatting to ensure that the slide is readable. If your presentation is really large, you may find that you want to create several summary slides, one for each section. Do this by making copies of the summary slide and adapting each to contain the content you wish.

Summary slides can easily be turned into clickable index to your presentation. Select each line of text on the slide and create a hyperlink from that text to the slide with that title. Summary slides are also useful for showing how far you are in the presentation.



Tip Four: To make a slide into your desktop wallpaper


The content of any slide within a powerPoint presentation can be turned into your desktop wallpaper. It doesn't matter whether the slide content is a picture or text. It is a fairly quick process, involving saving the slide as a jpeg and then selecting the jpeg file as your wallpaper.

1) From within PowerPoint, save that slide as a jpeg (File --> Save As... select JPEG)
2) PowerPoint will ask you whether you want to save the whole presentation or just the current slide. Select current slide.
3) Notice the name that PowerPoint gives the file. Close PowerPoint. (Optional, leave it open if you have other things to do...)
4) Now, set your background by either:

a) Using Windows Explorer, navigate to that file. Right click on the file and select Set as Desktop Background.

b) Right click on your desktop, select Properties, then click on the Background tab. Click the Browse button, navigate to the file, click on its title (or thumbnail), and click open.Or