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PowerPoint 2003 - the other changes


This article reprinted with permission from All'Bout Computers.

Last year, I wrote about the changes in PowerPoint 2003 that would most positively impact your use of the tool. Now it is time to look at the last three changes made and decide if they are good things or not.

Smart Tags

Remember the Smart Tags that Word and Excel started using in Office XP? With Office System 2003, the Smart Tag technology has been added to PowerPoint as well.

Smart tags are little boxes that pop up next to content to try to assist you with expanding the content. For example, there is an “info” Smart Tag that lets you pull additional information about a name from your Outlook contact list. In addition, you can program your own Smart Tags to add content to your PowerPoint presentations.

Smart Tags are very useful in some situations, especially those relating to repeatable data. I have not used them much, because the work I do in PowerPoint does not tend towards those areas. If you want to learn more about Smart Tags, let us know here at All ‘Bout Computers and someone will write up a detailed article on them.

Inking Support

Inking support is the ability to add inked comments and drawings to your presentations while they are running. There are two sides to the inking support:

• The ability to add ink to presentations from a Tablet PC and have it translated to text
• The ability to draw on slides during a slide show and have the drawings and annotations be kept

(I am going to focus on the second version of inking support. The inking support for Tablet PCs we will reserve for another article.)

In previous versions of PowerPoint, if you wanted to mark on your slides, you could, but you could not save the markings. To get around this, most of us got used to using the Meeting Minder to take notes and add action items to a presentation.

With the release of PowerPoint 2003, you can now quickly change your pointer from an arrow to one of a number of styles and colors of pens and save the markups as graphic elements when you leave presentation mode.

Case Study: Presenting the first draft of your presentation

You have spent the last three days putting together a presentation to announce your company’s latest product. You are ready to have the rest of your team see the presentation and offer comments and suggestions.

Everyone is in the room, and you bring up the first slide:



Immediately, someone raises the point that you misspelled guaranteed. Rather than stop the presentation and change the content, you press Ctrl-P on your keyboard. This changes your arrow pointer to a pen. If you were to right click at this point, you would see there are three different pen types you can choose from, as well as a number of different colors you can choose for each type:



You set your pen to the red felt tip, as shown in the menu, and write directly on the slide “Fix Typo”. Notice also that there are options to change the pen to an eraser or to erase all of the ink on your slide. They are not active in this screen shot since there is no ink currently on the slide. Once there is ink on the slide, the eraser options allow you to remove pieces of your ink (eraser, then click on the ink to be removed) or all the ink on the slide erase all ink on slide.

Next, someone suggests you should have a lighter background for the slides. Rather than hashing out a new background here in the group, you make a note on the slide to find a better background. Your slide now looks like this:



You now are ready to move to the next slide in your presentation. However, if you just click, you leave a red dot on the screen. Since you are in pen mode, all regular clicks are considered annotations, not navigation. To move, you can either:

• Right click and select next slide
• Right click, change back to the arrow, and click to move to the new slide
• Ctrl-P to change to the arrow and click to move to the next slide
• Simply press the right arrow key on your keyboard to move to the next slide.

When you finish your presentation, you will get a new message box:



If you choose keep, each of your inked slide markings will be turned into individual graphics on the slide. Each piece of ink can be moved, removed, re-colored, stretched or shrunk, just as with any other graphic.

Inking in the viewer

You can also use the inking options while viewing slides with the PowerPoint 2003 Viewer. When you do this, you will be asked not only if you want to save your ink annotations, but you will also get asked whether you want to overwrite the existing file or create a new one.

Font Embedding Changes

This one is bad news for a lot of us. In PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft added a “feature” that checks to see if any of the fonts embed in your file are non-shareable.. This sounds like a good thing. Unfortunately, it can be a real hassle if you don’t understand the font sharing rules.

When does the check occur?

This is the truly bad part of this change. The check for shareable fonts doesnÂ’t happen when you embed the fonts. Instead, it happens when you open a presentation file. However, if you try to open that presentation on a machine without the font, PowerPoint will pop up this error message:



You will be able to open this presentation for viewing, but not for editing or re-saving.

A hint: If you really need to open a file getting this error, open it with an older version of PowerPoint. Once you open the file in the older version, you can change the fonts to shareable/ editable fonts, save the file, and then work with the file in PowerPoint 2003. If you don’t have an older version of PowerPoint, you will need to find someone else who does.

The Embedding Rules

In the past, PowerPoint trusted you that if you embedded a font, you had the right to embed and share the font. Because the privilege was being abused (knowingly or not), it was felt that PowerPoint should do more checking to ensure that fonts were not being shared illegally.

When a font designer creates a font, they can set the font up with various levels of sharing rights. True Type fonts, which are the only fonts which can be embedded and shared, can be classed anywhere from “No embedding allowed” to “Installable embedding allowed”. These classifications determine whether PowerPoint will allow a presentation file with embedded fonts to be opened.

According to help, the rules are very basic. Any font delivered with Windows can be embedded, but shouldn’t be since it will always be on the system receiving your file. Any font delivered with Office can be embedded, as the are fully shareable. (But again, they probably don’t need to be embedded, as they will be on any system with PowerPoint installed.) Other fonts will be embedded only if they have no license restrictions.

In this case the help is wrong. Okay, maybe just misleading. When you try to save a presentation file with font embedding turned on, you can embed most fonts. If the font is not embeddable due to license restrictions, you will get this message:



However, you will not get this message on True Type fonts that are not totally restricted. But, you won’t be able to re-open the files with these in between fonts either. Basically, the limits for what can be embedded have not kept up with what can be opened after embedding.

A real life example:

LetÂ’s look at four different fonts and their properties to see the difference.

• AlefBetN – This font’s embedding attributes are set to Restricted license embedding. No embedding is allowed on this font. You can not embed it (you get the error message above). If you embedded it in a previous version, you wonÂ’t be able to open the file.
• Eras Bold BT – This font’s embedding attributes are set to Preview and Print Embedding allowed. It can be embedded for viewing and printing, but not for editing. So, you can view presentations with this font, but you can’t edit them. You won’t see an error on save, but you will on open.
• Curls MT – This font’s embedding is set to Editable embedding allowed. The font can be installed for use on another machine in a temporary manner. The font can be embedded with no errors on either open or close.
• Comic Sans – This font’s embedding attributes are set to Installable editing allowed. The font can be embedded with no errors on either open or close.

So how do I know if my fonts can be embedded with 2003?

Microsoft has a bunch of information on their site regarding typography, sharing fonts and other such topics. Included in this section of their site is a tool you can add to your copy of Windows which will let you check the properties of the fonts on your system. Great information. I strongly recommend you check it out.

Final Thoughts on 2003

There is one other “invisible” change to PowerPoint that came with Office Systems 2003. PowerPoint is now included as a part of Office Small Business Edition. This is a good thing, since it gives small business a great way to get into the product. In fact, you can even use 2003’s Small Business Edition upgrade as a valid way to add PowerPoint to an existing Small Business installation.

The change to Small Business isn’t all great news. Because the computer manufacturers (Dell, etc.) still wanted a version of office without Powerpoint, Microsoft gave them one. The version without PowerPoint is now called “Office Basic” and is only available through the computer manufacturers.

That covers all of the new features with PowerPoint 2003. Personally, I think the good out weigh the bad. When the changes to the font embedding are weighed against all the pluses of this new version, such as the new distribution capabilities, the research pane additions, and the inking capabilities, you definitely come out with one of the best PowerPoint versions in quite a while.