Monday, March 12,  2001		Article

Tips for Power Point
By Vipul Verma

Ideally, the combination of content and its presentation can add maximum value to anything. A thing rich in content and well presented is always well received.

Talking in term of computers and MS Office, the contents are the domain area of programs like MS Word, whereas the presentation is the outcome of programs like Powerpoint.

PowerPoint is a complete presentation graphics program that offers everything a person would need for a professional-looking presentation. Since this is a complete program in itself, it offers word processing, outlining, drawing, graphing and presentation management tools, which are quite powerful yet simple to use. Using PowerPoint you can create slides, print audience handouts, outlines and speaker’s notes. The creation of presentation in a series of slide is however, the most common form of presentation. These slides can be presented either on your PC or on an overhead projector using transparencies or 35 mm slides. These sides can be formatted to run as a single click presentation or otherwise depending upon the requirement of the presentation. Thus, it is one of the most versatile programs and has multiple benefits.

It also has full compatibility with other components of MS Office like Word, Excel and work done in these programs can easily be imported in PowerPoint, without any difficulties.

Draw a perfect shape

If you have to draw a perfect line, square or circle in your presentation and you try to do it free hand it would not be possible to do it perfectly. However, if you know the trick, then drawing a perfect object is simple. For drawing a perfectly horizontal line simply hold down the Shift key while dragging to create your line. Similarly for drawing a perfect square, simply hold down the Shift key while dragging to create your square. In case of drawing a perfect circle, hold down the Shift key while dragging to create your circle.

The Shift key can be said as one key solution to many problems. Normally, if have to resize an image, then simply expanding it in either directions creates problems as you may lose the dimensions. In order to resize an image proportionately, simply hold down the shift key and resize the image. Doing so will allows you to resize an image without changing its proportional dimensions.

Size of the file

Images, graphics and pictures are an integral part of working in MS PowerPoint. Therefore while working with graphics (resizing, colouring, etc.) move the graphic to the grey pasteboard area next to the slide. This will allow you to work on the graphic without interference from other objects (like text boxes) on your slide. Once you have completed work on your graphic, place it on your slide. This can prove to be an excellent tip for those, who work on complex presentations. For people who work on complex presentations, there is one bigger problem and that is related to the size of the file. Especially in cases if you have to carry a file on floppy, then having large images in your presentation would make it difficult for you to put it on a single floppy. However, if you try and optimise your graphics by using program like Adobe ImageReady, then, though the optimisation could result in some image loss, it will certainly reduce the file size of your presentation.

However, there is one more method of reducing the file size. If you save your presentation by a different file name, then the new file could be of small size, if you have done a lot of work in this file and have also used a number of graphics and animation. Because the changes you make in PowerPoint are cumulative and can create a file size that is unnecessarily large, it also helps in some cases.

Screen-blackening

Normally the slides made by using the MS PowerPoint are showed on computers only. Moreover showing presentations on the computer, gives more power, both in terms of powerful slide show and also added features. One of the excellent features of PowerPoint, which is little known to users, is the screen-blackening feature. Normally, when you wish to give your presentation, there could be some circumstances where you may have to break your presentation or stop the presentations for a while. During the break you may not want others to see your presentation. For all such circumstances, there is a feature in PowerPoint, which lets you darken your display until you are ready to begin your presentation. This is an important yet a simple function.

If you are in Slide show mode, then by pressing the "B" key on the keyboard, PowerPoint will displays a black screen on the screen. Now when you wish to restore your presentation, you simply need to press the "B" key again and your display will return. However, there is a need of caution here that while restoring the presentation, you should press only "B" key as pressing other key may advance your presentation to another slide.

Mode of presentation

There could be two modes of presentations, 1) On the screen (Computer screen or the LCD projector screen. 2) On overhead projectors using transparencies. If the presentation is to be done on screen then having backgrounds and multicolours add worth to the presentation. In case the presentation is to be made on an overhead projectors using transparencies, you should not then use backgrounds, complex images etc. The background can cause the printout to be dark and unreadable. If you remove the background, your slides will print nicely with black text over a white background, which in this case will add more value.