Real World Computing

Animation

I still stand by my original advice to use transition and animation effects with great caution. Stick to one simple transition between each slide, with perhaps another one to mark new sections: "Wipe Right" works well for most slides with, perhaps, "Cover Down". Build-up animations on the text should also be kept simple. PowerPoint lets you apply these to each bullet point one by one, by first-level point, or all at once - choose carefully according to the content of the slide, but avoid the tendency to go overboard or you'll make your audience seasick. Remember that if you ask the presenter to click the mouse once for every line of every slide in your presentation, they will at some point forget and you'll end up talking to an empty slide...

Sound and video

Here's another area where the technology has moved on extraordinarily, and what was technically challenging ten years ago is now much easier. Although reasons for including sound and video in a presentation are still pretty rare. You may want to record a narration to be included in the presentation file so it can be run by someone else without you being physically present, which can be good for training materials, but you rely on the end user having good headphones with which to listen, or else speakers and very tolerant co-workers. You might include music in a "warm-up" presentation to be shown while people gather for the main event, but you probably won't want to put sound effects onto individual slides that go "boing" when the annual profit figures come up. That's just irritating.

Themes and templates

I wrote extensively about themes in this column last month: they enable you to set the colours, fonts and effects in a presentation with just a couple of clicks. There are 20 themes that ship in the box, with 14 more available from Microsoft Office Online, and you can make your own and share them with colleagues to ensure consistency.

Templates include sample content as well as setting the look of the presentation, and are a good way to get a jumpstart if you're not sure what to include. There are many templates available through Microsoft Office Online and these show up in the File | New dialog box. You can also make your own templates by using File | Save As... and setting the file type to PowerPoint Template (*.potx).

Slide libraries

If you have Windows SharePoint Services on your network, you can publish some or all of the slides in any of your presentations to a slide library on the server (File | Publish | Publish Slides). Later on, when you come to create a new presentation, you can easily search for and add those slides to a new presentation, building it up from stock slides complete with notes, animations, effects and so on (Home | New Slide | Reuse Slides...). Next time you open this new presentation, PowerPoint will check with the slide library to see if any of the slides it contains have been updated and will offer to update your presentation accordingly. Combine this ability with the facility of SharePoint to check in, check out and require approval of items before they're published and you have a powerful mechanism for quickly building presentations from previously created and approved content.

Continued....