PowerPoint Notes

Ungroup Charts in PowerPoint 2007

Here’s a question that I received from someone who once sent me an animated Christmas game! He’s probably got a lot of other animated stuff that might get you either mad or mesmerized (or both!) — but for now, here’s his question: I’ll spare you the details but can you now no longer ungroup charts in PowerPoint 2007?

The answer is yes, you can — but the route to ungroup nirvana might be new — but fear not, let me get you there:

1. First of all, create your chart — and just to be on the safe side, duplicate the slide that contains the chart. That’s because once you ungroup your chart, you can no longer edit the values within the chart.
2. Make sure you do not double-click the chart — just select it, right-click the edge of the chart, and choose the Save as Picture option.
3. This brings up a dialog box of the same name — now choose EMF within the Save as type dropdown box, provide a name and location, and save the chart as an EMF graphic.
4. Insert a new slide within the presentation, and then insert a graphic by first selecting the Insert tab of the Ribbon, and then clicking the Picture button.
5. In the resulting Insert Picture dialog box, navigate and choose the EMF graphic you saved previously, and click Insert to get back to your slide with the graphic inserted.
6. Next, select the graphic on the slide, right-click and choose Group | Ungroup. PowerPoint might warn you that this is an inserted picture, not a group. Disregard this warning and click Yes. Right-click the graphic again, and choose Group | Ungroup.
7. This should ungroup all the elements of the chart so that you can recolor them, add effects, or animate them individually of each other.

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Tagged as: Charts, Graphics, PowerPoint 2007

Cannot Insert Flash EXE Files

Question: I am looking for help inserting a Flash movie into my PowerPoint slide. My client sent me a movie with an EXE file extention and I have followed your directions correctly but I can not get it to play. Is there any way you can help me with this or point me in the right direction?

Answer: You need to ask your client to send you a SWF file — SWF files are actual Flash animation movies — the EXE file you received is most probably a Flash Projector file that includes the Flash runtime to run the movie and is essentially used for CD distribution. The original creator of the Flash movie can most certainly create a SWF output and send it to you so that you can insert it within a PowerPoint slide.

Categories: powerpoint, powerpoint_flash

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FlashPaper Documents in PowerPoint

Question: I have these Acrobat PDFs, Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets that I need to be part of my PowerPoint presentation with all their formatting. But to do that I need to embed or link to those files — and most of the time I get the irritating security warning when I access them from within a PowerPoint show! Any better options or ideas?

Answer: That can be so irritating — and I do have an easy solution although it’s not free.

Look at Adobe’s FlashPaper program that allows you to print anything to a Flash SWF file — then insert those Flash SWFs inside PowerPoint slides. Since these are embedded within the slide, there are no warning dialog boxes — and you can even scroll, zoom, and pan these documents!

Tim Wilson sent me a couple of gotchas for this tip:

1. Set up the printing properties for FlashPaper to use a custom paper size. In Windows, you do this through Control Panel > Printers and Faxes. Make the paper size slightly larger than your image. If you don’t do this, FlashPaper will chop your image up into separate pages!
2. Leave space on your PowerPoint slide for users to click, to advance the slide show away from your Flashpaper slide. Perhaps include a ‘Continue’ label people can click on. If your FlashPaper object covers the whole slide, your users won’t be able to navigate away from the slide.

If you need to know how you can insert Flash SWFs in PowerPoint, look here…
Categories: powerpoint, powerpoint_flash, pdf, tutorials

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Graphic Elements for PowerPoint

Question: Can you suggest any good software to create a stunning graphic element for my PowerPoint. I would like to try using 3D shapes instead of PowerPoint shapes.

Answer: Look at PowerPoint’s 3D engine — it is surprisingly powerful although not in the class of a 3D program. Another option is to download the public beta of Office 2007 — the graphic engine is stunning.

Alternatively, do what professional presentation designers do all the time — use Photoshop as a companion to PowerPoint!

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Output Notes from PowerPoint

I’m looking for a way to output my PowerPoint notes alone, or a presentation without the metafile overhead. I need the slides plus the notes – or even a way to get the notes without anything else. You’ll need to have Microsoft Word installed on your system in addition to Microsoft PowerPoint for this trick to work:

1. Open your presentation and choose File Send to Microsoft (Office) Word.
2. Select the Notes next to slides option, and click OK.
3. Microsoft Word creates a table with slide thumbnails and notes. Delete the unnecessary column in the resulting Word table that includes the thumbnails – to do that, select the entire column, right-click and choose Delete Columns.
4. Choose Table Convert Table to Text… Choose your text separator (or choose a custom separator).

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