PowerPoint Notes

Menu To Run Multiple Presentations

I have seen a PowerPoint presentation set up as a menu from which to run a number of seperate presentations from different speakers at a seminar. I cant find this in the help files – can someone please direct me to where I can find help to do this.

This is quite simple – follow these steps.

1. Create a new folder and copy all the presentations that you need to link from the menu presentation.

2. Create a single slide presentation, and save it in the same folder. This single slide is going to be the menu slide.

3. Create a text box for the first presentation you want to link from this menu slide, and type something descriptive that allows you to identify which presentation you’re going to link to from a particular text box.

4. Right click one of the text boxes, choose the Action Settings option to open a dialog box of the same name.

5. In the Mouse Click tab, select the Hyperlink to dropdown list and choose the Other PowerPoint Presentation option – and navigate to and choose the other presentation.

6. Repeat steps 3, 4, and 5 as often as required.

7. Save and test your menu presentation.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

PowerPoint Narrations show up as Unix Executables!

If some narrations in your PowerPoint:mac presentations don’t play, that might be because they somehow ended up being Unix executable files! Yesterday, I got this client presentation that had all the narrations, but PowerPoint would not play them because they were not the AIFFs that PowerPoint was expecting. So what is the solution? It’s not too difficult — you’ll need to download a free copy of Audacity for Mac.

1. Open Audacity and choose Project | Import Raw Data.

2. This will bring up the Finder — navigate to your Unix Executable file and click Open.

3. Audacity will bring up the Import Raw Data sheet — make sure you select the Two channels (stereo) option and set the sample rate to 44100 Hz. Then click Import.

4. Audacity will recreate your sound from the raw data — hear it to confirm that this is exactly what you need, then proceed to save it.

5. Choose File | Export as WAV and overwrite the existing Unix Executable file (do make a backup of that file first as a precaution).

6. Audacity will add the WAV extension anyway — you might want to remove the extension in Finder and check if the narration plays well inside PowerPoint. If it doesn’t, just delete the sound icon on the slide that contained the narration, and re-insert the narration using the Inserts | Movies & Sounds | Sound from File option.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

PowerPoint for Windows Versions

Can you please provide me with a list of PowerPoint versions with their corresponding version numbers – for example Version 10 = PowerPoint 2002?

Here are the corresponding versons:

Version 11 – PowerPoint 2003
Version 10 – PowerPoint 2002
Version 9 – PowerPoint 2000
Version 8 – PowerPoint 97
Version 7 – PowerPoint 95
Version 4 – PowerPoint 4
Version 3 – PowerPoint 3
Version 2 – PowerPoint 2

There were no versions 5 and 6 of PowerPoint since Microsoft wanted all components of Office 95 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access) to share the same version. Since the last version of Word before that was 6, all Office applications included in Office 95 became version 7.

And PowerPoint was a Mac product ported to Windows only after version 2 – so there was no version 1.

Anyway, most of this is historic – you’ll rarely stumble across a presentation created in anything older than PowerPoint 97 (i.e. version 8).

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Start a PowerPoint Presentation Without Clicking

Is it possible to make your presentation start by clicking on the Spacebar key only, but without unplugging your mouse?

This certainly seems doable, and PowerPoint MVP David Marcovitz provides a solution. Follow these steps:

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed Under: Techniques
Tagged as: David Marcovitz, Interactivity

Windows Media Player, Ripping and DRM

Many times, you want to rip some tracks off a music CD and play it within your PowerPoint presentation, maybe as a background score that plays throughout the presentation. However, you might find that PowerPoint refuses to play those tracks! What is happening here?

Especially if you use Windows Media Player to rip the CDs, the real culprit might be DRM, which stands for Digital Rights Management and is a concept promoted by the music industry to prevent illegal distribution of their content. So, what’s DRM doing inside PowerPoint? That’s a good question – and DRM fits right into the PowerPoint world since most PowerPoint presentations are intended to be shown and distributed anyway.

However, I’ve ripped MP3s from music CDs using the new Windows Media Player 10 and no DRM is added to that – so why do some tracks get controlled by DMA and other don’t?

PowerPoint MVP Austin Myers throws some insight into whatever is happening behind the scenes:

Windows Media Player doesn’t add anything to it unless you tell it to. There are several “levels” of DRM built on newer music CDs and Windows Media Player simply passes them along into the ripped file. What can or cannot be done with it after that point depends upon how the content creator set DRM in the original file. In most cases you can rip to your machine for private use, but you cannot use it in a distribution application like PowerPoint (or BitTorrent).

Thank you, Austin.

Austin Myers creates a PowerPoint add-in that helps you shoo away your multimedia woes in PowerPoint. It is called PFCMedia and you can download a trial copy from his site…

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