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Info-things on PowerPoint usage including tips, techniques and tutorials.
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PowerPoint and Presenting Notes
PowerPoint and Presenting Glossary
Is it possible to save sound clips within the Clip Art Gallery and Task Pane onto a CD or hard drive?
If you are using PowerPoint 97 or 2000, you can drag the clips you need from Clip Gallery to the desktop.
PowerPoint 2002 and 2003 users can drag the clips off the Clip Art task pane to the desktop.
Once the clips are on the desktop, you can burn them on a CD.
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I am bringing a text placeholder onto a slide one bullet point at a time. However, my slides are pictures so I need to fill the text placeholder background with white fill. Is there a way to bring in the fill color with the bullet points so the audience sees only the unobstructed picture first then the text and white fill background for the text in the placeholder as I bring it in?
1. Create a new text box for every bullet you require. Make sure your text boxes have white fills and black text as you need. You might even want to experiment with the transparency of the fill if you are using PowerPoint 2002 and 2003 – you’ll find all these options in the Format dialog box – to access this dialog box, just double-click the text box.
2. Then line up all the text boxes so that they appear to be a single text placeholder.
3. Animate each text box in succession so that the bullets build one after the other.
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Here’s a real stumper. I’ve been trying to figure this one out for a while. How can you edit the text shadow inside of a ‘callout’. It seems to be locked. I’ve tried dropping text inside, highlighting text, changing the slide design settings, replacing all fonts in the presentation, you name it. Once again a problem that seems to be simple but is rather perplexing. I can’t figure out why callouts don’t have the same level of editing control that a simple text box has.
Shadows are influenced by two options:
1. Select the text and click the Shadow icon on the Drawing toolbar. Then click Shadow Settings to open the Shadow Settings toolbar. The last icon on this toolbar lets you change the shadow color.
2. Select the text and then choose Format | Font – if the Shadow option is selected, deselect it and work with the option 1.
It looks like text in an AutoShape (such as a callout) can only have shadows using option 2 though unless:
The base shadow settings give you a default background color. Remove the background color (i.e. no fill in the format autoshape window) and the callout text will perform just like any other textual text box.
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Let us assume you received or created a presentation in a version earlier than PowerPoint 2003 for Windows (97, 2000, 2002). You probably have fonts embedded within the presentation.
Now you open it in PowerPoint 2003, and you find you cannot edit the presentation. PowerPoint tells you that “This presentation cannot be edited because it contains a read-only embedded font.”
Why does this happen? Is there a solution?
Let’s start at the very beginning by discussing font licensing. Fonts are created by various companies, commonly known as font foundries. Some of these companies do not mind if their fonts are embedded in presentations. Others do not like that idea too much. To identify which fonts allow embedding or otherwise, most fonts have some code attached to them which allows an application to know whether the font can be embedded or not. If you want to know if a particular font allows embedding, you can download Microsoft’s free Font Properties Extension.
PowerPoint on Windows has always enabled font embedding and versions before 2003 allowed you to open and view presentations even if you did not have the actual restricted and embedded fonts installed on a local machine. You could then replace the fonts and edit the presentation as required, and finally, save the presentation to a new file.
In PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft implemented an algorithm that does not allow you to edit any presentation that contains a restricted, embedded font that is not installed on your system. You cannot even replace the fonts and save a presentation to a new file.
Not surprisingly, this creates so many issues for users of PowerPoint everywhere.
Here are some solutions:
Hopefully, one of these solutions will help you solve this problem, and PowerPoint will no longer complain, “This presentation cannot be edited because it contains a read-only embedded font.”
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Troubleshooting
Tagged as: Embed, Fonts, PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2003
I have slides with questions that need to be answered. If users provide the correct answer, they should be shown the next question slide. On the other hand, users who respond with the wrong answer should be made to go back to the last question to retry.
I could insert “correct” and “incorrect” slides between each question slide and triple my presentation file size. Can I do it with only only one “correct” and one “incorrect” slide for the entire presentation?
Kathy Jacobs, PowerPoint MVP provides a solution:
1. Put the “correct” and “incorrect” slides at the end of the show and hide them.
2. Now, set up two Custom Shows (Slide Show | Custom Show), one for the correct slide and one for the incorrect slide.
3. Set the “correct” and “incorrect” hyperlinks to the shows instead of the slides. When you set the hyperlinks up this way, you will get an extra option “Show and Return”. Activate it by checking the box for each link.
4. When you run the show, the appropriate slide will come up. On the next click, it will close and you will return to the main presentation. Since the actual slides reside at the end of your presentation, but are hidden, they will never play except when called via the Custom Show.
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