Introduction to Computer Concepts LAB 1 Presentations
Creating a Presentation with MS PowerPoint
The MS Office application for presentation graphics is called PowerPoint. It allows you to create an attractive computer slideshow suitable for display at a conference or printing for handouts for an audience. The slideshow can be shown directly on the computer screen to someone else or with an overhead projector to a large gathering. PowerPoint presentations can be made attractive and effective without much experience, since the software provides a large amount of help in the creation of slides. It contains templates for a variety of effects and purposes that you may use to give your presentation an individual flavor.
Getting Started
To start a new presentation, double-click the PowerPoint shortcut icon on the desktop. The application window opens with a new presentation document. If you want to open an existing presentation document simply click on File > Open from the menu toolbar. Then browse the directories for your file and click Open. Alternatively you may use the Open or New icons from the standard toolbar. Newer versions of MS Office, such as Office 2003 or later, have an additional task pane on the right-hand side, which was discussed in previous chapters. You may start a new file or open an existing one from there. Figure 1 shows the different ways to start or open a file.
Figure 1
Selecting a Slide Layout
A presentation document consists of a set of slides. Each slide may be formatted to have different graphical design, layout, and transition effects compared to the others to fit its contents best. In order to change all of these properties, you may right-click on a non-text area of the slide you are currently working on and click on the attribute you want to change or edit as shown in Figure 2. We will look at slide layout first.
To change the slide layout, which is the position and organization of text on your slide, right-click in a non-text area of the slide and click on Slide Layout. In the right task pane a set of available layouts that you may choose from will appear. Simply click on the one you want to apply the layout to the current slide.
Selecting a Slide Design
Slide design refers to the color, graphical design, and format scheme of the slide. There are many designs provided by PowerPoint that you may select from and modify to your liking. To change the slide design, right-click on a non-text area of the slide you wish to format and click Slide Design.
In the right task pane a set of options appear under three categories which you may choose from: Design Templates, Color Schemes, and Animation Schemes. Let’s start with design templates. Design templates include a set of graphical backgrounds to modify the appearance of your slide. You will see an arrow next to each design thumbnail when you hold the cursor over it. By clicking on the arrow, as shown in Figure 3, you will have the choice to apply the design to the current slide, all slides in the presentation, or all new presentations you create in the future.
You may also choose the color scheme for your slide(s) by clicking on the Color Scheme option which appears at the top of the task pane. This allows you to pick the colors you would like to use for different text elements of your slides. You may also edit the existing schemes to your liking. If you only want to change the background color of your slide and leave everything else intact, simply right-click on a non-text section of the slide and click Background and choose the color you wish to use.
Finally, to choose animation effects for the text on your slide click on the Animation Schemes option at the top of the task pane. This allows you to incorporated animated transitions for how the text appears on your slide. These effects can be applied to the current slide or all slides in your presentation as explained above for slide designs.
Working with Text Fields
The slide layout chosen is ready for a title and information to be added to the first slide where the slide says "Click to add title" and "Click to add text." You may add the first information onto your slide now. You can also edit the text using the formatting toolbar shown in Figure 4. It contains quick access to many text properties such as font size, style, alignment, bullets and numbering, indentation, and color to name a few.
Figure 4
In order to edit text content do one of the following depending on what you wish to achieve.
1. If you wish to edit the entire contents of a textbox, click on the border of the textbox to make it dotted. Any formatting you select from the formatting toolbar will be applied to everything contained in the textbox. You can also right-click after you have clicked on the border and choose from a longer set of options available to edit the textbox as shown in Figure 5. Some of these features are discussed in more detail below.
· Bullets and Numbering: This option allows you to select the shapes of bullets or the style of numbering if your text area contains bullets.
· Custom Animation: This option allows you to apply custom transition effects to the textbox selected. As shown in figure 5, in the right task pane a button labeled Add Effect will appear. By clicking on the arrow on it’s right corner, a menu for a choice of effects will appear from which you can choose effects you want
· Format Placeholder: This option contains attributes such as size, colors and lines, and position.
· Font: This option has a few more attributes of text to format beyond what is provided on the formatting toolbar shown in Figure 4.
2. If you wish to format only a specific word or phrase in the textbox, simply highlight the desired text and apply editing as detailed above.
3. You can edit bullets and numbering on an individual basis by placing the cursor on the line that contains that bullet, then do a right-click and select Bullets and Numbering to format features as detailed above. A quick way to increase or decrease bullet indentation to create an outline is to use the Tab key on the keyboard. Pressing tab demotes (increases indent) the bullet by one level, while pressing SHIFT+ Tab does the opposite. PowerPoint adjusts the text size as you decrease or increase the indent appropriately to give a feel of a multilevel outline. You may reverse this automatic change by changing the font size.
Inserting a New Slide
Choose Insert Slide or Duplicate Slide from the menu toolbar to create a new slide. In case of the duplicate slide, you will get a slide that has the same content and formatting as the previous slide. This is useful if you want to apply the same formatting to your new slide with different content. Once you have created the duplicate slide, you can then change the content as you wish.
Moving between Slides During Construction
By default (in PowerPoint 2003) there is a Slides window, shown in Figure 6, that appears to the left of the screen which shows sequentially all the slides you have created so far. You may wish to close this window. To get it back, click on View on the menu toolbar and then Normal which restores all default task panes and windows. From the Slides window you may reorder your slides by clicking on the slide you want to move and dragging it between a pair of slides where you want to position it.
At the bottom of this window, there are also a set of other types of views you may choose: the slide sorter view and the slide show. The slide sorter view eliminated the full size version of the slides and allows you to view a sequential thumbnail view of the slides you have created. You may move the slides as detailed above. Also, you can incorporate slide transition effects. Transition effects are the manner in which slides appear on the screen as you move from one slide to another during the slide show. To change the transition effects, click on the specific slide you want and then choose Transition from the formatting toolbar ash shown in Figure 7. In the right task pane, a set of transition effect options will appear which you may apply to the specific slide chose or all slides in your presentation. Some of the options available for editing are the transition effect, speed of transition, and event upon which the transition must take place.
Finally, to view your slides as they will appear during the show, click on Slide Show. This option is available at the bottom of the page as shown in Figures 6 and 7 or you may access it by clicking View followed by Slide Show from the menu toolbar. Immediately the presentation is launched with the current slide filling the screen. To move from one slide to the next, the usual action is clicking the mouse or depressing the spacebar on the keyboard. To stop the slide show at any time, hit the Escape key at the upper left of the keyboard.
Deleting Slides
To delete a slide make it the currently visible one, then click Edit Delete Slide from the main menu toolbar. Slides can also be deleted in Slide Sorter View using the Delete key.
Working with Graphics and Image Files
Some of the slide templates have a field for graphics. Or graphic fields may be laid directly on any text field, in effect layering objects on top of other objects. The graphics themselves may be created externally and imported through the clipboard or made directly in PowerPoint using the graphic tools that are provided in the program (drawing tools).
You can also download an image from the Internet or scan a photograph and place it on a slide. Just be sure to keep up with where a file saved from the Internet is stored in the appropriate folder so that when you choose Insert > Picture > From File you will be able to browse and find it. Perhaps some Clipart in the gallery will fit your slide needs. If your slide layout already has a placeholder for an image, you may click on the desired image type provided in a toolbar in the placeholder after which a selection window will appear depending on the image type you selected. Figure 8 shows an image placeholder. The types of images available in the toolbar from top left are tables, charts, clipart, picture from file, organization chart, and media clip. When the item has been placed on the slide, you will notice that a toolbar called Picture appears that has editing choices. There are many attributes you may edit including color, contrast, brightness, rotation, and even recolor the image for some types of images.
Working with Charts
If you select to insert a chart as a graphical element, an automatic sample chart will be inserted on your slide as shown in Figure 9. However, a datasheet window will appear that allows you to modify the data used to construct the chart. The colors used in the chart adhere to the slide color scheme you have chosen. If at a later time you want to view the datasheet to edit the chart data, simply double-click on the chart.
Saving Your Presentation
Besides showing your presentation and printing handouts and notes, you have numerous options for exporting your completed presentation for others to see. You can save it in several formats: for use as a PowerPoint file, as a PowerPoint file, or as HTML suitable for viewing with a Web browser. As you might expect, saving a file as either PowerPoint or PowerPoint show is done by choosing the format under File > Save As.
To make the presentation into an HTML file means exporting it as HTML. You have several decisions to make in the HTML format so that a viewer can move easily from one slide to another. To begin, choose File > Save as Web Page from the main menu toolbar. This brings up a dialog box for giving the file a new name. Your file will be stored with a “.htm” extension so that you may use it as a webpage which can be viewed by a web browser. Once you open the file in a browser, the presentation will appear as shown in Figure 10. As shown in the figure, there are various ways to navigate between slides including running a slide show as you could with a normal presentation file. If you wish to edit this presentation, open the file from PowerPoint (i.e. start PowerPoint first and then open the file). You will be able to format all aspects of the file.
1