Setting the Default Font
How can I change the default font in PowerPoint so that all new
slides automatically use this font?
- Within a single presentation:
View | Master | Slide Master and make your font changes there,
then close the Slide Master
- For all future presentations (based on the "Blank Presentation"
template):
- View the Slide Master as above and make your changes
(before actually creating any slides)
- File | Save As... | change the type to Design Template and
name the file "Blank Presentation" (no quotes)
- This will create a Blank Presentation.pot file in your profile
that will be used whenever you create a new blank presentation.
Make Some Notes
Use the PowerPoint View | Notes feature to create presentation notes for yourself associated with each slide.
Presentation Options
You have many options while running the presentation from PowerPoint:
- Next slide -- mouse click, or keyboard (N, Space, Right Arrow, Down Arrow, or PgDn)
- Previous slide -- keyboard (P, Left Arrow, Up Arrow, or PgUp)
- End show -- [Esc]
- Press "B" for a black screen
- Press "W" for a white screen
- Enter the number of a slide and press enter to go directly to that slide. (You might print out a preview list of your slides and number them so you know what number goes with which slide.)
- Hold both mouse buttons down for 2 seconds to jump to the first slide.
- To avoid distractions to the audience, you can place a black slide at the end of you presentation (and anywhere in the presentation that you intend to pause for discussion, white board work, etc). To automatically have the presentation end with a black slide, use the menu choices Tools, Options. Go the the View tab, and check the "End with Black Slide" option in the slide show box.
- Right-click with the mouse brings up a menu of great options
- Next and Previous (useful and obvious)
- Pointer Options | Hide Always (keeps the mouse pointer from showing up if you move the mouse)
- Arrow (gives you the mouse pointer)
- Pen (gives you the "telestrator" pen)
- Go | By Title (very useful for jumping to a particular point in the show, could use Slide Navigator, too)
- Screen | Black Screen (might be useful if you wanted to interrupt your presentation without having a visual distracting your audience) -- a mouse click or keyboard stroke brings back the screen
Printing Options
When you print (use File | Print) use the Print What drop down and notice the options you have -- including multiple slides per page and the notes view with
one slide and its associated notes per page.
Saving and Showing the Presentation
Once you've finished editing your presentation, save the file with an extension of .PPS (File | Save As and change the file type). You can then use My Computer or the Explorer to browse to the file. Double-clicking on the filename will open PowerPoint in SlideShow mode at the first slide in your presentation. Alternatively, instead of double-clicking, right-click on the file in My Computer or the Explorer and choose Show.
Sizing an Image to Cover the Entire Slide
Insert | Picture | From File will let you place an image file on the current slide. If you want the image to cover the entire slide, you'll have to resize and crop the image to dimensions proportional to the slide dimensions. You can crop and resize the image in an image editor like IrfanView, Paint Shop Pro, or Photoshop before inserting the image or you can use Powerpoint tools to resize and crop.
Once the image has been inserted on the slide in Powerpoint, one technique would be to
- Click and drag the image to move it into position in one corner of the slide.
- Then resize the image so that the shortest dimension matches the slide and the other dimension slops beyond the edge of the slide. Be careful while resizing the picture not to destroy the aspect ratio and distort the image. (Click and drag a handle at one corner of the picture. Holding the [Shift] key down as you click and drag will preserve aspect ratio for all types of resizing in Powerpoint.)
- Now you can crop the part of the image that extends beyond the slide.
To crop the picture from within Powerpoint you'll need the Picture toolbar --
View | Toolbars | Picture
- When the floating Picture toolbar opens, click the cropping tool.
- Once you've clicked the cropping tool, position your mouse over a selection handle at the border of the image, and click and drag to crop using that handle.
If you're in a situation where you can't crop anything from your image to make it proportional to the slide dimensions, then you could set the slide size to the picture size in File | Page Setup. Of course this affects all the slides in the slide show. You could use branching (one show links to another, ...) to get around this problem. With the image open in an image editing program you should be able to determine the image dimensions.
PIXELS divided by RESOLUTION (dpi) equals INCHES
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