PowerPoint Templates

Prior to PowerPoint 97, there was no internal file compression code inside of PowerPoint, and files could get pretty big quickly. The most common cause of large files is the addition of large bitmaps. PowerPoint 97 compresses these bitmaps, but previous versions do not. To keep your presentations as small as you can, try reducing the resolution of your bitmaps, which will bring your size down tremendously. For viewing on screen, the bitmaps don’t need to be more than 96 dpi; they won’t print nicely until they’re up around 150 or higher, but the screen always displays at 96 dpi, so if the primary viewing medium is the screen, there’s no point in having the bitmaps be a higher resolution. Also, the bitmap format can make a big difference to your file sizes. JPEG and PNG both have good internal compression code. GIF has some, but not as good as JPEG. BMP files are the largest; TIFF files will also be very large.

PowerPoint Tips & Tricks

Following are the some useful Tips & Tricks of PowerPoint.

Save Your Fonts with Your Presentation:-
If you’re preparing a presentation that you plan to distribute to others, be sure that you check this option by clicking on the Tools button in the File/Save As dialog box. This will work for most TrueType fonts on the Windows platform.

Saving Your Toolbar Configurations:-
If you like to customize your UI, move toolbars around, configure toolbars, etc, then you’ll want to know that all this information is stored in c:\windows\application data\microsoft\powerpoint\ppt.pcb
By copying this file, you can move your customizations to other machines.

Displaying Keyboard Shortcuts in Tool Tips:-
If you’d like to see the available keyboard shortcuts for menus, commands, and toolbar buttons, go to Tools/Customize, click on the Options tab, and click on “show shortcut keys in screen tips”.

Preview Fonts in the Toolbar:-
If you’d like to see previews of the actual fonts in the font selection of the formatting toolbar, go to Tools/Customize, click on the Options tab, and click “List font names in their font”, click Close.

Making Auto-Fit Text Stop Auto-Fitting:-
Turn this feature off by going to Tools/Options, click on the Edit tab, and uncheck “autofit text to text placeholder”, click OK.

Using Ctrl-Drag to Copy:-
You can quickly make a copy of any object by holding down the CTRL key while you drag on the object. You will then “drag off” a new copy.

Making Slides Print Correctly:-
PowerPoint has certain defaults to determine how it prints each object on the page. You can see over-ride these defaults. Go to View/Black and White; this will show you a gray-scale preview of how your slide will print. To change the print settings for any given object, right-click on it, then click “Black and White”, and then choose the appropriate print option for that object. Master objects can be selected by going to the Master page View.

Preview Slide Show Effects:-
While editing a presentation, hold down the CTRL key while clicking the slide show view button; this will open a tiny preview window showing that slide in slide show mode.

Setting the Default Text Style:-
If you want to change the style of the text that appears when you type things that aren’t the title or the slide body, do the following:
* Make sure no objects are selected.
* From the Format menu, select Font. Make all the changes that you want there, and click OK.
* From that point on, new text will be created in that style.
* To set the formatting for the title or slide body objects, go to the Slide
Master and format these objects on the masters.

Selecting Small Objects:-
Hit the ESCAPE key to insure that nothing is current selected, then repeatedly hit the TAB key, which will toggle you through a selection of all of the objects on a slide. This is useful for selecting very small objects, or objects that are covered up by other larger objects.

Editing Drawings:-
Anything you draw with the pencil tool, you can edit. To get the object into “points mode”, either double-click on the object, or select it then hit the Enter key. You will then see points at every vertex, which you can move. You can add points by holding down the shift key and clicking, you can subtract points by holding down the ALT key while clicking and you can of course just drag points around.

Easily Changing from Caps to Lower Case (or Vice Versa):-
If you have text that is in the wrong case, select the text, and then click Shift+F3 until it changes to the case style that you like. Clicking Shift+F3 toggles the text case between ALL CAPS, lower case, and Initial Capital styles. You’ll be surprised how often you use this once you get the hang of it.!