Building Presentations for Distribution to Others

If you’re making a PowerPoint presentation that you intend to distribute to lots of different people, here are some important things to watch out for that will cause problems:

1. Stick with the fonts that come installed with Windows; Fancy fonts that appear on your machine will cause problems if everyone else doesn’t have them.
2. Avoid embedding sounds and videos: these will not go from Mac to Windows gracefully, and you have to be very careful about how you insert the files in order to get them to “travel” properly.
3. Try looking at the presentation on a different platform (Mac vs Windows); be prepared for some visual changes in your file–the version or platform may not support some of the features you’ve put in, so be sure to sanity check your file on several different machines and versions BEFORE you distribute it!