Showing Off a Presentation

The whole point of creating a PowerPoint presentation is to show it off to an audience. So PowerPoint provides some handy Hollywood-style special effects to make your presentation look more interesting to your eyes and ears. PowerPoint also provides features for creating handouts for your audience. Because people often want to take notes during an interesting presentation (or just doodle during a really boring presentation), PowerPoint can create handouts that you can print and distribute.

Spell-Checking Your Presentation

You could have the best presentation in the world, but it will look like the worst presentation in the world if you have misspellings and typos on your slides for everyone to snicker at. To prevent this problem from occurring, PowerPoint can spell-check your entire presentation. PowerPoint automatically underlines all misspelled words with a red squiggly line. If you right-click any word underlined with a red squiggly line, a pop-up menu appears with a list of correctly spelled alternatives that you can choose. To spell-check your entire presentation, follow these steps:

1. Click the Review tab.

2. Click the Spelling icon.

3. Choose one of the following for each word that PowerPoint highlights as misspelled:

• Change: Click the correct spelling of the word and then click Change. (Click Change All to change all identical misspellings throughout your presentation.)

• Ignore All: Click Ignore All to ignore all instances of that word throughout your presentation.

• Add: Click Add to add the word to the PowerPoint dictionary so it won’t flag the word as misspelled again.

4. Click Close to stop spell-checking. PowerPoint won’t recognize technical terms, proper names, or correctly spelled words used incorrectly, such as using the word there instead of their, so it’s a good idea to proofread your presentation yourself.

Adding Visual Transitions

Transitions define how slides or part of a slide (text or graphics) appear during your presentation. By default, slides appear one at a time with all the text and graphics displayed at once, which can get monotonous.

To spice up your presentation, PowerPoint offers two types of transitions:

 Text and picture transitions

Use transitions sparingly. Transitions may be visually interesting, but you don’t want your transitions to be distracting.

Adding slide transitions

Slide transitions can make a slide appear to melt or break into multiple pieces that slip away, revealing the next slide underneath. When creating a transition, you need to define the following:  The actual visual appearance of the transition  The speed of the transition (Slow, Medium, or Fast)  Any sound effects you want to play during the transition (these can get really annoying, so use them sparingly)  When to display the transition (after a certain time period or when you click the mouse) To create a slide transition, follow these steps:

1. Click a slide (in the Slide or Outline view pane). Any transition you choose will end by displaying the slide you choose in this step.

2. Click the Animations tab.

3. Click the More button of the Transition To This Slide group. A pull-down menu appears listing all the different transitions available . If you move the mouse over a transition, PowerPoint shows you what that transition will look like on your chosen slide.

4. Click the transition you want.

5. (Optional) Click in the Transition Sound list box and choose a sound, such as Cash Register or Drum Roll.

6. (Optional) Click in the Transition Speed list box and choose a speed (Slow, Medium, or Fast).

7. (Optional) Select the Automatically After or the On Mouse Click check box. If you select the Automatically After check box, you have to specify a time in the Automatically After text box for the slide to wait before running the transition.

You can select both the On Mouse Click and Automatically After check boxes, so the slide transition waits until you click the mouse or until a certain amount of time passes.

8. (Optional) Click Apply to All to apply your transitions to every slide in your presentation.

Applying the same transition throughout your presentation can give your slide show a consistent look, but it’s best for only simple, visual transitions and not for transitions that involve noisy sound effects that get tedious after a while.

Text transitions

Besides animating how your slides appear and disappear, you can also add transitions to your text boxes or graphics so they fly or drop into place across a slide. Use text transitions sparingly because the transitions can get distracting when people just want to read your presentation without having to watch letters zoom around the screen. To create a simple text transition, follow these steps:

1. Click a text box or picture on a slide. PowerPoint displays handles around your chosen item.

2. Click the Animations tab.

3. Click the Animate list box in the Animations group.

4. Click an animation, such as Fly In or Wipe. PowerPoint animates your text so you can see how it looks.

Adding Hyperlinks For greater flexibility in presenting information, PowerPoint lets you add hyperlinks to your slides. Hyperlinks let you open a Web page (provided you have an Internet connection), a file (such as a Word document), another slide in your current presentation, or a program. By adding hyperlinks to your slides, you can display additional information or display slides out of order.

Creating Web page hyperlinks

A Web page hyperlink lets you convert text into a hyperlink that can load your default browser and display any Web site. When you exit the browser (or just switch back to PowerPoint), you can see your slide again and continue with your presentation. By accessing a Web site, you can avoid copying data and pasting it on a slide. For example, if you’re giving a presentation about advertising, you can create Web page hyperlinks to show how your competitors use the Internet to advertise and sell their products. To create a Web page hyperlink, follow these steps:

1. Highlight the text in a title or subtitle text box that you want to turn into a Web page hyperlink.

2. Click the Insert tab.

3. Click the Hyperlink icon in the Links group.

4. Click in the Address text box and type a Web site address, such as www.microsoft.com.

5. Click OK. PowerPoint underlines the text you selected in Step 1. When you view your presentation, PowerPoint turns the mouse pointer into a hand icon when you move the mouse over the hyperlink.