The Tribe of Adminsa home for wayward admins

This is just a small start on a PowerPoint wiki. Send in your questions and tips!

1.  Q:  Sometimes when I import a slide from another presentation and tell it keep the source formatting, it only keeps part of it – the color scheme will be right, but the text boxes will be mis-sized. What’s up with that?

A: I’ve found one possible solution and two workarounds to that:

The presentation that you imported the slides from may have custom sized pages. Go to the original presentation. Under File, choose “Page Setup.” Note the page size. Make sure that yours matches. If you have to change it, close and reopen PowerPoint afterwards.

Workaround 1: Close PowerPoint and reopen it. Sometimes everything works after you do this.

Workaround 2: In the original slide show, select all. Optional: On the drawing toolbar, choose Draw, then Group. Create a new slide in your new presentation and select “Paste Special” from the “Edit” menu. Use the first selection: “MS Office Drawing Object.” This should paste it as you see it. Doing the optional step of grouping it makes a little more likely to keep its size and allows you to resize as a whole if it doesn’t.

2. Q: Why did my screen go black in the middle of my presentation?

A: Mortifying, isn’t it? If your presentation sits still for too long while your speaker blathers on, the screen goes black. It’s a power-saving function. One solution is to move your mouse around, but this could be somewhat distracting to the audience and oh-by-the-way make you look like an idiot.

The better solution is this: find your computer’s settings (Windows XP: Start>Control Panel; Mac: Apple> System Preferences). Where it is in there varies by system, but you’ll find something like “Energy Saver” and “Desktop and Screensaver” or “Display.” You need to set both the energy saver and the screensaver to “never.”

You did all that and it still happened? Some built-in projectors have energy-savers, too. Ask your facilities team about it before your presentation. You may need to add a slide you can move to in slow times, or a very slow, very subtle animation – though this doesn’t always work – it’s the failure to change slides that triggers the screensaver, so be sure you know the details. You may just have to sit there wiggling your mouse. Stand on your dignity.

3. Q: Is there any way I can make my presentations smaller so I can email them?

A: Depending on what’s in your presentation, you can make them significantly smaller.

1. The first thing you can do is compress the size of any pictures in your presentation. If you have a newer version of PowerPoint, you can do them all at once. In Mac, do a “Save as,” choose “Options” and check the “Compress Graphics Files” box. You can choose an image quality at that point. In Windows, open your picture tool bar and click on the icon of the picture with arrows pointing in at it. If your presentation will only be viewed on screen, you can save images to the lowest resolution.
2. Another thing you can do is format your pictures as JPG or PNG in the first place. They will take up less room than TIFF or GIF files. There’s an easy way to change the format here. You could remove the pictures from an existing presentation, reformat them to JPG or PNG, replace them, and then re-save your document, but what a pain!
3. If pictures aren’t your problem, you can compress your file with WinZip in Windows or StuffIt in either Mac or Windows.
4. You can save your presentation as a PDF. This is for presentations that have no sound, animations, or transitions – think of it as a print document; you are “publishing it” to PDF. During the “Save As PDF” process (under the File menu in older versions and Mac; under the Office Button in 2007) you’ll be given an “Optimize For” choice. One of your options will be to optimize for email or smaller size.
5. If you have a really huge presentation, it will still be pretty big. One thing you might look into is FTP clients. They are really quite simple to use once you get the hang of it, and you can get one for free or very little. The rub is that you have to have a website. I use Transmit.
6. The very simplest solution is to sign up for free online storage at some place like Mozy or MediaFire. You will upload your presentation to the storage site (you won’t even know that you’re using an FTP client to do it! ) and then just send a link and the log-in information to your email contacts.