PowerPoint Tricks

Here are a few Powerpoint tricks that can either save your time or make your work easy.

Opening the Slideshow in a separate window:
Sometimes when you’ve started a slide-show in full-screen and realise that it needs some tweaking, you have to stop the show, change the slide, start the show again, and then look for another slide that needs changing.

Instead, when you start a slide-show, hold down [Ctrl] and click the Slide Show button at the bottom left of the screen or View >Slide Show.

This opens the slide show in a separate, smaller window, so you can easily switch between the presentation and the show.

Take your PowerPoint with you:
Working on a colleague or friend’s PC? You don’t need to waste time tweaking PowerPoint preferences to get everything the way you want it - all your PowerPoint settings are in this file:

C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Microsoft\PowerPoint\PPT##.pcb (where ## is the PowerPoint version number you have installed.)

Simply carry this file around and place it in the same folder on the new machine, now PowerPoint is just the way you like it. Do remember to back up your friend’s settings file, though.

Changing between .PPS and .PPT:
You can save your presentation as a PowerPoint Show (.pps) if you want the slideshow to start as soon as you open the file. But if you want to edit some parts of the show in Powerpoint, all you need to do is rename the file with the .ppt extension. Windows will warn you that the file might become unusable-ignore this. It even works vice-versa - if you rename a .ppt to .pps, the presentation now starts the slideshow directly.

Include a Flash movie in your presentation:
You can include a Flash movie in your presentation. Right-click on the PowerPoint toolbar and select Control Toolbox. At the bottom-right corner of the toolbox, click on the More Controls button and scroll down to select ‘Shockwave Flash Object’ to insert your Flash movie.

Replacing Fonts:
If you want to quickly change the theme of your presentation, the first thing you should do is replace older fonts with new ones. Go to Format>Replace Fonts, and choose which font should replace which. Only the fonts will change, the formatting will remain intact.

Photo Albums in PowerPoint:
Want to make a slide show out of your photo collection? It’s quite simple: go to Insert>Picture>New Photo Album dialog box, to add a picture from a file or disk. Under 'Insert picture from', select File/Disk. Locate the folder or disk that contains the pictures, select the ones you want, and click Insert. If you want to format your photo album later, go to Format > Photo Album.