Slide Prep: FAQs

Please email Carla Otten, at the DAC Presentation Help Desk, with your QUESTIONS or HOT TIPS. Your question or tips might appear with a credit on this page!

     Make equations
     Make strategic line breaks
     Make transitions throughout the presentation
     Adapt your presentation to a different template
     Get rid of unwanted shadows
     Convert for black/white printing

… Make equations

• Change "style," "size," "define," "format," and "spacing" values directly in the equation editor. From then on all your formulas will adapt to these new settings whenever you open them in the equation editor again. Our preferred settings are as follows:
  style: "greek" and "symbol" = "symbol font", the rest all "arial font" (no bold, no italics)
  size: from top to bottom: 20-18-15-22-18
  spacing: top to bottom: 150%-150%-100%-45%-25%-25%

• After getting back into powerpoint you may want to resize the formula with the "format object", "size" command.

• Remove the background in the formula's and recolor them "format object", "picture", "recolor", so that they have the same color as the rest of the text.

• Copy an already made equation to make another one with the same specification.

… Make strategic line breaks

Very often you may want to break off a line at a different spot than where your textbox is allowing you to. You can do this by using the "shift -enter" key combination.

… Make transitions throughout the presentation

Go to the slide sorter view and select all "control-A". Choose a transition effect in the left top fill in box (choose one from the list you get when clicking the arrow next to it, preferably "dissolve") and hit enter.

… Adapt your presentation to a different template

There are many ways to change your presentation to a different template. If the one in the chapter "converting an existing presentation" doesn't work for you, try this one.

• Once you have chosen and downloaded a template, open it in slide sorter view.

• Go to your own presentation also in slide sorter view and select all of your slides (ctrl-A).

• Copy/paste them into the new template.

• In order to make sure that all the features will be applied do as follows:
  1) Still in "slide sorter" view select all the slides of the "bullet list" style together.
  2) Hit the button "slide layout" and choose "bullet list" and hit apply. Sometimes this is not enough and you have to do a "reapply" after that.
  3) Then select all the ones you didn't do yet and do the same but now you choose "title only".
  4) It is always the case that after applying a new design you have to pass through each slide separately and just hit the "slide layout" button, choose the respective style, and do a reapply.
  5) Those objects that were "recolored" (formula's, bitmaps) need to be recolored again if the base color is different.
  6) Save this changed presentation to a new name.
  7) Compare both versions by having them next to each other on the screen "Window arrange all" and go through each slide adjusting whatever seems to be incorrect in the new template.

  This may sound complicated, but once you start, you'll see it will be worth the effort.

… Get rid of unwanted shadows

Sometimes a new line or box provides you with unwanted shadows.

Get rid of those by pushing the "shadow yes/no" button. Then go to "draw" and click "set autoshape defaults".

… Convert for black/white printing

The supplied templates are made to print well in black and white when sticking to the 8 colors in the main pallet and when not importing bitmaps and/or formulas.

You can manually fine tune the black and white version of each slide in your presentation without changing anything in your colored version as follows:

• First change to black/white view (button on task bar).

• Go from slide to slide and select anything that needs changing it's black/white definition with the right button and experiment with the options in the black and white option from the list.

• You will have to do this for all the formula's as the white color you changed to with the "recolor" option will have to be changed to black in this way.

• One easy way to accomplish this for a very conmplex slide is to select everything on the slide (ctrl-A), then hit the right mouse button on one of the selected objects and choose "black with white fill" from the black and white option.