PowerPoint Tips
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Return to First Slide During a Presentation
For one reason or another, you may find that you need to return to the first slide in your presentation while it's running in Slide Show view. To do so, just press [Home]. This is much quicker than using the mouse and can be easily hidden from the audience. Also, if you know the number of the slide, you can type that number and press [Enter] to go to that slide.

AutoShape Defaults
If you plan on using a specific fill color, line color, line style, or shadow for each AutoShape in a presentation, you can set these attributes as AutoShape defaults. This means that each AutoShape you create will automatically use these attributes. To do this, select an AutoShape that you'd like to set defaults for. Now, click the Draw button on the Drawing toolbar and choose Set AutoShape Defaults. Each shape you create will use these same attributes, even if you change these attributes for another AutoShape.

Create Connector Lines Between Objects
You can easily create flowcharts or other connected object schemes using PowerPoint's Connectors feature. PowerPoint's Connectors feature enables you to connect AutoShapes, text boxes, WordArt, clip art--even OLE objects. To do so, first insert, modify, and position at least two drawing or OLE objects as you want them to appear on your slide. Next, display the Drawing toolbar (if it isn't displayed already) by right-clicking on any open toolbar and selecting Drawing from the resulting shortcut menu. To connect two objects, choose AutoShapes/Connectors from the Drawing toolbar. Select the connector tool you'd like to use, then position the pointer over one of the objects you'd like to connect. When you do, the pointer changes to a connector icon, and the object's connector handles are displayed in blue. Place the pointer over the connector handle you'd like to connect from, then click the mouse button once. Now, place the pointer over the connector handle of the object you'd like to connect to, then click the mouse button again. When you do, PowerPoint inserts a connector line between the objects' connector handles. If you decide that you'd like to rearrange the location of the connected objects, simply drag them to the desired location--the connectors stay in place and adjust their path accordingly.

Copy Images
To make multiple copies of an object, hold down the Ctrl key while you drag away as many copies as you need. To see how this works, run PowerPoint and open a blank slide. Choose Insert, Picture, ClipArt. Select a picture and click Insert. Press and hold Ctrl while you drag a copy of the object to a new location. You can repeat this as often as needed. Just keep holding down Ctrl and dragging away copies. This works in all Office programs.

Drag and Drop PowerPoint Slides
In PowerPoint, you can drag and drop slides from one presentation to another. To do this, choose File/Open to open two different presentation windows. Now, choose Window/Arrange All and PowerPoint automatically tiles the presentations so that both are visible. Next, change both of the windows to Slide Sorter view. This makes the transferring process much easier. To transfer slides, simply click and hold on the slide you'd like to move and drag that slide into the other presentation.

Draw and Erase During PowerPoint Slide Shows
You can use the shortcut command Ctrl+P to access the Pen tool during a slide show. Click your mouse and drag to use the Pen tool to draw on the slide during your slide show. To erase everything you've drawn, press the E key.

Change the Colors of Your Textures in PowerPoint
Textures make great backgrounds for PowerPoint slides. Unfortunately, there aren't many standard PowerPoint textures to choose from. This can pose a problem, especially if you're looking for a specific color. If you want to change the color of a background texture, use the Rectangle tool to draw a rectangle that fills the entire slide. Next, choose No Line from the Line Color dropdown list. Then, click on the Fill Color dropdown list and select More Fill Colors. Choose a color from the Standard or Custom Color palette. As soon as you find the right color for your background fill, select the Semitransparent check box located in the bottom-left corner. When you've finished, click OK. The semitransparent rectangle changes the color of your original texture background. You can change any texture fill using the same procedure, just as long as you make a copy of the shape containing that texture and place it on top with a semitransparent color.

Create Scrolling Credits in PowerPoint
You can create a scrolling list of credits in PowerPoint. To do this, you create a text box, add text, and place the text box above the PowerPoint slide you want your credits to scroll across. Once you position your text, you can use the Custom Animation feature's Crawl From Bottom effect to animate your credits. When you run your slide show, the credits will scroll from the bottom of the screen and disappear when they run off the top.

Create a Panoramic View in PowerPoint
Nowadays everything uses a wide screen view, including DVDs and video games. So why not follow the leader and create your own panoramic slide views in your PowerPoint presentations? You can add Panoramic slides to an entire presentation by changing the height of your slides in Page Setup. To do so, choose File/Page Setup to open the Page Setup dialog box. Change the number in the Height box to 4 inches and then click OK. Your slides are now set up as a Panoramic view. You can add elements to these slides just as you would a normal 10 x 7.5-inch slide.

Black the Screen During a Slide Show
There are times when you need to pause during a slide show; for example, you may need to answer some unexpected questions. When you pause your slide show, you may not want to leave a slide in view. So just set the screen to black. Just press B, and PowerPoint will display a completely black screen. To get back to your current slide, press B again. You can also turn the screen white if you prefer. Just press W to turn it white and W again to return.

Creating Hand-drawn Effects in PowerPoint
To produce a hand-drawn effect in PowerPoint, select a clip art image and ungroup the selection to turn it into a drawing object. Once you ungroup the image, immediately regroup it. Once you regroup your image, choose Format/Object to open the Format Object dialog box. Next, select the Colors And Lines tab and choose Fill Effects from the Fill Color dropdown menu. Now, select the Gradient tab in the Fill Effect dialog box and choose the One Color option button in the Colors areas. Then, choose a color from the Color 1 dropdown menu and use the Dark/Light slider to adjust the gradient. Click OK when you've finished to return to the Format Object dialog box. Click OK in the Format Object dialog box to return to PowerPoint and see your hand-drawn image.

A PowerPoint Visual Effect
Run PowerPoint and open a blank slide. Choose Insert, Picture, ClipArt and select a scenery type of picture (although any picture will do). Click the picture to select it and size it to fill the entire slide. Next, choose Draw, Ungroup. Say Yes to convert the image to a Microsoft Office Drawing Object. Then, leaving all the picture elements selected, choose Draw, Group. Then click the down arrow to the left of the Paint Can and choose Fill Effects.

In the Fill Effects dialog box, click the Gradient tab and then select the Two Colors radio button. Select two light colors for Color 1 and Color 2. After you make the color selection, click OK to close the dialog box and apply the color selection. Experiment with different color combinations such as black and white, or black and red.

Change Clip Art Colors in PowerPoint
If you want to quickly change the colors in a clip art object, so that the colors in your image coordinate with the color scheme of your presentation, you can use PowerPoint's Recolor feature. To quickly access this feature, right-click on your clip art image and select Format Object from the resulting shortcut menu. Next, select the Picture Tab and click the Recolor button. Now you can easily adjust the colors of your clip art image using the Recolor Picture dialog box. To preview your changes, click the Preview button.

Make PowerPoint Slides From an Outline
You can create a PowerPoint slide show from a Word outline. Just create your outline using a standard outline format. Run PowerPoint and open a blank slide. Choose Insert, Slides From Outline. When the Insert Outline dialog box appears, find your Word file and double-click it. Each Heading 1 title becomes the title of a slide. With the slides created, you can now supply the graphics and any additional text you require.

Printing PowerPoint Slides
If you need to print only certain slides from a slide show, there is an easier way than printing them one at a time. Choose View, Slide Sorter. Then click the first slide you want to print and hold down Shift while you click the remaining slides you wish to print. Once you've selected your slides, choose File, Print. When the Print dialog box opens, select the button labeled Selection and click OK to begin printing.

Hiding slides in PowerPoint (97,2000)
To hide a slide during a presentation, first click the Slide Sorter View button or choose Slide Sorter from the View menu. Click on the slide you want to hide and click the Hide Slide button on the Slide Sorter toolbar. After you hide the slide, PowerPoint encloses the slide number in a box with a diagonal line through it. Now that you've hidden a slide, PowerPoint will skip it during the actual slide show unless you choose to display it. If you need to hide multiple slides, hold down the Shift key (or Ctrl in 2000), select each slide you wish to hide, and then click the Hide Slide button.

Creating Guides in PowerPoint
If you need guides on your slides in order to place objects in a certain spot, go to View, Guides. You will see the standard vertical and horizontal guides that partition your slide into four sections. If you need more guide lines, there is an easy way to create them. Hold down the Ctrl key, click on either the vertical or horizontal guide, and drag your mouse to create a new guide line. These lines will not print.

Set Up a Black Last Screen in PowerPoint
A good way to signal the end of your presentation is to set the screen to black (or some other color) at the end of your slide show. To do this, open your slide show and choose Tools, Options. When the Options dialog box opens, click the View tab. Now select the check box labeled End With Black Slide and click OK to close the dialog box and save your selection. If you want to end your slide show with some other color onscreen, simply create a blank slide at the end of your slide show and set its background color to whatever you want.

Rotating AutoShapes in PowerPoint
To rotate an AutoShape in 15-degree increments, click the Free Rotate button and hold down the Shift key as you drag on your shape.

Running a Slide Show Without Opening Powerpoint
When your audience is waiting expectantly for a professional slide show from you, you would like to start up immediately at the touch of a button. You don't even want them to see PowerPoint opening. Try this: Run Windows Explorer and locate your slide show file. Right-click the icon and choose Show. PowerPoint opens and runs your slide show. When the show finishes, PowerPoint closes. Your audience never sees the PowerPoint working window at all.

If you don't want your audience to see you running Explorer, place a shortcut to the file on your desktop. Then, when you're ready to start the show, right-click the shortcut and choose Show.

Slide Show Pointer
The following keyboard shortcuts will help you quickly control the appearance--and disappearance--of your slide show pointer during a presentation.

Press Ctrl-H to hide the button and the pointer immediately.
Press Ctrl-A to display the pointer as an arrow and to display the button.
Press Ctrl-U to automatically hide the button and pointer in five seconds.

Get the Old PowerPoint 97 Slide View
Slide view in PowerPoint 2000 isn't the same as Slide view in earlier versions. If you prefer the old Slide view, you can get it back easily. Hold down the Control key while you click the Slide View icon at the lower left of your screen. To return to the new PowerPoint 2000 style Slide view, simply click the same icon again.

Use of Capital Letters
When creating slides in PowerPoint, try to avoid using all caps in your titles (or anywhere in your slides). Concentrate instead on choosing an attractive and easily readable font and font size. Uppercase letters are often less attractive than lowercase and usually more difficult to read.

Additional Autoshapes
If you don't find the AutoShape you need among the hundreds of basic shapes, flowchart elements, connectors, lines, callouts, and so forth that are available on the AutoShapes button's categories and palettes, be sure to choose the last command on the AutoShapes menu: More AutoShapes.

Clicking this button opens the More AutoShapes dialog box, which looks like the Clip Art Gallery. But don't be fooled. More AutoShapes offers most of what's available as clip art, but it also has many more simple pictures-musical notes, puzzle pieces, office furniture, and other conceptual images. Just navigate through the categories (the same as in the Insert Clip Art dialog box plus several additional ones) and choose the shape you want to place on your slide. When you return to the slide, you can reformat many of these shapes by double-clicking them and changing the settings in the Format AutoShape dialog box.

How to Edit AutoShapes in PowerPoint
It's a lot simpler to edit a drawing or shape that's already created than it is to create one from scratch using PowerPoint's drawing tools. The Edit Points tool in the Draw menu gives you some powerful editing capabilities for this, but there's one problem: It's not available when you select an AutoShape. To edit an AutoShape:

First, click your AutoShape to select it. Press Ctrl-X to cut the AutoShape to the Clipboard. Next, select Edit, Paste Special to open the Paste Special dialog box. Choose Picture (Enhanced Metafile) from the As list box, then click OK. The AutoShape reappears on your slide. Right-click the AutoShape, point to Grouping, then select Ungroup from the pop-up menu. PowerPoint displays a message box warning: "This is an imported picture, not a group. Do you want to convert it to a Microsoft Office drawing object?"

Click Yes. The object is no longer an AutoShape but a fully editable drawing object. You can now use the Edit Points tool in the Draw menu or any of PowerPoint's other drawing tools to edit the object as you like.

View Slide Show in Mini-View
If you hold down the Ctrl key while you click the Slide Show button in the lower-left corner of the screen, PowerPoint displays your slide show in a small window rather than full screen. If you find something you'd like to change, click back in the main PowerPoint window. The screen show window minimizes itself onto the Windows taskbar. Navigate to the slide that needs editing, make your changes, then click the PowerPoint Slide Show button on the taskbar to resume your mini-show right where you left off, with your most recent changes in place.

Graphic Editing
PowerPoint offers some powerful graphics-editing capabilities. For example, if you have a clip art picture that you want to use a portion of, all you have to do is separate what you want from what you don't, and delete the portion you don't want. First, insert the the clip art picture you want to work with. Right-click the picture, choose Grouping, and select Ungroup. Answer Yes to verify that you want to convert the picture to PowerPoint objects. Next, click somewhere on the slide away from the picture to deselect every object, then click on an individual object you'd like to get rid of and press Delete. Continue this process until all the unwanted parts have been deleted. Finally, select the remaining parts of the picture (Ctrl + A will get them all), right-click, choose Grouping, and select Group. Doing this will make the remaining picture act as a single unit.

Use Your PowerPoint Graphics in Other Apps
If you want to put a chart or drawing that you have created in PowerPoint into another program, you can easily convert it to JPG or GIF format. First, choose File, Save As. In the Save As dialog box, pick the format you want from the Save As Type drop-down list box. In this case, you'd pick either JPEG File Interchange Format (* .jpg) or GIF Graphics Interchange Format (* .gif). Next, enter a name in the File Name text box and click Save. PowerPoint displays a message box that asks "Do you want to export every slide in the presentation?" Click No to export just the current slide.

Transparent Objects In PowerPoint
If you have a ClipArt picture on a PowerPoint slide, you can draw an AutoShape positioned over the picture and have the picture show through. Open a blank slide and choose Insert, Picture, ClipArt. Insert the picture and then close the Insert ClipArt dialog box. Click the Oval tool in the Drawing toolbar and draw a circle. Move the circle over the drawing. Right-click the circle and choose Format AutoShape. When the Format AutoShape dialog box opens, click the Colors and Lines tab. Under Fill, click the arrow at the right side of the Color list box and select a color. Select the check box labeled Semitransparent and click OK. Your ClipArt picture will now show through the circle.