PowerPoint.Advanced.Presentation.Techniques [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Creating a Web-Based Presentation

PowerPoint is probably not your best choice for building a general-purpose Web site. There are other, better tools, such as Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver. You can even use Microsoft Word or Microsoft Publisher.

Even though you probably won't create a lot of stand-alone Web pages with PowerPoint, you may want to publish a presentation on an existing Web site. You can do this in either of two ways: PowerPoint format or HTML format.

A presentation delivered on the Web has the same overall goal as any other presentation. You want the audience to see it, appreciate it, and buy into it, but the means for accomplishing this over the Web are slightly different.

A successful presentation over the Web is:

Universally accessible to the intended audience. You must know your audience and their Web browser versions so you can save your presentation in the best format for their needs.

Friendly and interactive. That means you should include directions, hyperlinks, and action buttons to help users move around.

Quick to download. That means keeping the file size as small as possible without sacrificing the important things. Don't use unnecessary sounds, graphics, videos, or photos.

Not heavily reliant on sound. Don't make sound an integral part of a presentation for the Web because you can't assume that everyone who views it will have a PC with sound support. Further, consider making the sounds that you do include optional, perhaps by clicking a button on the slide rather than playing automatically.

You may find that you have to compromise one or more of these goals to meet another. For example, there is a way of ensuring compatibility with multiple browsers when saving in Web format, but it results in larger file sizes. I'll tell you more about that shortly.

Choosing PowerPoint versus Web Format

Will you save the presentation in Web format and publish it like a Web page, or will you make it available for online download in PowerPoint format? Both have their pros and cons.

PowerPoint format ensures that the audience sees the presentation exactly as you created it, including any embedded sounds, transitions, and animations. However, only people who own a copy of PowerPoint or who have downloaded the PowerPoint Viewer can see it. Therefore, most people who don't already have either one are likely to conclude that it's too much work to see your presentation, and you may turn off potential viewers.

With Web format, anyone with a Web browser can view the presentation without any extra software. It makes your presentation widely accessible. However, certain special effects in the presentation might not be visible to all users, depending on the effect you used and the browsers the individual audience members have.

Web format provides some nice extra navigational aids for users that make action buttons unnecessary. Notice in Figure 17-9 that users can use arrow buttons at the bottom of the window to move forward and back or click a slide in the Contents pane to jump to that slide.

Figure 17-9: A presentation saved in Web format and shown in a Web browser.

If you choose Web format there are a few PowerPoint features that don't work correctly. It's good to know about these up front so you can avoid using them in a presentation destined for the Web. Here are some examples:

If you set a sound or music clip to continue to play for a certain number of slides, it will stop when you advance past the initial slide.

If you set up the text on an AutoShape to have a different animation than its AutoShape, it will lose the special animation and be animated together with the AutoShape.

If the presentation is set up for automatic transitions between slides, all mouse-click animations behave as automatic animations.

Sounds attached to objects that are hyperlinks (for example, action buttons) don't play.

If a hyperlink on the Slide Master is covered by a placeholder, even if that placeholder is transparent, the hyperlink is unavailable on the individual slides.

Shadow and Embossed text effects are not supported; the text appears as normal text.

You may also find other features that will not work correctly on Web page presentations, such as certain animation effects that don't work properly.

Choosing Traditional HTML versus Single File Web Page

If you decide to go with Web format, you have another decision to make: a Single File Web Page or a traditional HTML file.

The Single File Web Page creates a single file with an .MHT extension that contains everything needed for the entire presentation. No support files or folder is needed. This is very convenient; the entire presentation is encapsulated in a single file so you can e-mail that file, upload it, or do anything else with it. However, the file size is slightly larger than the combined file size of the traditional HTML file plus all its support files. Also, some older Web browsers do not support the use of MHT files, so some audience members may not be able to see it.

Traditional HTML creates a single text-based HTML file and a support folder containing all the graphics and helper files needed to turn it into a Web presentation. An HTML presentation consists of many files. PowerPoint creates a home page (an entry point) with the same name as the original presentation. This is the file you name when you save. For example, if the presentation file is named Literacy.ppt, the home page is named literacy. Then, PowerPoint creates a folder names presentation name Files (for example, Literacy Files) that contains all the other HTML, graphics, and other files needed to display it.

This type of file is easy to import into a larger Web site (in FrontPage, for example), and you can edit the HTML file in any application that supports text editing. That means you don't have to go back to PowerPoint every time you need to make a change. However, working with a support folder can be unwieldy, and you might forget to copy the folder when you are moving the presentation to a server.

Choosing a Level of Browser Compatibility

The final decision you must make is which Web browsers you will support. This is applicable to both HTML and MHT formats.

The higher the Web browser format you support, the more of PowerPoint's bells and whistles will transfer flawlessly to the Web version, and the better the quality of the multimedia content (sound, video, and so forth). You basically get a nicer show with the higher version support.

However, by choosing higher version support, you potentially exclude a portion of your audience. Anyone who does not have that version or higher will not be able to see the show-either not at all or not as you intended.

The third piece of the equation is file size. The lower the version you support, the smaller the file size. An exception to this is the option to save for multi-browser compatibility (covered later); doing this accomplishes both near-universal support and inclusion of all the features, but at the expense of a much greater file size.

The default browser support is Internet Explorer 4.0 or later, and this works well in most cases. Internet Explorer 4.0 is now several years old, and 6.0 is the current version. Chances are good that almost everyone will have at least 4.0.

If you decide to go with a lower setting, and support Internet Explorer 3.0 and Netscape Navigator 3.0 or later, here are the consequences:

Animation and transition will not work.

Animated GIFs will not play if the presentation is saved with a screen size of 640 × 480 or less.

Sounds and movies will not play.

Some graphics will appear degraded in quality.

The slide is not scaled to fit the browser window. It runs at a fixed size based on the screen size setting you select when you publish the presentation.

You cannot view the presentation full-screen.

You cannot open or close frames.

The active slide does not appear highlighted in the outline pane.

The mouse cannot be used to highlight items in the outline pane.

If you save the presentation to support IE 4.0 or later but people try to view the presentation with an earlier version or with Netscape Navigator, they will still be able to see it, but the following will occur:

The presentation outline will appear permanently expanded.

No notes or additional frames will appear.

Hyperlinks will not be operational.

Clicking a slide title in the outline pane will not jump to that slide.

The default browser colors will be used to display the presentation text color and background color. (Exception: the colors do appear correctly in IE 3.0.)

Sounds and movies will not play.

You can also further fine-tune the version number by choosing compatibility for Internet Explorer 5.0 or 6.0. If you choose either of these, PowerPoint will use VML (Vector Markup Language) for graphics, to speed up their loading. The graphics are then not viewable with any earlier browser versions.

If you choose Internet Explorer 6.0 compatibility, PowerPoint will allow the use of PNG graphics (a graphic format that is an improved version of GIF) in the presentation. Earlier browser versions will not be able to see those graphics.

Now that you know the pros and cons of your myriad options, let's get down to some of them.

Saving a Presentation in Web Format

If you go with the default settings, saving a presentation as a Web page is almost as easy as saving it normally.

Choose File⇨Save as Web Page to display the Save As dialog box. Single File Web Page is the default file format, and the default file name is the presentation name (see Figure 17-10). Change either of these, if desired. You can also change them permanently (choose Tools⇨Options, General tab, Web Options button).

Figure 17-10: The Save as Web Page command displays a slightly different Save As dialog box than normal.

PowerPoint takes the default page title (that is, the words that will appear in the Web browser title bar when the page displays) from the title of the first slide. If you want a different title, click the Change Title button, type a different title, and click OK.

If you want to save in a different location, navigate to the drive or folder you want. I'll explain later in the chapter how to save files directly to a Web or FTP server.

After completing the save, you will probably want to check your work by opening the file in your own Web browser and checking to make sure the slides appear as you intended. To do so, browse to the save location from My Computer and double-click the HTML file to open it.

Web Format Options

The process described in the preceding section gives you very little control over how PowerPoint translates the presentation to Web format. For more control, click the Publish button in the Save As dialog box to display the Publish as Web Page dialog box, as shown in Figure 17-11.

Figure 17-11: Use this dialog box to provide more input on how PowerPoint converts your work to Web format.

After displaying this dialog box, you use it as a replacement for the Save As dialog box for the rest of the saving process. Here are the options you can set:

Publish what? The default is Complete Presentation, but you can choose a range of slides or a custom show.

Display speaker notes. The default is yes, so that an icon on each page enables your readers to jump to that page's notes, and a notes page pane appears at the bottom (as shown in Figure 17-9).

Browser support. The default is Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or later. This format takes advantage of these versions' capability to process certain codes and run certain mini-applications. If you think some of your audience may not have this browser, choose one of the other following options instead:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0, Netscape Navigator 3.0, or later. This option results in many of the animated features of the presentation not being saved, but it also makes for a smaller file size and greater compatibility with a variety of browsers.

All browsers listed above (creates larger files). This option is for maximum compatibility. It essentially saves two versions of the presentation in the same file-one for IE 4.0 and higher and one for everything else. That way there is no sacrifice of features in order to ensure compatibility. However, it does increase the file size.

Publish a copy as. These are the same controls as the ones in the Save As dialog box (see Figure 17-10). You can change the page title with the Change button, or type a different name and/or location in the File name box.

Open published Web page in browser. If you leave this checkbox marked, PowerPoint opens Internet Explorer and displays your presentation's first page automatically after the save. This is a good way to check your work.

Notice the Web Options button in Figure 17-11. Click it to display the Web Options dialog box, where you have even more choices regarding the presentation's conversion. The following sections summarize those options.

GENERAL

On the General tab, you can set the following:

Add slide navigation controls. This is turned on by default. It results in the left-hand pane shown in Figure 17-9 that lists the names of the slides. Users can click a slide's name to jump to it.

Colors. Notice in Figure 17-9 that the aforementioned navigation area is black with white lettering. You can choose a different color scheme from the Colors list. Choices include Browser Colors (whatever the default colors are set in the user's Web browser), Presentation Colors (text color or accent color) taken from the presentation, or Black Text on White.

Show slide animation while browsing. If you have any slide animations and you want them to be part of the Web version, mark this checkbox. It is unmarked by default because Web users may find animations annoying, rather than clever, because of their Internet connection speed.

Resize graphics to fit browser window. This option is marked by default so that if users are running their browsers at less than full-screen size or using a different screen resolution, your content will not be cut off, but rather resized so that it fits their screen.

BROWSERS

Have you been wondering exactly what the differences are when saving with compatibility for one browser versus another? You'll find some answers on the Browsers tab, as shown in Figure 17-12.

Figure 17-12: Customize the presentation's save for a specific browser version.

Choose a browser version from the drop-down list, and the checkboxes in the Options section are automatically marked or cleared for that version based on its capabilities. You can also manually mark or clear any of these checkboxes. The lower the version you choose, the fewer features will be enabled and the smaller the file(s) will be.

The four checkboxes are as follows:

Allow PNG as a graphics format. PNG is an improved version of the GIF format. IE 6.0 supports it fully; earlier versions might not. If your presentation contains PNG files and this option is not marked, they will be converted to a supported format when you save.

Rely on VML for displaying graphics in browsers. VML stands for Vector Markup Language. It's a way of making graphics appear more quickly in Web pages. You must have at least IE 5.0 to see graphics that rely on VML; people with older browsers will not see the graphics.

Save an additional version of the presentation for older browsers. This checkbox is turned off by default no matter which version you select. Marking it will insert the needed codes for backward compatibility but will increase the file size.

Save new Web pages as Single File Web Pages. This option enables or disables MHT as the default format. To view a single file Web page, users must have at least IE 4.0.

files

On the Files tab you can control how your files are saved, organized, and updated:

Organize supporting files in a folder. This option is the default when you save as traditional HTML. PowerPoint saves the needed files in a folder with the same name as the presentation home page. If you deselect this option, the supporting files will be placed in the same folder as the home page itself.

Use long file names whenever possible. This option preserves the Windows 95 and higher long file names, which are usually more descriptive than the shorter eight-character names in DOS and Windows 3.1. If you need to transfer the presentation to a server that does not support long file names, deselect this option.

Update links on save. With this option marked, every time you save your presentation in Web format through PowerPoint, all links are updated.

Default editor. Unmark the single checkbox in this section if you want to use a third-party editing program (non-Office) as the default for editing Web pages and you don't want a warning to appear each time you open the file in that third-party program.

PICTURES

There is only one control on the Pictures tab: Target Monitor. In most cases the default of 800 × 600 is a good choice.

The presentation can run at several screen resolutions. The smallest is 640 × 480. (The numbers refer to the number of pixels, or individual dots, that make up the display.) Most people run Windows at 800 × 600 or higher (that's the minimum for Windows XP), but people with older systems may still be using 640 × 480. If you choose a higher setting for the presentation than a user has on his screen, he will have to scroll in the Web browser window to see everything.

ENCODING

On the Encoding tab are a couple of settings that only multilingual offices will use:

Save this document as. Choose a language character set here. The default for the United States is US-ASCII, which is fine in most cases. A more general setting for any English-speaking country or for languages that use the same alphabet as English is Western European (ISO).

Always save Web pages in the default encoding. If you want PowerPoint to always rely on Windows' information about what kind of alphabet you are using, mark this checkbox, and you never have to worry about the character set again.

FONTS

The Fonts tab enables you to select a character set to encode with the Web presentation. This is mostly an issue when you are creating a presentation in a non-English language. The default is English/Western European/Other Latin Script.

You can also select a font for any text in the Web presentation that does not have a specific font assigned to it. Actually, you select two fonts: one proportional and the other fixed-width (monospace). Leaving these set at their defaults is a good idea because the defaults (Times New Roman and Courier New) are available on almost every PC.