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

Manually Editing Master Elements

Besides dragging placeholder boxes around, what can you do to the Slide and Title Masters? Plenty. Just about anything you can do to an individual slide, you can do to the masters. Here are just a few examples.

Changing Text Formatting

To change the text formatting used in the presentation's text placeholders, change them for the placeholder text on the Slide Master. The changes you make to the Slide Master will automatically apply to the associated Title Master too. You can change the font (typeface), size, color, and other attributes like bold, italic, shadow, and so on.

You probably already know how to make font changes, but just in case you need one or two refreshers, Chapter 5 for more formatting procedures.

Changing the Background

Most of the design templates that come with PowerPoint include some sort of background graphic decoration. You can stick with the background provided, modify it, create your own, or go backgroundless.

There are several ways you can go when it comes to slide backgrounds as follows:

You can choose a design template that comes with a background you like, and then customize it as needed.

You can start with a background provided by a design template and then dissect and modify it.

You can delete any background graphic provided and use a solid color background.

You can delete any background graphic provided and use a fill effect such as gradient, pattern, picture, or texture as the background.

You can create your own background by combining lines and shapes with PowerPoint's drawing tools.

ANATOMY OF A BACKGROUND

Before you start getting into the complexities of background modification and creation, it might help to break down one of PowerPoint's provided backgrounds and see how the good folks at Microsoft constructed it. This experiment might be a springboard for your own ideas and/or might help you figure out how to customize the background to meet your needs.

Try the following as an experiment:

Start a new, blank presentation and apply the Radial.pot design template to it.

Open Slide Master view and select the background graphic behind the title area on the Slide Master-not the Title Master (see Figure 3-10).

On the Drawing toolbar, choose Draw⇨Ungroup. Now each of the shapes and lines that comprise the background graphic have their own individual frames. This particular background graphic consists of three separate elements: the purple shape behind the title, the white underline beneath the title, and the green oval line that runs around the outside.

Click in the blank white area to deselect everything. Then click once on the purple shape behind the title.

Choose Draw⇨Change AutoShape⇨Basic Shapes, and then click the octagon (second shape in second row). The purple shape changes to an elongated octagon (see Figure 3-11).

Click the green border to select it. Then open the Line Color menu from the Drawing toolbar and select the second-from-the-right color in the color scheme (brown). The line changes to brown.

Regroup the objects (choose Draw⇨Regroup). You do not have to select all the objects; PowerPoint remembers what all was in the group.

Close Slide Master View.

Close the presentation without saving your changes to it.

Figure 3-10: Apply Radial.pot to a blank presentation and then select the background graphic on the Slide Master.

Figure 3-11: Background graphics constructed of AutoShapes can be edited freely using PowerPoint's own drawing tools.

As you learned from the preceding steps, backgrounds provided in PowerPoint are in many cases just simple AutoShapes grouped together. You can change them at will by ungrouping and modifying them. See Chapter 7 for more help with the drawing tools.

Some of the backgrounds are more than just AutoShapes, however. For example, the background in the slide shown in Figure 3-12 includes a graphic of several clocks. There is also a frame with a gradient shadow along its right edge.

Figure 3-12: Some backgrounds include external graphic images, not just AutoShapes.

This background can also be dissected by using the Draw⇨Ungroup command on it. In Figure 3-13, I've broken apart the two elements-a graphic and a transparent rectangle with a partial gradient fill-so you can see them separately; take a look at Figure 3-13 and then look back at Figure 3-12 to see how they work together to give the illusion that there is a shadow behind the graphic.

Figure 3-13: The background from Figure 3-12, dissected into its two parts.

There is one final type of background provided in some of PowerPoint's templates, and that's a full-slide image. For example, many of the backgrounds that look like water or clouds are actually single large images. These can't be selected or ungrouped in the Slide Master; they must be edited through the Background dialog box (Format⇨Background). You'll see one of these later in the chapter in the section Selecting a Picture Background.

DELETING A BACKGROUND GRAPHIC

First things first-to delete a background graphic, do either of the following:

Display the Slide Master, select the background, and press Delete.

While not in Slide Master View, choose Format⇨Background, mark the Omit background graphics from Master checkbox (see Figure 3-14), and click OK.

Figure 3-14: You can remove background graphics from the Background dialog box

SELECTING A SOLID COLOR BACKGROUND

You can't delete the color from the background, but you can change it to a different color (like white, for example). To do that, choose Format⇨Background and select the desired color or effect. Remember, though, that changing to a fixed color means that color will stick even if you switch to a different color scheme. Therefore, it's usually better to allow the color scheme to select the background color, or at least Chapter 2. That would make the color change in the current presentation and would allow it to change if you changed the color scheme later.

SELECTING A FILL EFFECT AS A BACKGROUND

I'm saving the main discussion of fill effects for Chapter 7, so jump ahead there if you're eager to play with gradients, textures, or patterns as backgrounds. Suffice now to say that these are really cool effects and that you will need to master them before you can consider yourself really proficient at background creation.

SELECTING A PICTURE BACKGROUND

A picture background fills the entire "behind" of each slide with a single graphic image. As I mentioned earlier, PowerPoint uses this technique for some of the design template backgrounds.

To see how one works, do this experiment:

Start a new, blank presentation and apply the Ocean.pot template.

Choose Format⇨Background.

Open the drop-down list in the Background dialog box and choose Fill Effects.

Click the Picture tab. Notice that the current background appears as a picture here (see Figure 3-15).

Click Select Picture. The Select Picture dialog box opens. The default location shown is the My Pictures folder.

Navigate to the folder containing the picture you want to use. For this experiment, open the Sample Pictures folder (within My Pictures) and choose Sunset. Then click Insert.

Click OK in the Fill Effects dialog box to use the chosen picture.

In the Background dialog box, click Apply to All. Notice that the picture is all-blue, whereas the original was a vibrant red.

Choose Color Schemes from the Slide Design task pane to open the Color Schemes in the task pane, and select the yellow-background scheme. The picture changes to all-yellow.

Close the presentation file without saving your changes.

Figure 3-15: PowerPoint has used a picture as a background fill effect in the current design template.

CREATING YOUR OWN BACKGROUND

Now that you have seen how backgrounds work, you're probably itching to create your own. If you come up with some good ones, you might even be able to sell them to other PowerPoint users!

The specifics of background-creation will depend on your vision of the finished product, of course, but here are some general steps:

Set the background color to either a solid color or a gradient or pattern. Use scheme colors whenever possible.

or

Choose a background texture or picture. Picture backgrounds were covered in the preceding section.

In Slide Master View, create background graphics using PowerPoint's drawing tools, layering and formatting objects as needed to create the desired images.

Add any graphics from files that you need to supplement the graphics drawn with the drawing tools.

When you're finished, select and group all the graphics into a single object (with Draw⇨Group). This isn't necessary, strictly speaking, but it does make them easier to work with.

Exit from Slide Master View and save the file as a template (see Chapter 2).

Changing Bullet Characters

You can use anything from a simple round dot to a full-fledged graphic from any source. Each slide can have its own different bullet characters, but it's better in most cases to stick with a consistent bullet character across all slides. And whenever you want something applied to all slides, where do you apply it? That's right, to the Slide Master.

On the Slide Master, you'll notice several levels of bulleted lists. By formatting the placeholders there with the desired bullet character, you automatically assign them to all text placeholder boxes on all slides where bullets are employed.

The choice of first-level bullet character is especially important since it's the one that your audience will see most often. However, the other bullet levels are important too because they must be complementary to the top-level bullet character in style.

APPLYING A BASIC BULLET CHARACTER

To change the bullet character for an outline level (just the basic bullet, nothing fancy), do the following:

From the Slide Master, click in the line representing the outline level for which you want to change the bullet character.

Choose Format⇨Bullets and Numbering. The Bullets and Numbering dialog box opens.

Make sure the Bulleted tab is displayed. If it isn't, click it.

Click one of the other bullet styles shown (see Figure 3-16).

(Optional) To change the size of the bullet in relation to the text, change the value in the Size box.

(Optional) To change the color of the bullet, change the color in the Color box.

Click OK.

Figure 3-16: Select a different bullet character, and adjust its size and color, if desired.

CHOOSING AN ALTERNATIVE BULLET CHARACTER

The seven bullet character choices that appear in the Bullets and Numbering dialog box are just the tip of the iceberg. You can choose any character from any font on your system as the bullet, including any of the special fonts like Wingdings.

To select a different character, from the Bullets and Numbering dialog box, click the Customize button. The Symbol dialog box opens (see Figure 3-17). Choose a font from the Font list, click the desired bullet character, and click OK.

Figure 3-17: In the Symbol dialog box, choose any character from any font as the bullet character.

The bullet character takes its formatting from the line of text that it supports. For example, if the text has the Shadow attribute applied to it, the bullet character will too. You can't format the bullet character differently from the text in terms of shadowing or bolding, but you can make it a different size and color through the Bullets and Numbering dialog box as you saw in Figure 3-16.

CHOOSING A PICTURE BULLET

Picture bullets give great flexibility to PowerPoint's bulleted list feature! You can use any picture as your bullet character, in any size.

PowerPoint's Clip Organizer comes with hundreds of small graphics suitable for use as bullets, so you may not need to look any further than that. To select a bullet character from the Clip Organizer, click the Picture button in the Bullets and Numbering dialog box. This opens the Picture Bullet dialog box shown in Figure 3-18. From here just click the graphic you want and click OK.

Figure 3-18: Select a picture for the bullet character.

Chapter 9 will tell you all about the Clip Organizer, but for now here's what you need to know:

The clips with a little globe in the bottom left corner are located on the Internet (at Microsoft's Web site). When you choose one of these, it will subsequently be downloaded to your hard disk for use. Download time is minimal since the graphics are so tiny. These do not appear in the Picture Bullet dialog box if you are not connected to the Internet.

The clips with a little star in the bottom right corner have some sort of animation effect associated with them, such that when they're used in a presentation, they do something other than just sit there. (The exact effect varies, so you have to try each one out to see what it does.)

The clips with neither a globe nor a star are plain, static bullet characters that are already located on your hard disk and ready for use.

If none of the bullet characters suit you, you can import your own. To do so, from the Picture Bullet dialog box shown in Figure 3-18, click Import. Then select the file containing the graphic you want to use and click Add. The clip is then inserted into the Picture Bullet dialog box, and you can select it from there as you would any of Microsoft's own bullet graphics.