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So, you've finished creating your PowerPoint slides and now you are ready for the big presentation. In this article, I give you a few tricks for getting the most out of your presentation. Using just one PowerPoint file, you can create a lot of different presentations. This is great if you have to do a very similar "dog and pony" show for a number of different groups. For example, suppose you have to give a presentation at four different industry conferences. You can create a title slide for each one with the conference name and date. Then create a separate custom show for each conference that includes the appropriate title slide and all the rest of the slides in the presentation. If you discover problems with your slides during the first presentation, you can make changes without having to change three separate files.
1. Set Up the Show
After you've created your presentation, you need to set up how you want it to run. Not all presentations require a person to present them. You can set your show to run by itself, which can be useful for trade show booths, kiosks, or other public places. In some cases, you may only want to run part of the presentation or run it without narration or animation. You can change some or all of these options, so the same presentation can be used in different settings. To change the slide show options, choose Slide Show|Set Up Show. If you will be presenting the show make sure Show Type is set to Presented by a speaker. For self-running shows, you can choose to run it in a window or not.
2. Set Options
You can change many aspects of your show. You can select a range of slides to include in your show or set whether you want to run a custom show (Custom Shows are discussed in step 3). You also can set options to indicate how you want the slides to advance, whether to include narration, and whether it should loop continuously.
3. Create a Custom Show
You can use custom shows to get a lot of mileage out of one presentation. If you want to show specific slides or show them in a certain order, you must create a custom show. Choose Slide Show, Custom Show. Click New to create a new custom show. Double-click slide names to add them to the show. To rearrange the list, click a slide in the Slides in custom show box and click the arrow keys. Click OK, type a file name for your show, and choose OK again to save the show.
4. Hide Slides
A quick way to change a presentation is to hide a slide. If you just want to avoid using particular slide in a show, you don't have to create a custom show. Click the slide and choose Slide Show|Hide Slide. The slide is not included when you show the presentation.
5. Save As a Show
After you have finalized all the aspects of your presentation, you can save it as a "show," so it can run independently from PowerPoint. If you save the file as a PowerPoint show versus a regular PowerPoint file, you don't have to open PowerPoint and choose View|Slide Show to run your presentation. Instead, the show runs automatically when you open the file. Slide show files are saved with a different file extension (.PPS) instead of the regular PowerPoint file extension (.PPT). Show files also have a different icon, so they are easy to spot in Windows Explorer. To save your presentation as a show, you change the Save as Type drop-down box to PowerPoint show when you save the file. You can either leave the default file name (which is your presentation filename with a .PPS extension) or type a new one. Click Save.
The file is saved to your hard disk with the filename you specified. If you look at the file in Windows Explorer, you see that it has a "show" icon, instead of the regular PowerPoint file icon. If you right-click the filename and choose Send To Desktop, you can create a shortcut to the file on your desktop. Then you can just double-click the icon to run your show!
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