Spice-up your PowerPoint with music!

You can spice-up your PowerPoint presentations by playing some music along with a screen show, especially if you're showing pictures of a club activity or ministry activity to a group of audience.

It is quite easy once you are aware of a few basic rules:

1. CD music tracks are not saved as part of the presentation. If you play the presentation again, and you don't hear any music, you probably need to put the audio CD in the drive.
2. PowerPoint 97 has a bug. If you are still using PowerPoint 97, you may want to upgrade. If not, you'll have to live with a bug in that version that doesn't allow it to play the last track of any audio CD.
3. PowerPoint cannot play non-consecutive tracks. In other words, you can play tracks 3, 4 and 5 in succession. However, you can't play tracks 3, 5 and 8.

Now for the good news. Here are the steps:

1. Make sure you have the audio CD with the music you want is located in the CD drive.
2. Open a new or existing presentation in PowerPoint and navigate to the first slide. Now choose Insert Movies and Sound Play CD Audio Track, as shown above.
3. In the Insert CD Audio dialog box, choose the track on the CD with the music you want to start with and the last track you want to be played. You can opt to start in the middle of a track by providing specific timings. You also can opt to loop the sound continuously.
4. PowerPoint may ask you if you want the sound to play automatically. Be sure to accept this option.
5. PowerPoint places a CD icon on the slide. You can drag the icon off the slide area if you don't want it to be visible while you are playing the presentation.

To make your CD track play across slides, follow these steps:

1. Right-click the CD icon on the slide and choose ‘Custom Animation' from the context menu. (On the Mac, Ctrl + click on the icon to see the context menu.)The custom animation task pane is activated. Within the pane, you see the name of your sound file listed.
2. Click the downward pointing arrow next to the sound file to show a drop-down menu. Choose Effect Options within this menu. (On the Mac, you'll find an Effect Options button.)

Minimizing the size of a Powerpoint presentation

I have seen, some times the powerpoint presentations get so big that you don't know what to do. PowerPoint presentations mainly get big in size due to high resolution pictures added to them. Let's say you want to send a draft copy of a presentation to a colleague for a review.You don't have to send a 'big' presentation. You can minimize the size of the presentation by following these steps:

1. Open the Powerpoint presentation that needs to be 'compressed'
2. Right Click on one of the pictures in the presentation and select the option 'Format Picture'
3. Select 'Compress' from the 'Picture' tab
4. Cilck on 'Compress'
5. Select 'All pictures in the document' and 'Web/Screen' options
6. Click 'OK'
7. If you get a dialogue box, warning that the quality of the image will reduce, go ahead and select 'Apply'
8. click 'OK' in the format picture dialoge box

You have just minimizes the size of the presentation. But it's a good idea to keep the original presentation, in case you want to produce some high quality printouts. My recommendation is to save this as seconday document.For example, if the original presentation is abc.ppt, then minized one can be named as abc_small.ppt. In that way, you can easily idenifythe presentation.

You can minimize the size of a Powerpoint presentation by upto 20 times!! and you'll hardly notice the reduction in the quality of imagesif you're viewing from a computer screen.

Minimizing/ Compressing the size of a picture

If you don't have an image editing software (e.g. Photoshop Elements) , Microsoft PowerPoint software provides some alternatives to reduce the size of a picture. Rember: Reducing the size of the picture (ie. to reduce the kilo bytes) will also reduce the quality of the picture. But sending the pictures through internet will be a 'breez'.
Here are the steps to do it:

1. Start a new PowerPoint presentation with a blank slide layout
2. Click Insert-> Picture-> From file
3. Select the picture you want to reduce the size of
4. This will bring the picture to the presentation slide.
5. Right click on the picture placed in the power PowerPoint and select the option 'Format Picture'
6. Select 'Compress' from the 'Picture' tab
7. Click on 'Compress'
8. Select 'Web/Screen'
9. Click 'OK'
10. If you get a dialogue box, warning that the quality of the image will reduce, go ahead and select 'Apply'
11. Click 'OK' in the format picture dialogue box
    Now you have reduced the size of the picture.

Now in order to save the picture as JPEG image, do the following steps:

• Right click on the picture and select 'Save as picture' option
• Give a file name. I suggest you give a different file name. Example if your large picture file is- abc.jpg then you can give the name abc_LowRes.jpg. The next time you look for the same picture, you'll automatically know there is a high resolution picture and low resolution picture. That's neat!!
• Under 'Save as type' please choose JPEG

If you're using Microsoft Office 2003, then the Microsoft Office Picture Manager can help to reduce the size of a picture easily.I'll share that in my next bit.

PDF Basics

PDF (Portable Document Format) is a global format for efficiently and securely sending documents. It is also an open standard, which means, whether it's Microsoft Power Point or Word or even a picture, you can convert them all into a PDF format and read/view them with the help of a PDF reader (freely downloadable from: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html). All what you need is Adobe Reader to read the PDF documents.

You will require Adobe Acrobat software to create PDF documents. Besides, just creating PDF documents, the Adober Acrobat can also add security to your documents. Which means, users who read a PDF document can be restricted from printing them, or the document can be password protected. You can also use Adobe Acrobat to perform variety of commenting tasks when the documentsare being edited by a team of people. But if you're looking at just creating PDF documents, the following websites provide assistance:
1. http://www.pdf995.com/
2. http://www.primopdf.com/

You just have to upload the documents and the website converts them into PDF format. Please note: the converted PDF docuemnts don't provide the additional security settings that are available with Adobe Acrobat software.Also, please read the terms and conditions before downloading the software.

Use Microsoft Office Templates and save time

Template documents are often helpful to make a quick start with a document that you’re looking to create. Let me give you an example: Our club wanted to design a calendar for the club year. I was thinking of creating a calendar on Excel. Then I thought "May be, some one has already created a calendar. Let me check the Microsoft templates site". I went to http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/CT101425251033.aspx and found out that there were already 68 different formats for 2007 calendar!! I quickly downloaded the format and customized it for our club needs. I managed to do it within 30 minutes. If I didn't have the template, it would have taken me at least 3 hours to design our club calendar. The point is simple: check the Microsoft template site before you create a document. It could be Power Point, Word, Excel or even an Access database.