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Books | Book Excerpts
PowerPoint Makeover 7: No Bullets Presentation
Page 3 of 4
by Geetesh Bajaj - published on this site on November 29th 2007
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Consolidate the Slides
Add
More Slides
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Consolidate the Slides
In the previous steps of this makeover,
all the bullets were promoted to slide titles, and the Slide Layout
for all the slides in the presentation was changed. Yet, there's
always some housekeeping left that cannot be done automatically
with a click or two. If you are following the steps in this makeover,
or doing another makeover on your own, remember to look out for
any problem areas that need attention. The sooner you spot these
problems in the makeover process, the easier they are to resolve.
There are several ways to find out whether there are problem areas
in a presentation, but two of them are time-tested and indispensable:
- Play your presentation from the first slide to the last several
times.
- Look closely at the presentation in Outline view.
You are sure to discover a few things that you want to correct
after you review the presentation. In the case of our current makeover,
I discovered many empty lines in the outline between slides 26
and 35 (see Figure 8.8). I also discovered that slide 34 had two
titles!
Figure 8.8 The outline makes it easy to spot goof-ups.
If you are following the makeover step by step, continue using
your saved presentation. If you just stepped in, you can use the
nobullets_03.pptx presentation from the Makeover 07\Steps folder
on the CD.
Follow these steps to sort out the issues:
- In the Slides pane, click the Outline tab to view the outline
(refer to Figure 8.8). Slides 1–25 seem perfectly fine;
each slide has a single-line title. However, look what happens
after slide 26. You need to make some changes here.
- Click in the Outline tab, right after the end of the sentence
in Slide 26. Press the Delete key twice (or thrice, if required)
to get rid of those empty lines. If you pressed the Delete key
once too often, quickly press Ctrl+Z to undo.
- Repeat the process for slides 27 and 31.
- For slide 34, you need to take another approach. This slide
has two lines that should have been distributed as two titles
in successive slides. Fortunately, that's exactly the type of
task that takes a mere moment to fix in the Outline tab.
Click at the end of the first title line ("because of..."),
and press the Delete key twice so that there are no empty lines
between the first and second lines of the title, as shown in Figure
8.9.
Figure 8.9 Create new slides in the outline.
- Press the Delete key once again and then, press Enter. Now
the lines are on two separate slides. Next, remove the extra
line in the title on the newly created slide to end up with what
you see in the "after" image in Figure 8.9.
- Save your presentation.
Back
Add More Slides
Now that you have consolidated the slides, it's time to add some
more! I'll be showing you how you can divide one slide into two.
Even after these two slides are separated, they maintain a link
because they share a text-to-visual relationship. That might sound
very impressive, but in fact, it is something so simple that even
a kindergartener could probably understand it.
Let's look at this title: henry lives in seattle.
Now break this into two slides:
- First slide: henry
lives in
- Second slide: seattle.
Now remove the word "seattle" altogether
from the second slide, and insert in its place a large picture
of the Seattle skyline that includes the Space Needle. Now even
if you don't put the word "Seattle" in the title, everybody
still knows that Seattle is what the picture portrays. The before
and after of this concept can be seen in Figure
8.10.
Figure 8.10 One slide becomes two slides.
We'll put in all those pictures later; for now, let's start splitting
the slides. If you are following the makeover step by step, continue
using your saved presentation. If you just stepped in, you can
use the nobullets_04.pptx presentation from the Makeover 07\Steps
folder on the CD.
Follow these steps:
- Divide the second slide (a.k.a. Mr.MBA)
into two slides; the two new titles will be "a.k.a." and "Mr.
MBA".
- You need to do the same thing with many other slides, but for
now, you can just open the nobullets_05.pptx presentation from
the Makeover 07\Steps folder on the CD, which contains the split
slides. In fact, take a look at how I split the slides in nobullets_05.pptx,
and replicate that in your presentation.
You will notice that
some slides such as "Meet Henry More" were deleted
because they no longer serve a purpose. In addition, some slides
were split into more than two slides; look at the nobullets_05.pptx
presentation to get an idea of the changes made.
You can split slides quickly in the Outline pane by pressing Enter
in the middle of a title to create a new slide from the second
half of the title.
- Remove the two pictures in the erstwhile slide 12.
- Save the presentation.
Back
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