Quite often,all you want to do is send a PowerPoint presentation
with all linked files to someone else. You want to be sure
that the intended recipent can play the presentation as
long as they have PowerPoint or the free PowerPoint Viewer
installed.
It's fairly easy to accomplish - first follow these housekeeping
steps:
- Create an empty folder and create a new presentation
within that folder. Place all music and video files as
well as any documents you want to link from the presentation
within the folder.
- Insert all sounds and videos as required within the
presentation. If you have no sounds or videos, skip this
step.
If you want to span a sound across
all slides in a presentation, look here...
- Link all documents as required from within the presentation.
If you have no documents to link, skip this step.
Tip: If you want your presentation to open in slide
show mode, save your presentation as a PPS file rather
than PPT. You don't even have to open PowerPoint - just
rename the extension even before you zip up the folder.
Now we need to zip this presentation as a self executable
EXE. You could use any of the zip archiving tools like
WinZip or PowerArchiver - since I need to create a tutorial
that all users can work with, I'm going to use ZipGenius,
a freeware utility.
I'm assuming you have ZipGenius installed - during installation
opt to include shell extension support.
Now that we have ZipGenius instaled, let us proceed with
the second part of this tutorial:
- Open the folder that contains the presentation and
related files, select all the files andright-click. Then
choose the ZipGenius option.
This will open another flyout menu with several options. One of the
options allows you to "Create a new archive". Choose this
option (see screenshot). This will create a zipped archive of all the
files within the same folder.
- Right-click the zipped archive, choose the ZipGenius
option and choose the "Convert to EXE" option
from the flyout menu.
- ZipGenius now leads you through a series of wizard
screens - the first screen lets you provide a title for
your EXE - I just named it "My PowerPoint Presentation" - click
here to view a SnagIt screenshot....
- The next wizard screen asks you for a folder path to
extract your files - just choose the "%temp%' option
from the dropdown menu and click Next - click
here to view a SnagIt screenshot....
- The next wizard screen asks you to include a message
- I typed my message and chose the Standard message option
and clicked Next - click
here to view a SnagIt screenshot....
- The next screen asks you if you want to execute any
file - choose your PPT (or PPS) presentation file - click
here to view a SnagIt screenshot....
Tip: If you want your presentation to open in slide
show mode, save your presentation as a PPS file rather
than PPT. You don't even have to open PowerPoint -
just rename the extension even before you zip up the
folder.
- The final screen allows you to choose many more advanced
settings - since this is a beginner tutorial, I've left
all options with their default settings. Just click the
Start button - click
here to view a SnagIt screenshot....
- ZipGenius will inform you that the self-extracting
archive has been created.
- Run the EXE to test it.
On some systems, I found that the extracted PowerPoint
files don't launch automatically - in that case you can
extract all files to a folder and manually
run the presentation.
You can also use other zip compression tools like WinZip
and PowerArchiver to duplicate the steps detailed
above.
