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Autorun Multiple PowerPoint Presentations With AutoPlay Menu Studio
...Continued from Page 1
Create Your Presentation
Before You Save
Rename Extensions
Back To Our Splash
Creating Hotspots
Refining Your Splash
Compiling Your Autorun
Burn Your Autorun CD
Step 7 - Create Your Presentation
For PowerPoint 97: Create your PowerPoint presentation.
Don't use any VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) in your presentation,
since the PowerPoint Viewer does not support VBA. Also, don't use
any third party plug-ins for transitions or special effects.
For PowerPoint 2000: All rules specified above for PowerPoint
97 apply to PowerPoint 2000 as well.
In addition, you'll have to create your presentation in a PowerPoint
97 format. Although the binary format for storing PowerPoint 97
and 2000 remained unchanged, Microsoft added a few new features
to PowerPoint 2000. Unfortunately, no PowerPoint 2000 viewer has
been released as yet. This means that a large number of viewers
will be unable to view all the new PowerPoint 2000 features. These
include:
- Animated GIFs - Animated GIFs will display as static
GIFs in the PowerPoint Viewer of PowerPoint 97. The workaround
is to convert such animated GIFs to the AVI format.
- Screen Tips For Hyperlinks - No screen tips are available
on hyperlinks - but this is a trivial issue.
- Picture and Numbered Bullets - You'll have to use normal
bullets rather than picture or numbered bullets.
- Tables - PowerPoint 2000 uses tables similarly to those
used in Word - PowerPoint Viewer would use something like a grouping
of auto-shapes to simulate a table.
The best way to find out which features are unsupported is to
install the PowerPoint 97 Viewer on a system with PowerPoint 2000.
Every time you edit your presentation, test-run it on the Viewer
to find out if any significant changes take place.
For a more concise view of features supported in various PowerPoint
incarnations, view the following chart:
Back
Step 8 - Before You Save
Save all your presentations and other linked files such as video,
sound, narration, animation and images in the 'present' sub folder
created in Step 6.
Continuously check how your presentation appears in the PowerPoint
Viewer.
Your presentation is ready for an autorun CD once it plays identically
in PowerPoint itself and the PowerPoint Viewer.
Back
Step 9 - Rename Extensions
Rename all the PowerPoint presentation in your folder with the
PPT extension to PPS. For example, if you have stored a presentation
called Corporate.ppt in the 'present' sub folder, you would rename
it to Corporate.pps
For this example I have stored 4 imaginary presentations and their
linked files in the 'present' sub folder. These are:
- Corporate.pps
- Retail.pps
- Forms.pps
- Products.pps
Back
Step 10 - Back To Our Splash
Open your saved project from Step 4.
Right click and choose 'Page Properties' - select 'Bitmap Image
- Tile' in the Background option.
Choose any seamless tile or save this seamless tile:
For more seamless tiles, visit Indezine's Background Archive at:
http://www.indezine.com/back/
Anytime you want to preview your work in AutoPlay Menu Studio,
press the F5 key.
Back
Step 11 - Creating Hotspots
- Click on the New Text tool.
- The 'Text Object Properties' box appears.
- Type your text - I typed 'View Corporate Profile' and set the
font to Arial, Bold, colour White and size 18.
- Although you can use any font, since AutoPlay Menu Studio packages
all fonts along with the final splash, be sure you have permissions
to use a particular font.
- Drag your text object to the desired position.
- Right click the text object and choose 'Object Properties'.
- The 'Text Object Properties' box opens again - select the 'Actions'
tab in the box.
- In the Actions tab, click the 'Add' button to open a flyout
menu.
- In this menu choose Execute -> Execute Program
- A small form appears in the dialog box.
- Click on the empty area next to the 'File Name' field to open
the Virtual CD ROM explorer.
- In the 'Virtual CD-ROM Layout' box, choose Ppview32.exe as
the program to execute.
- Against the 'Arguements' field, type:
present/corporate.pps
- Create similar text objects with hyperlinks for the remaining
three PPS presentations.
- Open Windows Notepad and enter any information which you think
might provide helpful for your end-user. Save this text file
as 'readme.txt' within your Virtual CD-ROM (the 'cdrom' folder).
- Create a new text object in AutoPlay Menu Studio - type the
character - 'Help'.
- Right click and choose Object Properties -> Action -> Add
-> Execute -> Open Document. Choose 'readme.txt' as the
document to open.
- Create another text object - type 'Visit Web Site', right click
and choose Object Properties -> Action -> Add -> Execute
-> Open URL and enter your site URL.
- Create yet another text object - type 'Exit', right click and
choose Object Properties -> Action -> Add -> Window
-> Close/Exit.
- Save your project.
- Press F5 to preview your autorun CD.
Back
Step 12 - Refining Your Splash
You've successfully created an autorun splash and the other files
that activate from hyperlinks within that.
Now you can spend some time in fine-tuning and refining your splash
to include your company logo, background music and other paraphernilia.
Save your project.
Back
Step 13 - Compiling Your Autorun
In AutoPlay Menu Studio, press F7 to open the Build dialog box.
I've filled in my options as under, but your options might look
different.
AutoPlay Menu Studio will now test run your autorun splash. Your
links may not work - since we have not saved the autorun.exe to
a root drive. If you copy the entire contents of your 'Cdrom' folder
to the root of any drive including a hard disk, CD-R, CD-RW or
Zip disk, you can test run your autorun.exe. It should work faultlessly.
Back
Step 14 - Burn Your Autorun CD
Now, you can burn your own autorun CD which allows you to run
your own splash which can activate multiple presentations, Internet
URLs or any document with an associated application.
And this is just the beginning. With AutoPlay Menu Studio, you
can create such splashes for multiple languages too.
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