PowerPoint Makeover 7: No Bullets Presentation - 3 of 4

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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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Repeat the process for slides 27 and 31.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 
   Figure 8.9 Create new slides in the outline.
5. 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.
6. Save your presentation.

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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:

1. Divide the second slide (a.k.a. Mr.MBA) into two slides; the two new titles will be "a.k.a." and "Mr. MBA".
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
3. Remove the two pictures in the erstwhile slide 12.
4. Save the presentation.

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