5 tips on Powerpoint 2007

It's been more than a year now, I have been using Powerpoint 2007 to create presentations, All thanks to my college faculties for giving us presentations to be presented every week. During this one year, I have learned a lot on how to use the features in PowerPoint 2007, and what all features are there not available in earlier versions. I have listed down these points which will be helpful to you if you ever intend to give presentation anywhere.

1. SmartArt :- WOW, this is truly a Wow feature by Microsoft. SmartArt got great designs and shapes to be used. The good part is that you can change colors, give pre defined color combinations, which may suite your presentation theme and your topic. They also provide you designs for special purpose like Hierarchy, process, Chain reaction and few more… It completely eliminates the requirements for those drawing tool, used to draw those flow charts.
2. Formatting Images :- Basic formatting did exist in earlier versions, but was not very interactive. The new version is much better and provides some more better and required features. Changes made to the images can be seen live, as soon as you make any changes, you do not need to apply those changes to see the effect of it. Another feature provided is to disable the image compression which in turn increases the size of presentation but also the quality remains intact. To disable image compression Go to Image options (Appears when you insert and select an image) –> Compress images –> Options, and untick "Automatically perform Basic compression on save". From there you can also set the density of the image as per the requirements. The only problem which I came to know later on was that you need to do this again and again, for different images, as it is not a permanent change.
3. Page Setup :- It is not possible to give a presentation in a single style on all the Projectors. According to the device you are presenting on, you need to change the page setup, hence getting the most of it. We cannot present the same presentation on Plasma and on a projector, as both have different aspect ratios. To select the proper page setup, Go to View tab –> Slide Master –>Page Setup. From here choose the correct setup you want to. You can have customized sizes as well.

4. Custom shows :- We are used to give long presentations in short duration, and leave the deep understanding part. You have to insert that data so that everyone could read that. One way is to put notes in each and every single slide, But in notes to, everything cannot be expressed. The other way is to create a complete slide and present a Custom show. How ? Just Go to Slide show tab –> Custom Slide, and choose the slides you want to show. Simple enough.
5. Rehearse Timings :- Timings are very important for us. If we go beyond those time limits, we are bound to get reduced marks. This rehearsal tool comes in handy, where in you can practice and see if your speech matches with the presentation and time allotted. You can also set the time for slides to switch automatically when you have rehearsed, and save that rehearsal. This is one of my favorite tools which I think was needed but the there was no alternative to that.