Viewing a Presentation

It's never been easier to stay on top of your PowerPoint presentation. PowerPoint 2002 allows you to see either a text outline of your presentation or thumbnails of all the slides in the left-most pane. The current slide appears in the main pane, and the slide's notes sit below (see Figure 28.8).

PowerPoint starts in Normal view. You can return to this view at any time by choosing View, Normal, or by selecting the Normal View icon on the View Bar.

Normal view includes the presentation's outline in the left pane, a preview of the current slide in the upper-right pane, and speaker notes at the bottom right. Click and drag on the edge of any pane to resize that portion of the view.

Although Normal view gives quick and easy access to most of the options you'll typically want to use, each of the individual views available via the View Bar comes in handy for specific tasks.

Organizing Ideas in the Outline Pane

You can do most of the important work on a presentation—that is, content, content, content—without ever leaving the outline pane.

Any text you type in the outline pane immediately to the right of a slide number becomes the title of the slide; subsequent outline points turn into bulleted items in the slide's text placeholder. Highlight, click, and drag to move outline text or entire slides. To select an entire slide, move the mouse pointer under the slide number until it turns into a "northwest arrow"—meaning that the arrow points upward and to the left. Click and the slide is selected.

→ Details on setting outline levels are given in the next chapter; see "Editing Slides".

Using Slide Sorter View to Rearrange a Presentation

Slide Sorter view (see Figure 28.9) gives you an opportunity to see the entire presentation all at once, move slides around, control the transition effects that bind the slides and animation together on an individual slide, and perform easy, one-click previews of animations and transitions.

Move to Slide Sorter view by selecting the Slide Sorter view icon in the View Bar, or by choosing View, Slide Sorter.

PowerPoint transitions control how a slide makes its appearance onscreen. Animations, on the other hand, control how components of the slide appear, after the slide is onscreen.

Bring up the Slide Transition pane by choosing the Transition icon on the Slide Sorter toolbar. Or, you can bring up the Animation schemes on the Slide Design pane by clicking the Design icon on the Slide Sorter toolbar and then choosing Animation schemes.

Slide Sorter view is the easiest place to

• Rearrange slides— Just click and drag.

• Add slides— Click in the space between two slides and select Insert, New Slide.

• Delete slides— Click a single slide or hold down the Ctrl key and click several slides, and then press the Delete key.

• Set transition effects— Click a slide or hold down the Ctrl key and click several slides, and then use the Slide Transition pane to pick and fine-tune the transition you like.

• Preview transition effects— Click the Preview button to the left of the slide number, or click Play at the bottom of the Slide Transition pane.

• Apply a built-in PowerPoint animation to the contents of the slide— Click a slide or Ctrl+click several slides, and then use the Slide Design pane's Animation Schemes list to pick the animation you like, or the Custom Animation pane to build an animation from the ground up.

Previewing Your Slides in Slide Show View

At any point in the process of developing a presentation, you can preview the show itself.

To see the presentation starting with the currently selected slide, just pick a slide (in any view) and click the Slide Show View icon on the View Bar. This starts the show and all the usual show navigation techniques apply (for example, click to advance the slide, press Esc to exit). When the show is over, you return to the view you were using before starting the slide show.

Adding Notes

The simplest way to add or modify notes is via the Normal or Outline views, where the notes pane can be expanded if necessary to accommodate lengthy notes.

PowerPoint has a Notes view (also called Notes Page view) although, oddly, you can't get to it via a button on the View Bar. Instead, you have to choose View, Notes Page (see Figure 28.10.)

If the notes for any particular slide extend beyond one page, Notes view expands the text area downward to accept what you type. If you print the notes for that particular slide, however, they'll be truncated at one page. Multipage notes appear in Normal view.

Although the text formatting in Normal views'notes pane might not be correct, it should appear correctly in Notes view.

Viewing Presentations in a Web Browser

If you save your presentation as a Web page, either on the World Wide Web, or on your company's intranet, the entire presentation can be viewed with a Web browser (see Figure 28.11). The person looking at your presentation need not have PowerPoint installed to see all the details and navigate the presentation fully.

→ For details on viewing your HTML-based presentation, see "Using a Browser for Your Presentation".

To get full effect of the browser-viewing option, the person viewing the presentation should be running Internet Explorer version 4 or later, or Netscape Navigator version 4 or later. Although you can create presentations that show up on earlier versions of both browsers, there are extensive limitations on what they can do.