18. Publishing Your Presentation to Any Format

In This Chapter

Outputting a PowerPoint presentation isn’t always as easy as clicking Save. This chapter discusses various ways to publish a presentation and how to overcome all the inevitable complications.

PowerPoint File Format Types

image PowerPoint has always had a variety of different file types. There are regular presentation files and design template files that most everyone is familiar with, but then there are exotic file types such as Add-In and Show files. PowerPoint 2007 introduces a brand new file format, .pptx—explored in great detail in Chapter 17, “Migrating Files to PowerPoint 2007"—which complicates the matter even more.

Understanding PowerPoint File Formats

PowerPoint 2007 saves to quite a number of different file format types. Table 18.1 gives a brief summary of each file type. The new formats are marked in the table as New, whereas the old binary formats from past versions of PowerPoint are marked as Old.

Table 18.1 File Format Types in PowerPoint 2007

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Macros

Because previous versions of Office (mostly Word and Excel) suffered a black eye from allowing macro viruses to plague users’ computers, Office 2007 has the concept of macro-free file formats and macro-enabled file formats. Any file with a macro has to be saved to one of the macro-enabled formats that ends with the letter “m,” such as .pptm. If you receive a file in a format that’s macro free, such as .pptx, PowerPoint guarantees that it won’t contain macros that could damage your computer.

More information about macros can be found in Chapter 10, “Formatting Your Presentation.”

Embedding Fonts in a Presentation

image Not all computers have the same fonts. Office comes with a few—such as your friends Arial, Times New Roman, and Verdana—but fonts beyond the standard Office set vary computer by computer.

If you’re like most people, there are some occasions when you need to send your presentations to others. Obviously, you want everyone to see the same font that you used to create the presentation, so it’s important to verify that your recipient owns all the fonts that you use in your presentations. Otherwise, PowerPoint will just select a replacement font, and it might be positioned incorrectly or displayed at the wrong size.

Stick to the Office Fonts

If you do need to distribute your presentation without a lot of control over what fonts the end user might have, your best bet is to stick with the standard Windows and Office fonts. Everyone with Office has these fonts, so they’re a safe bet. Take a look at the Microsoft Typography website at www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/ to see which fonts came with Office 2003 and Windows XP. Office 2007 and Windows Vista come with a superset of those fonts. You can choose a product from the list to see which fonts come with it.

If you are sure that the recipient of your presentation has PowerPoint 2007, you can also use the new fonts mentioned in Chapter 2, “Everything You Need to Know About Text.”

To ensure that your presentation looks exactly as it did when you created it, your other option is to embed the fonts.

Embedded Fonts

If you do not know what fonts exist on the machines of the people who will be looking at your presentation, you can embed the font in the presentation.

1. Click the Office button and choose PowerPoint Options.

2. Choose Save in the left pane of the dialog. In the bottom section, check the box next to Embed fonts in the file (see Figure 18.1). You can also choose whether you embed the entire font—which makes editing the presentation easier—or just embed the characters used in the presentation, which saves a little disk space but makes editing more painful.

Figure 18.1 Choose to embed the font in the presentation.

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Caution

PowerPoint respects a licensing level that is set inside of each font. Some fonts are set as Print or Preview-Only, which means that your recipients will be able to view the presentation with the embedded fonts, but they won’t be able to edit the presentation at all. Other fonts are licensed as Installable, which means that editing is allowed, but the font can be used only inside the presentation in which it is embedded. Finally, the most liberally licensed fonts are installable, which means that you can install the font to Windows and use it in any program later. This Microsoft KB article explains more: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/826832.

Making a Presentation That Just Plays (.ppsx)

image There are several different scenarios in which the .ppsx format comes in handy. This format saves the presentation as a slideshow only—the file will no longer be editable and will open automatically into Slide Show view.

For example, if you’re planning to show a presentation and don’t want the editing interface in front of the audience, save the file as .ppsx.

Save the file in the PowerPoint Show format by clicking the Office button and choosing Save As. Choose PowerPoint Show as the Save As type (see Figure 18.2).

Figure 18.2 Choose PowerPoint Show as the Save As type, which by default starts the presentation in Slide Show mode.

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Caution

.ppt files created in older versions of PowerPoint can be renamed with a .pps extension to change them to PowerPoint Show files. Unfortunately, the new .pptx/.ppsx file format used in PowerPoint 2007 writes whether the file is a PowerPoint Show file directly into the contents of the file. So, a simple rename is no longer sufficient, and you must go through the Save As process now.

Tip

Not sure if your recipient has the latest version of PowerPoint? Save as type PowerPoint 97–2003 Show, which has a .pps extension. It’s the equivalent of .ppsx but for older PowerPoint versions. Opening .ppsx files is not a problem if the recipient has the latest PowerPoint Viewer or the Office 2003 compatibility pack. But if you’re not sure or you think that the recipient has Office XP or older, saving in the older format is the way to go. The downside to doing this is that the .pps file will always be larger than just sending the .ppsx file.

This saves your file with a .ppsx extension instead of a .pptx file extension. When you open the .ppsx file—by double-clicking it from Windows Explorer, for instance—PowerPoint sees the .ppsx extension and launches directly into the slideshow. This can be a useful way to distribute presentations you intend for most of your viewers to watch using Slide Show.

Tip

Likewise, if you want to view a .pptx or .ppt file directly in Slide Show, you can do this by right-clicking the file and choosing Play.

Advanced Publishing Tricks

image Suppose that you are done editing your presentation, you want to send the presentation to others, but you don’t want them to edit the presentation. The next sections discuss two ways to send a presentation in a finalized form.

Mark as Final

Mark as Final lets you declare a presentation as finished. Later, if the presentation is opened, it’s opened in a read-only format so that people don’t accidentally edit it.

When a presentation is marked as final, it means

  • Typing, editing commands, and proofing marks disappear.
  • When opened, the presentation is set to read-only so that it cannot be accidentally edited.

To mark a presentation as final, do the following:

1. Click the Office button and choose Prepare, Mark as Final.

2. Click OK. Notice the finalize icon that appears in the status bar.

Change your mind? Mark as Final is not a security feature, just a suggestion noted in the file. So if you or anyone you send the file to decides that the file is not so final after all, it’s easy to “unfinalize” the file: Simply click the Office button and choose Prepare, Mark as Final. These are basically the same steps you took to finalize it.

Save as PDF/XPS

Another way to publish a presentation is to save it as a PDF or XPS file. PDF files can be viewed by anyone with Adobe Reader; XPS files can be viewed with a built-in viewer that comes with Windows Vista.

1. Install the 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in named Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS from this location online: www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041. Unfortunately, that address is a little hairy. You can also get to it by searching Google for “PDF XPS Office add-in.” Download and install the add-in. If you don’t have installation privileges on your computer, contact your friendly IT person.

2. After the add-in is installed, click the Office button, click the arrow to the right of Save As, and then choose PDF or XPS (see Figure 18.3). There are some options at the bottom to tweak, such as whether the PDF is intended to ever be printed. You can click the Options button if you want to get really detailed about what to save in the PDF, such as hidden slides, document properties, or accessibility information.

Figure 18.3 Save as PDF or XPS from the Office menu.

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Note

To get more information about each of the advanced PDF saving options, click Options to launch the Options dialog. Then click the question mark button at the top right of the dialog.

3. You can then view the saved document without using PowerPoint. If you save to PDF, you can use the Adobe Reader to view it; download it free here: www.adobe.com/reader.

Collaboration Using Comments

image PowerPoint is being used more in nontraditional ways because presentations are being utilized as documents to convey information instead of simply a presentation aid. As you might have noticed, PowerPoint is the Office application best tailored to view and manage graphics, and if a document is rich with media and graphics, people typically use PowerPoint instead of Word to present their content.

The Comments feature can help you and your peers manage working on the same document. It allows you to add annotations without modifying the actual presentation.

Adding Comments

You might be familiar with the Reviewing ribbon in Word 2007 (it was the Reviewing toolbar in previous versions), which allows changes to be tracked and allows one person’s modifications to be viewed by another.

Although this highly popular feature is not found in PowerPoint, it is possible to obtain similar functionality using the Comments feature. The basic idea is that you can annotate slides by adding Comments that contain who created the comment, and when it was created, as well as some text. All Comments on a slide can be cycled through, edited, and deleted.

To insert a Comment, go to the Review tab in the Comments group and click New Comment.

A balloon is inserted in the upper left corner of your current slide by default; or if you have an object selected, the comment will be placed next to it (see Figure 18.4). Multiple comments are cascaded and offset from each other.

Figure 18.4 Add a new comment to annotate your presentation.

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Using Comments

Here are some things to keep in mind about comments:

  • Comments can only contain text, not graphics.
  • Comments cannot be formatted.
  • The title of the comment is made up of the initials used to register PowerPoint followed by the comment number.
  • Comments expand to accommodate the text placed in them.
  • Navigation from one comment to another using Next and Previous will open the comment text.
  • Comments can be made invisible by clicking the Show Markup button, but note that this does not delete them from the presentation.

This is a great way to add notes to a presentation without actually modifying the content. The comments do not show up in Slide Show mode, so only editors of the presentation will notice them.

Note

Previous versions of PowerPoint had the capability to Send for Review and also a Revisions Pane, which were quite helpful for collaborating on presentations. These features were removed in PowerPoint 2007.

Encrypting Presentations with a Password

image You, as a reader of this book, might very well be a spy and need to email a super secret PowerPoint presentation back to headquarters. The presentation might get intercepted by baddies, and you want to be absolutely certain that no one will be able to read its contents unless they have the secret password.

Password to Open

You’re in luck. PowerPoint makes it very easy to encrypt presentations so that they are completely unreadable without the correct password:

1. Open your presentation in PowerPoint (click the Office button and choose Open).

2. Click the Office button again and click the arrow next to Prepare. Choose the Encrypt Document option.

3. Type your secret password into the box and click OK (see Figure 18.5). PowerPoint asks you to enter it again to make sure that you entered it correctly.

Figure 18.5 Encrypt Document lets you add a password so that nobody can open it without first entering the password.

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4. Save your presentation and close PowerPoint.

5. Restart PowerPoint and open the presentation. PowerPoint now prompts you for a password.

Caution

This uses real encryption, so you won’t be able to get into your file if you forgot your password. Really! Even if you paid someone at Microsoft a million dollars, they wouldn’t be able to recover your presentation if you forget the password. So don’t forget it. Also, passwords are case sensitive, so a capital A is not the same as a lowercase a.

On the other hand, don’t put complete faith in Office’s password protection either. No program is perfect, and tools exist to attack encrypted PowerPoint presentations. Your best safeguard to prevent this it to choose good passwords that are long, combine uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols (such as @%!$).

If you edit an encrypted presentation and save your changes, the encryption stays in place. You don’t need to manually encrypt every time.

To remove encryption for a presentation, go back to the Office button. Again, go to Prepare and select Encrypt Document again, which will deselect the option and unprotect your presentation.

Setting a Password for Editing Privileges

PowerPoint also has an ability to set a password that is needed to edit the presentation. If an editing password is set and the recipient doesn’t know the password, the presentation will be opened in read-only mode and won’t be editable.

To use this feature, click the Office button, and then click the arrow next to Save As. Choose Tools, General Options (see Figure 18.6). Yeah, we know; it’s a really weird place to hide password options.

Figure 18.6 Choose General Options from the Tools menu on the Save As dialog.

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In this dialog, you can set a password to allow a user to modify the presentation. The password you enter in the Password to Modify field is required for someone to edit the presentation. Note that there’s also a text box in the dialog that lets you set a password to open the presentation, which is described in the previous section.

Unlike the password to open, which encrypts the entire presentation, this password is much less secure. Someone with a little technical knowledge can remove or change this password. So please don’t rely on this one for top secret content.

Caution

Once again, passwords for edit are not nearly as secure as passwords to open. If you send your favorite computer nerd (like us) a presentation that requires a password to edit, rest assured that we will be able to edit it if we really want to. Programs are also available that let people easily break these passwords. The password to edit just keeps honest people honest.

To clear out the edit password, return to the dialog by clicking the Office button and choosing Save As. Again, go to Tools and then General Options. Clear out the password you don’t like, and click OK.

Exporting a Presentation as a Picture Slide Show

image Save Presentation as Pictures

PowerPoint lets you save presentations in many formats. One useful format is as a picture:

1. Open your favorite presentation.

2. Now save the presentation as an image by clicking the Office button, and then clicking the arrow next to Save As. For the Save As type, choose PNG Portable Network Graphics Format or another picture format.

3. Choose a location to save to, such as your Desktop, and then give the presentation a name. Click OK.

4. When PowerPoint asks whether to export every slide in the presentation or just the current slide, choose Every Slide (the first choice).

Now you have a folder full of PNG images on your desktop, which you can view with any image viewing program as a collection of picture slides.

Caution

Because these are pictures, you will lose any effects, animations, or media in the original presentation. What you’re getting is a static shot of each slide in its initial state.

Slides on an iPod

Do you have an iPod that supports pictures? You can transfer the images of your presentation that you saved to the iPod to make your presentation more mobile. This can be very helpful for students or if you are traveling to a remote location where you might not be able to take a laptop.

Do the following to copy the images of your presentation that you just created to your iPod, and enjoy your slides on the road:

1. Connect your iPod to your computer.

2. If iTunes doesn’t start automatically, launch iTunes from the Start menu.

3. In iTunes, select the iPod’s icon. You will see it in the Devices section at the bottom of the left pane.

4. Click the Photos tab. (If you don’t see a Photos tab, your iPod probably doesn’t support photographs, unfortunately.)

5. Check the Sync Photos From box and navigate to the folder of slide PNGs you saved.

6. Choose whether to copy all your folders or just the selected folders and albums. You probably just want to copy the selected ones.

7. When you’re happy with your choices, click the OK button, and your iPod will sync the slides.

Note

These steps were based on Apple iTunes 7.4 for Windows. They might vary if you’re using an older or newer version of iTunes.

Save Anything as a Picture

In addition to saving entire slides from your presentation as a picture, just about any element you create in PowerPoint can be saved as a picture. Let’s walk through an example:

1. Create a new presentation and add a text placeholder to the slide.

2. Type some text into the placeholder.

3. On the Insert tab, go to the Drawing group and click Rectangle. Click anywhere on the slide to insert the rectangle.

4. Select the rectangle and the placeholder by dragging a marquee to select both objects. Or, use Ctrl+A to select everything on the slide.

5. Right-click one of the selected objects and choose Save as Picture and save it.

Neat, huh? This works with just about any type of PowerPoint object. It makes it very easy to whip up a quick diagram, save it out to a picture, and email it to a friend.

Note

Notice how the default file format for saved pictures in PowerPoint 2007 is PNG. This is so that saved objects can have a transparent background without much fuss. In PowerPoint 2003, the default was Enhanced Windows Metafile (.emf), which also did the job, but did not work as well on non-Windows platforms.

Save a Picture as a Picture

Yes, this means that you can save a picture as a picture also. Go ahead:

1. Insert a picture on your slide.

2. Right-click it and choose Save as Picture. By default, this saves the image at its current dimensions. PowerPoint probably shrunk the image when it was inserted, so you won’t be saving the picture at its full size. To save it at its full original size, click the little arrow to the right of the Save button and choose Save Original Picture.

Note

Save Original Picture saves the original picture stored in the presentation. If someone were to use the PowerPoint 2007 picture compression tools or removes cropped regions from all saved pictures, the original picture would no longer be in the presentation, so you wouldn’t be able to save it.

So what’s the point? You might want to save a picture as a picture to take advantage of PowerPoint’s picture effects. For example, with a picture selected, you can go to the Picture Tools Format tab and go to the Picture Styles group, where there’s a gallery of pretty picture effects. Then, when the picture’s formatted the way you like, use Save as Picture to save the picture as a picture again.

Saving to a Network Share

image When saving a presentation using the Save As dialog, you might think that the text box only allows you to type in the filename to save under. But, you can actually type in remote locations to save your presentation directly to a remote server (see Figure 18.7).

Figure 18.7 The Save As dialog box that lets you enter a server location as well as a filename to which PowerPoint saves your file.

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You can save to a network share by typing in a UNC path such as \waynes-computerdocuments.

To save to a website that supports WebDAV or a Microsoft SharePoint Document Workspace, type a URL such as www.example.com/Documents.

Many companies use SharePoint internally, and Microsoft will host SharePoint for you free through its Office Live service (http://officelive.com). You can get WebDAV by signing up for a premium Microsoft Office Live service such as Live Essentials or from Apple by signing up for its .Mac service. Inside a corporation, you’re best off using Slide Library, which you can read more about in Chapter 9, “Inserting Content into PowerPoint.”

Caution

Saving over a network is typically less reliable than saving to your local hard drive. For a super important presentation, your best bet is to steer clear of network saving, or save a copy locally just in case the other one fails to save or becomes corrupt.

Customizing AutoSave

image One cool thing about PowerPoint is that it periodically saves what you’ve done so far. That way, if PowerPoint crashes, your computer crashes, or aliens attack, you won’t lose any changes you have made to your presentation.

By default, PowerPoint saves your work every 10 minutes. We’re paranoid, so we prefer to save more often. To do this

  1. Click the Office button and choose PowerPoint Options.
  2. Choose the Save tab on the left.
  3. Make sure that Save AutoRecover Information Every ___ Minutes is checked, enter 1 for the number, and click OK to save.

If you often edit a large presentation, saving every minute slows down your whole system. Just use a higher number for the time increment to create an AutoRecover file to keep from eating up all your processor’s performance.

Save as Web Page

PowerPoint lets you save a presentation in HTML, the native web format. Because most people can view PowerPoint presentations these days either with PowerPoint itself, the free PowerPoint Viewer, or another program such as Open Office, we don’t find ourselves using this feature for publishing that often. However, this feature does have its uses.

In this section, we discuss using the Save as Web Page feature to extract your media from a presentation and explain why Office HTML is as ugly as it is.

Easily Extract Pictures, Movies, and Sounds from Your Presentation by Saving the Presentation as a Web Page

Ever add a picture, movie, or sound to a presentation, lose the original content, and want to pull the original object back out of PowerPoint? Or maybe someone sent you a presentation containing a pretty picture that you’d like to save out to use on your own. There are various ways to accomplish this, but the easiest is to save the presentation as a web page:

1. Open the presentation you need to get something from.

2. Click the Office button, and then click the arrow next to Save As.

3. Choose Web Page for the Save As type, choose a location to save to such as the Desktop, and click Save.

4. Navigate to the place you saved the presentation as a web page. You will find a folder there with a similar name as your presentation. Inside, you will find the original pictures, movies, and sounds from the presentation.

Ugly Office HTML

As web developers, one of our biggest gripes with Office used to be the bloated HTML it would save out. Really, we type two words in a PowerPoint presentation. We expect something like this:

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Instead, PowerPoint produces this huge file that barely resembles HTML, with all this extra gunk:

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Actually, there’s a very good reason that PowerPoint saves out all this stuff. Although it’s definitely not optimized for the Web, the designers of this feature figured that customers would expect to be able to open the PowerPoint HTML back up without any data loss. After all, they said if PowerPoint can save it, it should be able to open it.

Therefore, the HTML needs to be as expressive as the normal .pptx format. Because PowerPoint has added a good number of features over the years, this obviously requires saving a lot of information, which does explain the size of the HTML source.

Note

Word contains a Filtered HTML option that produces cleaner code that cannot be reopened in high-fidelity. Unfortunately, PowerPoint doesn’t have a similar filtered HTML option.

Removing Sensitive Information from Presentations (Document Inspector)

image Have you heard about those scandals in which a government official posted a Word document on the Internet and accidentally revealed confidential information that had been embedded in the doc?

Yeah, that’s not good. Office 2007 includes some new tools for sanitizing documents to make sure that you don’t accidentally send out private stuff when sending your file to others:

1. Open a presentation, click the Office button, and then click the arrow next to Prepare. Choose Inspect Document.

2. You will be prompted to save the presentation if you have changes that you have not already saved.

Tip

The Document Inspector’s changes cannot be undone, so consider making a copy of your presentation before using it.

3. Check all the boxes and click OK. PowerPoint shows you some information saved in the presentation that you might not know about and gives you an opportunity to strip it out (see Figure 18.8).

Figure 18.8 There are many types of hidden data that PowerPoint can help remove from your presentation.

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This tool can help strip out comments, ink notations, document properties, custom XML data, invisible content that was hidden with the content pane, off-slide content, and notes.

Caution

Not all off-slide content is bad. For example, you might have some notes not on the slide that you like to pull in for quick edits. Sometimes this is worth getting rid of; sometimes it’s good to keep around. The Document Inspector will point out potential problems, but don’t follow it blindly.

Tip

If you have a presentation with a lot of notes that are taking up too much space, use the Document Inspector to remove all the notes from your presentation to make the file smaller.

Using PowerPoint Shapes in Other Office Applications

image It’s easy to export PowerPoint content to Word and Excel. Because slides are structured as one large canvas, it’s often easier to create quick diagrams in PowerPoint and move it over to Word or Excel rather than create it in Word or Excel.

Copying Shapes to Microsoft Excel

Copying content from PowerPoint to Excel is easy:

1. Launch PowerPoint.

2. Insert a few shapes using tools on the Home tab, Drawing group under the Shapes button. Choose a shape and click on the slide to insert it.

3. Select all the shapes you inserted (press Ctrl+A to select everything or Shift+click to select individual shapes), and then choose Copy (press Ctrl+C or go to the Home tab under the Clipboard and choose Copy).

4. Launch Excel.

5. Paste the shapes (press Ctrl+V).

6. Excel 2007 uses the same underlying drawing code as PowerPoint 2007, so you can continue tweaking your diagram in Excel. For example, you can select a shape, go to the Format tab in the Shape Styles group, and choose Shape Fill to change the fill on a shape right in Excel.

Most of what’s created in PowerPoint—including shapes, charts, pictures, and diagrams—can be copied over and edited in Excel with full fidelity.

Note

If you’re using PowerPoint 2007 with Excel 2003 or older, the objects will be pasted into Excel as pictures. So, they will look great, but they won’t be editable since older versions of Excel don’t have the new Office 2007 user interface.

The opposite technique, moving Excel content into PowerPoint, is discussed in Chapter 9, “Inserting Content into PowerPoint.”

Copying Shapes to Microsoft Word

Word’s drawing engine was not upgraded in Office 2007 as Excel and PowerPoint’s were. Diagrams and charts can be brought from PowerPoint over to Word and edited in full fidelity, but moving over a shape keeps it in locked form.

Give it a try:

1. Follow steps 1–3 from the steps in the Excel section given previously.

2. Launch Word.

3. Paste the copied shape(s) (press Ctrl+V).

Notice how individual shapes can’t be formatted or selected. If you want to make edits, make them in PowerPoint and then recopy and repaste into Word. You know that you like PowerPoint better anyway.

You can insert Office 2003 era shapes in Word using Insert, Illustrations, Shapes, choosing a shape, and clicking in the document to insert it. No pretty effects exist like glows, soft shadows, reflections, or real 3D on native Word shapes though. Word 2007 does have galleries though (with a Word shape selected, go to Drawing Tools Format and look at the Shape Styles group), so you can use the PowerPoint 2003 era effects in Word with greater effectiveness.

Saving to the 97–2003 File Format

image PowerPoint 2007 introduces a new .pptx file format. For at least the next few years, you will likely be sharing files with folks who still have older versions of PowerPoint. Some might have PowerPoint 2002 or older, which doesn’t include the file format Compatibility Pack (read more about the Compatibility Pack in Chapter 17, “Migrating Files to PowerPoint 2007”). Others might be using Open Office or Google docs, which don’t support the new file formats. In any case, people will often request that you send them a .ppt file.

That’s easy enough. Just click the Office button, click the arrow next to Save As, and choose PowerPoint 97–2003 Presentation. Now you can save the file in the .ppt format that all versions of PowerPoint from 97 to 2007 are capable of opening without a hitch.

Don’t Choose a Weird File Format

To keep your presentation size small, stick to the new 2007 file formats (.pptx, .ppsx, .pptm, and so on) if you can.

Saving to the older binary formats (.ppt, .pps) is best when you’re collaborating with others who may have PowerPoint versions that are older than PowerPoint 2003. (PowerPoint 2003 users can use the Compatibility Pack to view the new file formats.) But, when you save to the older format, PowerPoint essentially saves two copies of the file. For example, if you save as presentation.ppt, it shoves a full presentation.pptx copy of your presentation inside the .ppt file. That way, if a PowerPoint 2007 user opens the file, he will get all the data from the embedded .pptx file; if a PowerPoint 2003 user opens the file, he will get all the data from the binary .ppt file.

The new file formats produced by PowerPoint 2007, which are zipped XML, are typically smaller than the old binary .ppt format produced by PowerPoint 2003, especially if fast saves are turned on in PowerPoint 2003. There are rare cases in which PowerPoint 2003 will produce smaller files. But one thing is clear: For compatibility reasons, the .ppt binaries produced by PowerPoint 2007 will always be bigger than the native .pptx files it produces. So, stick to .pptx when possible.

A similar tip applies when you’re using older PowerPoint versions such as PowerPoint 2003. Save as the default .ppt format. If you save as PowerPoint 97–2003 & 95 Presentation, PowerPoint essentially saves two copies of the presentation, which can massively increase file size.

Also, don’t worry about having to always save to .ppt or the 2003 formats if your friends, peers, or co-workers have yet to upgrade to Office 2007. Read about the Compatibility Pack in Chapter 17, which allows them to open files created in 2007 with their previous versions of PowerPoint!

Change Your Default File Format

If you anticipate saving mainly in the old file format, you can set PowerPoint 97–2003 file as your PowerPoint default:

1. Click the Office button, and then click the PowerPoint Options button.

2. In the PowerPoint Options dialog, choose Save in the left panel.

3. For the Save Files in This Format section, select a file format that you want to be your default. Then click OK to save your choice.

Caution

Unless there’s a good reason to do this—for example, everyone you know is using ancient versions of PowerPoint—you should steer clear of changing your default format to PowerPoint 97–2003. When saving to the PowerPoint 97–2003 format, you won’t be able to use many of the new drawing features introduced in PowerPoint 2007.

Using the Compatibility Checker

PowerPoint 2007 supports many new features that aren’t supported when you save in the older file format. PowerPoint 2007 contains a Compatibility Checker that warns you when it needs to “dumb down” your file to save in the old format.

For example,

1. Create a new presentation.

2. Type some text into the title placeholder and select it.

3. On the Format tab, go to the WordArt Styles group and select one of the fancier effects.

4. Click the Office button, and under the Save As options, choose PowerPoint 97–2003 Presentation, select a filename, and click Save.

5. This automatically pops up the Compatibility Checker (see Figure 18.9). Carefully read what saving will do and press Continue when you’re satisfied. Be careful though because you cannot undo this.

Figure 18.9 The PowerPoint Compatibility Checker.

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Compatibility Mode

When you save a file in the older .ppt file format or when you open a file that’s in the old format, note that the title changes to say Compatibility Mode, as shown in Figure 18.10.

Figure 18.10 Compatibility Mode.

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When in this mode, PowerPoint makes sure that you don’t do anything to the file that is incompatible with PowerPoint 97–2003. For example, click into the title placeholder and then go to the Home tab in the Drawing group and open the Quick Styles gallery. Note how all the styles are disabled.

If you change your mind and want the full power of PowerPoint 2007, you need to upgrade to the new file format that supports all the latest features. To do that, click the Office button and then choose Convert.

A dialog appears, asking whether you want to upgrade (see Figure 18.11). If you accept, the file format changes and the words “Compatibility Mode” disappear from the title bar. Click OK to accept. If you check the Do Not Ask Me Again About Converting Documents check box, you won’t be prompted anymore in the future.

Figure 18.11 A dialog asks whether to upgrade your file to the new PowerPoint 2007 file format.

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Now if you click into the title placeholder, go to the Home tab, Drawing group, and open the Quick Styles gallery, you can see that all the options are available.

Compressing Pictures to Create Smaller Files

image Having many large photos is one way to bloat the size of your saved presentations. Unlike previous versions of PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2007 does a lot by default to compress pictures so that they take up very little space.

This process is very customizable, however:

1. With a presentation that contains pictures open, click the Office button and then click the arrow next to Save As.

2. Click the Tools button and choose Compress Pictures.

3. Click Options to bring up the dialog shown in Figure 18.12.

Figure 18.12 PowerPoint lets you customize how pictures are compressed.

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Uncheck the first check box if you want to pick and choose which pictures are compressed and uncheck the second check box if you often re-crop pictures within PowerPoint and don’t want the cropped portions deleted. Most of the time, you should just keep both checked to keep your presentations smaller.

If you don’t intend to print your presentation and just want view it onscreen, you can change the Target Output option to Screen to further compress your images to make the presentation even leaner in size.

Publishing Your Presentation to a CD

image With PowerPoint 2007 comes a brand new PowerPoint Viewer (www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=048dc840-14e1-467d-8dca-19d2a8fd7485).

Older Viewers

The 2007 Viewer now requires Windows 2000. The 2003 Viewer distributed with PowerPoint 2003 ran on Windows 98 SE as well, but the system requirements were bumped to Windows 2000 during the Office 2007 to make the code more secure. If you need to view PowerPoint presentations when using older versions of Windows, you can grab the older PowerPoint 2003 Viewer here—www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=428D5727-43AB-4F24-90B7-A94784AF71A4—and the even older PowerPoint 97 Viewer here—http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/2000/Ppview97.aspx. The PowerPoint 2003 Viewer added newer animations and slide transitions, support for password protected presentations, and animated GIFs.

The nice thing about Microsoft Office viewers is that they’re free, so you can use them even if you don’t own the associated program. This also applies to the Word viewer, the Excel viewer, and the Visio viewer (and we’re sure that there are others):

Why Care About a Viewer If I Own PowerPoint?

“But I own PowerPoint! Why do I care that there’s a new viewer? I can just view my presentation in PowerPoint.”

One point of anxiety you face as a PowerPoint user is being unsure whether the presentation that took you hours to create and looks marvelous on your home machine will turn to ugly mush after you are forced to present on some old machine running a decade old version of PowerPoint that’s already connected to a projector but that doesn’t support half the animations you’re using.

Fear no more.

The coolest feature of this viewer is that it can be run without any installation or setup, which means that it can be run directly off your USB keychain or even off write-protected media such as a CD or DVD.

Replacing the old Pack and Go Wizard, a new Package for CD feature (found under the Office button in the Publish options) was added in PowerPoint 2003 to make it easy to burn your presentation to a CD along with the new PowerPoint Viewer (see Figure 18.13). Then, you can just stick the CD into any machine running Windows 2000 or later, even if the computer doesn’t have PowerPoint, and your presentation will play automatically using the new viewer.

Figure 18.13 The Package for CD dialog.

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Tip

Need to view PowerPoint files on your little Windows Mobile device? If you have a device running Windows Mobile 5.0, you have PowerPoint Mobile. This application only allows you to view PowerPoint files, but it does so very accurately since it runs the same underlying code as the PowerPoint 2003 Viewer.

Package for CD Customizations

You can choose multiple presentations when selecting which files to copy. PowerPoint lets you create a playlist of presentations so that you can order the presentations (see Figure 18.14). The Select How Presentations Will Play in the Viewer choice in the Options dialog (see Figure 18.15) lets you choose whether to play the presentation in your playlist in order or whether to let the user choose which presentation to play.

Figure 18.14 The Package for CD playlist dialog.

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Figure 18.15 Select options for how the presentation will be played.

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The PowerPoint 2007 viewer still only plays older binary .ppt files natively, so this dialog also lets you choose whether you want to downgrade your new .pptx files to play natively in the viewer. Unless you choose Archive Package, all your files will be down converted to the old .ppt binary format. If your files contain presentations that are not in the old .ppt format (this includes files for which you’ve used Convert to change to the new format), you will get a warning asking whether to convert to “compatible file formats,” which means that PowerPoint wants to convert them to the old format.

The middle options in the dialog let you choose whether to include linked files and embedded fonts in your package. As always, beware of including linked files unless you trust the source.

Other options let you set a password for the entire package and choose whether to inspect the presentations for inappropriate content. (Read about Document Inspector earlier in this chapter.)

Bypassing Package for CD

If you really know what you are doing, you can bypass the Package for CD feature and copy the Viewer files yourself. These are the files you need for everything to work right. They all need to be in the same directory:

  • pptview.exe
  • gdiplus.dll
  • intldate.dll
  • ppvwintl.dll
  • saext.dll
  • unicows.dll

So create your presentation and burn it to a CD, knowing that you can stick it in practically any old Windows machine, and it will play exactly the way you expect it to.

Other Notes About the Viewer

Here are some other caveats about the Viewer that might not be obvious:

  • There are a few limitations to the Viewer: no VBA Macros, no programs, no IRM, no OLE.
  • There are a few special command switches for launching the Viewer. For example, you can open a list of presentations instead of just one, you can use the Viewer to print a presentation, or you can open a presentation starting at a particular slide. This article has more details: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;830040.
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