Powerful PowerPoint for Educators: Using Visual Basic for Applications to Make PowerPoint Interactive

Before You Be gin
This book assumes that you know the ba sics of PowerPoint. If you don’t,
you should spend a couple of hours playing with PowerPoint and/or buy an in-
troductory book about PowerPoint. Try to get one that is specific to the ver sion
of PowerPoint that you own. While most features are iden tical from ver sion to
version, there are a few subtle differences in each version.
Before you begin, you should check a few of PowerPoint’s set tings. Start
PowerPoint, and choose “Op tions” from the Tools menu if you are us ing a Win-
dows computer, choose “Pref er ences” from the Edit menu if you are us ing a
Macintosh with OS 9 or earlier, and choose “Pref er ences” from the PowerPoint
menu if you are us ing a Macintosh with OS X. Regardless of which version you
are us ing, you will have sev eral tabs at the top of the di alog box. These tabs in-
clude View, General, Edit, and Save. The re maining tabs will vary by which
version you have.
Click on the Save tab. The first item is a check box for “Allow fast saves”
(see Fig ure 2.1). If this box is checked, click on it to remove the check mark. If
you al low fast saves, PowerPoint will spend less time sav ing your work, but it
will cre ate larger files and files that are more prone to problems. While you are
unlikely to ever find that PowerPoint has corrupted your pro ject, you are less
likely to have prob lems if you uncheck “Allow fast saves.”
Figure 2.1. No Check Next to “Allow fast saves”
14 Tra di tional Mul ti me dia Fea tures of PowerPoint

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Next, click on the Edit tab. Find the “Undo” section. Change the setting for
“Max i mum num ber of undos” to 10. In many ap plications, when you make a
mistake, if you don’t do any thing else, you can fix it by choosing “Undo” from
the Edit menu. In PowerPoint, you can fix not only the last mistake but several
mistakes be fore that. This setting tells PowerPoint how many things it has to re -
member so you can undo them. In the ory, you might want to have as many as
possible, but sev eral PowerPoint experts have no ticed that the higher this num -
ber is the more likely you are to have prob lems with PowerPoint. Set ting it to 10
gives you enough ability to correct your mistakes while minimizing the likeli-
hood that you will have a problem.
Another setting you might want to change can be found un der the Gen eral
tab. You might want to change the setting for “Link sounds with file size greater
than.” This set ting is dis cussed later in this chap ter.
Once you have changed the settings to not al low fast saves and to limit the
number of undos, click OK to save the settings.
Next, choose “Cus tom ize” from the Tools menu. Click on the Toolbars tab
and make sure there is a check next to “Draw ing.” The “Draw ing” toolbar will
be very use ful for drawing your own shapes and mod ifying the appearance of
shapes that are drawn for you.
Finally, be fore you start work ing on a PowerPoint pro ject, create a folder
on your disk for your pro ject and save your pre sentation to that folder. This will
be important when you start including hyperlinks and mul timedia ob jects in
your pre sentation. Most el ements of your presentation will be embedded in your
presentation. That is, they will be part of the PowerPoint file. Other el ements
will be stored in other files, and your presentation will link to those other files. If
you save your pre sentation first and you save any linked files to the same place
you save your pre sentation (that is, the same folder on the same disk), your links
will con tinue to work when you move the presentation (along with all the linked
files) to another place, such as another folder, an other disk, or another computer.
If you don’t save your files first, the links are likely to stop working.