A Survey of Advanced PowerPoint Features

The following sections describe various types of feature groups although the treatment of these groups is by no means exhaustive. Most of these features are well beyond the scope of this book, so you need to seek help or information elsewhere. Nevertheless, these features can give you a sense of some of the power left for you to unlock in PowerPoint.

Note that the figures shown in these sections are intended to illustrate rather than teach you how to use these advanced features.

Online Meeting Services

A whole group of advanced features have to do with online collaboration. Imagine, for example, that you're connected through the Internet with colleagues around the world and you want to work on a presentation together, or you want to play a slide show for everyone and conduct a Web-based discussion of the presentation. If you have the necessary network setup, these are some of the things you can do:

• Meet now Online meetings are accomplished by using NetMeeting, an intriguing and extremely valuable service that is used for conducting meetings over the network and for sharing, viewing, annotating, and commenting a slide show that everyone sees. (See Figure 21.1, which shows a NetMeeting chat in progress.) This feature requires an Internet locator service (ILS) set up on a server that knows about and can connect you to other users who are running NetMeeting and are connected to the same ILS server. The ILS server, in turn, must be set up on a Windows 2000 or later recent domain, and it must be running the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) Admin Service. If you are in a company or school that has or can have this type of resource, you should ask your network administrator if you can take advantage of this or other network-related features.

  Figure 21.1. Online meetings can include chat sessions where you type questions and answers while viewing a PowerPoint screen.

  

• Web discussions This feature enables you and your colleagues to attach comments to a Web page or to any document that can be opened with a browser, such as PowerPoint slide shows saved in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or Mime-encapsulated HTML (MHTML) format. As comments are added, they can be viewed in a discussion task pane, threaded so that you can see who responded to whom. This feature requires a Web-based discussion server.

• Shared workspace A shared workspace is an area, hosted by a Web-based discussion server, where you and your colleagues can share documents and information, monitor the status of given projects, and so on. This new feature in PowerPoint 2003 also requires Microsoft's SharePoint services.

• Subscription notification Along with SharePoint services and Web discussions, you can receive notification of any changes made to a Web page via email notification. You can subscribe to an individual Web page or to an entire folder on a Web site.

• Information rights management (IRM) This feature, which is new in PowerPoint 2003, enables you to make documents available to others but also to restrict who can use them, when they can use them, and what they can do with them while they have them checked out. IRM requires you to download and install the Microsoft Windows Rights Management client and also to subscribe to Microsoft's .NET services, which enables you to generate your own authentication certificate and to respond to requests for licenses and keys to work with your documents.

Research Services

Another group of advanced features is research services, which involve the ability to look up words, get reference information, and even translate from one language to another.

You can select a word or phrase and choose Tools, Research to display the Research task pane (see Figure 21.2).

Figure 21.2. Research services enable you to do much more than look up words in a dictionary.

PowerPoint can search for information in its own dictionary and thesaurus, or if you're connected to the Internet, it can search several online research, business, and financial sites. You simply select the service or group of services you want and see what kind of results you get.

Special Characters

You can insert special characters individually, but if you're working extensively with a foreign language, or if you're using mathematical equations, that approach is tedious and inefficient.

PowerPoint, indeed the entire Office suite of applications, enables you to install support for any of a number of languages, including common European languages and those that use non-Roman characters or that read right to left, such as Russian, Japanese, and Hebrew.

You must be running a recent version of the Windows operating system, such as Windows 2000 or Windows XP, both of which have built-in language support. In addition, you can select or create keyboards that enable you to input foreign characters more naturally (see Figure 21.3). If you're using characters that require multiple keystrokes for each character, such as Japanese, you also must install and use an Input Method Editor (IME) for that specific language.

Figure 21.3. You can set up languages by using keyboards and characters from many different countries.

Equations are handled a bit differently from the way you insert foreign language characters. Although you can insert as text some of the same characters and symbols used in equations, formatting them to look like equations is nearly impossible.

Instead, you insert an equation object by choosing Insert, Object, Create New and choosing Microsoft Equation from the list of object types. If you did not install the Equation Editor when you installed Office 2003, you must do so before you can select this option from the list.

PowerPoint then opens an equation editor in a separate window, and you use it to create and format an equation (see Figure 21.4). When you click OK, the equation editor closes, and PowerPoint inserts the equation in a slide as an object (see Figure 21.5). You can move, size, and otherwise manipulate the equation box. To edit the equation, double-click it to return to the equation editor.

Figure 21.4. Microsoft's Equation Editor is a powerful tool for formatting equations.

Figure 21.5. Equations appear as objects in a PowerPoint slide, and they can be moved or sized.

Features That Automate Difficult or Tedious Tasks

If programming can be used to create a program such as PowerPoint, it stands to reason that even more programming can add to or modify how PowerPoint works. PowerPoint, along with the rest of the entire Office suite and Windows, enables you to use programming techniques in the following features:

• Macros A macro at its most basic is simply a recorded sequence of keystrokes or actions that can be played back by typing a simple keystroke or attached to an object as an action setting. However, you can take macro programming way beyond simple macro recording to accomplish some rather complex and amazing feats.

• Visual Basic This object-oriented programming language can be used to edit recorded macros or to create entirely new macros (see Figure 21.6). If you already have programming skills, learning to program in Visual Basic isn't very difficult. Indeed, anyone wanting to learn to program in this language can learn quickly with the help of a self-study book.

  Figure 21.6. You can use Visual Basic Editor (VBE) to edit or program macros and other PowerPoint controls.

  

  The challenge comes in learning to use Visual Basic to hook into things that PowerPoint already does and modify the process or add capabilities that aren't already there. The satisfaction comes from getting PowerPoint to do exactly what you need it to do, even if it's not designed that way.

• Script editing PowerPoint files can be saved as Web pages, which makes it easy for others to view them by using a browser. PowerPoint also allows you to open Web versions of a slide show and edit directly in PowerPoint. Nevertheless, Web versions of PowerPoint slide shows are written using HTML and its variations, and they can be viewed and edited directly in that language.

If you choose Tools, Macro, Microsoft Script Editor, PowerPoint opens the Microsoft Script Editor, displaying HTML code in the center of the editor, with a variety of tools for editing (see Figure 21.7). Chances are that you'll find this approach less than appealing. However, if you're experienced in working with HTML code, and if you need to get behind the scenes and tweak that code to make something specific take place, you can do so by using the Microsoft Script Editor.

Figure 21.7. PowerPoint's Microsoft Script Editor enables you to edit HTML code directly for Web-based presentations.

Add-ins

Add-ins are special supplemental programs, usually provided by third-party sources, to extend and enhance the capabilities of PowerPoint. Add-ins range from programs that add multimedia capabilities to those that simply enhance PowerPoint's default menus or toolbars.

Some add-ins are free; others you have to pay for. You can even write your own custom add-in programs by using the VBE. Also, you can find many add-ins on the Web. Look at the Microsoft Web site for the ones that are provided by Microsoft or do a Web search for addins and PowerPoint to find possible PowerPoint enhancements elsewhere on the Web.

You can easily add add-in programs by choosing Tools, Add-Ins, Add New and browsing to find the filename of the add-in you want, one that ends with .ppa.

Commercial Programs and Services

You can purchase third-party add-ins, templates, and graphics to add variety and interest to presentations. Packages of animations, templates, and add-ins can cost anywhere from a few dollars to a couple hundred dollars. With a little research, you can often figure out which ones offer the best value. If you get to the point where you create lots of presentations, an investment in commercial programs might well be worth it.

You'll also find that certain PowerPoint features really are a conduit to commercial services, or that in order to use a feature, you have to invest in other programs or hardware. Examples include PowerPoint's Fax service and its collaboration features, such as NetMeeting, SharePoint, and Web discussions. The next section shows you how to get information and reviews on products and services so you don't waste time and money.