Publishing a Presentation to the Web


A presentation delivered on the Web has the same overall goal as any other presentation: you want the audience to see it, appreciate it, and accept it. However, the means for accomplishing this over the Web are slightly different. A successful presentation over the Web should meet the following requirements:

  • Universally accessible to the intended audience. You must know your audience and their Web browser versions, so that you can save your presentation in the most appropriate format to their needs. This chapter discusses this issue in detail.

  • Friendly and user-interactive. This means that you should include directions, hyper- links, and action buttons to help the users navigate through the presentation, as you learned in Chapter 21.

  • Quick to download. This means that you should keep the file size as small as possible without sacrificing important features. For example, do not use unnecessary sounds, graphics, videos, or photos, because these items all contribute to the file size.

  • Quick to view. You should skip complex animation and transition effects in a Web show. Web users like to get right to the point of each slide. Although long-lasting animation effects may be great for a speaker-led presentation, they are usually just annoying to Web users.

  • Does not rely heavily on sound. Do not make sound an integral part of your presentation, because you cannot assume that everyone who views it will have a computer with sound support. For example, library computers usually do not. Further, consider making the sounds that you do include optional, perhaps by including a button on the slide that they can click to hear the sound. A lot of people object to Web pages that play sounds or music automatically.

You may find that you have to partially sacrifice one of these goals to meet another. For example, PowerPoint offers a way to ensure compatibility with multiple browsers when saving in Web format, but this results in larger file sizes. I will discuss these dilemmas as the chapter progresses and let you come up with your own solutions.

Deciding on a File Format for Web Distribution

You can begin by deciding which file format you want to use. This can be a rather complex question because of the wide array of choices. You first need to decide whether you want to publish in Web format or in native PowerPoint format. If you decide to publish in Web format, you then need to decide whether to create a single-page Web file or a traditional HTML file. You must then decide which browsers you want to support.

Native PowerPoint Format versus Web Format

First, you must decide whether to upload the presentation to a Web server in its native PowerPoint format or to publish it in Web format. Both formats have pros and cons:

  • PowerPoint format. You can make the PowerPoint presentation file available for download from your Web site, just as you can make any other file type available, such as a graphic or an application.

    • Pros: The audience sees the presentation exactly as you created it, including any embedded sounds, movies, transitions, and animation.

    • Cons: Only people who own a copy of PowerPoint or who have downloaded the PowerPoint Viewer program can see it.

  • Web format. You can convert your PowerPoint presentation to Web format.

    • Pros: Anyone with a Web browser can view the presentation without any special software. This makes your work widely accessible.

    • Cons: Certain special effects in your presentation might not be visible to all users, depending on the effects that you used and the Web browsers that the audience members use.

If you choose Web format, there are a few PowerPoint features that will not work correctly. It is good to know about these features so that you can avoid using them in a presentation that is destined for the Web. Here are some examples:

  • If you set a sound or music clip to continue to play for a certain number of slides, it will stop when you advance past the initial slide.

    EXPERT TIP 

    If you need to make a music clip play through multiple slides, then you might be interested in this article: http://www.onppt.com/ppt/article1018.html.

    You can also edit the HTML file itself in a text editor. Open the http://www.fullscreen.html file and add the following line between the <html> and the <head> tags at the top (where yoursong is the name of the music clip and the actual file extension of that clip type is substituted for wma):

         <bgsound src="/books/3/488/1/html/2/yoursong.wma" loop=infinite> 
  • If you set up the text on a shape to have a different animation than its shape, it loses the special animation and is animated together with the shape.

  • If the presentation is set up for automatic transitions between slides, all mouse-click animations behave as automatic animations.

  • Sounds attached to objects that are hyperlinks (for example, action buttons) do not play.

  • If a hyperlink on the Slide Master is covered by a placeholder, even if that placeholder is transparent, the hyperlink is unavailable on the individual slides.

  • Shadow text effects are not supported; the text appears as normal text.

You may also find other features that will not work correctly on Web page presentations, such as certain animation effects.

Caution 

Do not assume that the presentation will look the same in all Web browsers. At a minimum, run the presentation in both Internet Explorer and Firefox, and note any differences.

Single-Page Web File versus Traditional HTML File

If you decide to go with the Web format, you have a second decision: should you use a single-page Web file or a traditional HTML file? Here is the difference:

  • Single-page Web file. This creates a single file with an.mht extension that contains everything that you need for the entire Web presentation. No support folder is needed.

    • Pros: Great convenience. The entire presentation is encapsulated in a single file, so that you can e-mail this file, upload it, or do anything else with it as a single unit.

    • Cons: The file size is slightly larger than the combined file size of the traditional HTML file and all of its support files. Also, some older Web browsers do not support the use of MHT files, and so some audience members may be excluded.

  • Traditional HTML file. This creates a single text-based HTML file and a support folder containing all of the graphics and helper files necessary to turn it into a Web presentation.

    • Pros: You can import this page into a larger Web site (for example, in FrontPage), and you can edit the HTML file in any application that supports text editing. You do not have to go back to PowerPoint every time you need to make a change.

      Cons: Working with a support folder is somewhat unwieldy. For example, you might forget to copy the folder when you are moving the page to a server.

An HTML presentation consists of many files. PowerPoint creates a home page (an entry point) with the same name as the original presentation. This is the file that you name when you save the presentation. For example, if the presentation file is named Rondo.ppt, the home page is named http://www.Rondo.htm. Then, PowerPoint creates a folder named presentation name Files (for example, Rondo Files) that contains all of the HTML, graphics, and other support files needed to display the complete presentation.

Caution 

If you are transferring the HTML presentation to another computer (which is very likely if you are going to make it available on the Internet through your company's server), then you must be careful to transfer both the HTML home page and the entire associated folder.

Browser-Compatibility File Formats

The third and final format decision is based on which Web browsers you want to support. This is applicable both to HTML and MHT formats.

The higher the Web browser version that you support, the more of PowerPoint's features you can transfer to the Web version, and the better the quality of the multimedia content. You can export a better show using the higher version support.

However, by choosing higher version support, you may exclude a portion of your audience. Anyone who does not have this version or higher either cannot see the show at all or cannot see it as you intended, depending on the version. As a result, the lower version support results in greater compatibility.

The version support that you select also affects the file size - in general, the lower the version, the smaller the file size. An exception to this is the option to save for multi-browser compatibility (which I discuss later in this chapter); choosing this option accomplishes both near-universal support and inclusion of all of the features, but at the expense of a much greater file size.

The default Web browser support is Internet Explorer 4.0 or later, and this works well in most cases. If you decide to support Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 and Netscape Navigator 3.0 or later, you will run into the following problems:

  • Animation and transitions will not be supported.

  • Animated GIFs will not play if you save the presentation with a screen size of 640x480 or less.

  • Sounds and movies will not be supported.

  • Some graphics will appear degraded in quality.

  • The slide will not be scaled to fit the Web browser window. It will run at a fixed size, based on the screen size setting that you select when you publish the presentation.

  • You will not be able to view the presentation in full screen.

  • You will not be able to open or close frames.

  • The active slide will not appear highlighted in the outline pane.

  • You will not be able to use the mouse to highlight elements in the outline pane.

If you save the presentation to support Internet Explorer 4.0 or later, but someone tries to view the presentation with an earlier version or with Netscape Navigator, then they will still be able to see the presentation, but the following problems will occur:

  • The presentation outline will appear permanently expanded.

  • No notes or additional frames will appear.

  • Hyperlinks will not work.

  • Clicking a slide title in the outline pane will not take you to that slide.

  • The default Web browser colors will be used to display the presentation text color and background color. An exception is that the colors will appear correctly in Internet Explorer 3.0.

  • Sounds and movies will not play.

As you will learn in the section, Browser Options, you can also fine-tune the version number by choosing compatibility for Internet Explorer 5.0 or 6.0. If you choose either of these versions, PowerPoint will use Vector Markup Language, or VML, for graphics, in order to reduce loading time. However, earlier Web browser versions will not be able to view the graphics.

If you choose Internet Explorer 6.0 compatibility, PowerPoint allows the use of PNG graphics (a graphic format that is an improved version of GIF) in the presentation. Earlier Web browser versions cannot see these graphics.

Now that you know the pros and cons of the different options, we can start with saving your presentation as a Web page.

Saving the Presentation as a Web Page

If you use the default settings, saving a presentation as a Web page is almost as easy as saving it normally. You simply issue a command and provide a name; PowerPoint does the rest.

Caution 

When you save your presentation as a Web page, the resulting HTML or MHT presentation remains open and on-screen. If you make additional edits, these edits do not apply to the original PowerPoint presentation file on which the Web version is based. After saving your work on the Web version, make sure that you also use Office image from book Save As to re-save your work in PowerPoint format if you want all of the copies to remain updated.

Follow these steps to perform a basic save in Web format without setting any special options.

  1. Choose File image from book Save As. The Save As dialog box appears.

  2. Open the Save As Type drop-down list and select either the Web Page format or the Single File Web Page format. The Save As dialog box changes to show a Publish button and a Change Title button, as shown in Figure 22.13.

    image from book
    Figure 22.13: The Save As dialog box appears different when you are saving in a Web format.

  3. The default name is the presentation name. If you want a different name, type it in the File Name text box.

  4. PowerPoint takes the default Page title from the title of the first slide. This title appears in the Web browser title bar when the page displays. If you want a different title, click Change Title, type a new title, and click OK.

  5. If you want to save the presentation in a different location, navigate to the drive or folder that you want.

  6. Click Save. PowerPoint saves the presentation in the format that you chose.

You will probably want to check your work by opening the file in your Web browser and making sure that all of the slides appear as you intended. To do so, browse to the location where you saved the presentation and double-click the file to open it. Figure 22.14 shows an example of a presentation in Web page format.

image from book
Figure 22.14: This is a PowerPoint presentation that was saved in Web page format.

Note 

When you view a Web presentation in the default view, as shown in Figure 22.16, many of the animations, transitions, and other features do not work. To take full advantage of these features, you must switch to Slide Show view by clicking the Slide Show button.

Setting Web Publishing Options

When you save using the steps in the preceding section, you have very little control over how PowerPoint translates your presentation. For more control, click the Publish button in the Save As dialog box. The Publish As Web Page dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 22.15.

image from book
Figure 22.15: You can use this dialog box to provide more input on how PowerPoint converts your presentation to Web format.

Use the Publish As Web Page dialog box as a replacement for the Save As dialog box, and set any of these options:

  • Publish What? The default setting is Complete Presentation, but you can choose a range of slides or a custom show.

  • Display Speaker Notes. This check box is selected by default, so that an icon on each page enables your readers to jump to the notes for that page.

  • Browser Support. The default setting is Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or later (High Fidelity). This format takes advantage of the capability of these Web browser versions to process certain codes and run certain mini-applications. If you think that some of your audience may not have this Web browser version, you can choose one of the other options instead.

    • Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0, Netscape Navigator 3.0, or Later. This option results in many of the animated features of the presentation not being saved, but it also makes for a smaller file size and greater compatibility with a wide variety of Web browsers.

    • All Browsers Listed Above (Creates Larger Files). This option offers you maximum compatibility. It essentially saves two versions of the presentation in the same file - one for Internet Explorer 4.0 and higher, and the other for everything else. This way, you do not have to sacrifice features in order to ensure compatibility.

  • Publish a Copy As. These are the same controls as the ones in the Save As dialog box. You can change the page title with the Change button, or type a different name and location in the File Name text box.

  • Open Published Web Page in Browser. If you leave this check box selected, PowerPoint opens Internet Explorer and displays your presentation's first page automatically. This is a good way to check your work.

But wait! There's more! Notice the Web Options button in Figure 22.15. You can click it to display the Web Options dialog box, shown in Figure 22.16, where you can change even more conversion options. The following sections cover these options.

image from book
Figure 22.16: You can fine-tune the Web export settings of your presentation even more precisely with these options.

General Options

On the General tab, shown in Figure 22.16, you can change the following options:

  • Add Slide Navigation Controls. When you leave this option selected, a pane on the left side of the Web browser window displays the names of the slides. Users can click a slide's name to jump to it.

  • Colors. Notice in Figure 22-16 that the aforementioned navigation area is black with white lettering. You can choose a different color scheme for this area from the Colors drop-down list. Choices include Browser Colors (whatever default colors are set in the user's Web browser), Presentation Colors taken from the presentation (text color or accent color), or Black Text on White.

  • Show Slide Animation While Browsing. If you have set any slide animations, as discussed in Chapter 18, and you want to include them in the Web presentation, then select this check box. It is deselected by default because Web users may find animations annoying, rather than clever, due to slow Internet connection speeds.

  • Resize Graphics to Fit Browser Window. This option is selected by default. As a result, if users are running their Web browsers at less that full-screen size or if they are using a different screen resolution, then your content will not be cut off, but rather resized to fit their screen.

Browser Options

The features that PowerPoint makes available to your audience depend on the different Web browser versions and compatibility settings that you select. You can find these settings on the Browsers tab, as shown in Figure 22.17.

image from book
Figure 22.17: You can customize how you save your presentation for a specific Web browser version.

Choose a Web browser version from the Target Browsers drop-down list; the check boxes in the Options section are automatically selected or deselected for that version based on its capabilities. You can also manually select or deselect any of these check boxes. The lower the version you choose, the fewer features that are used, and the smaller the files become. The four check boxes are:

  • Allow PNG as a Graphics Format. PNG is an improved version of the GIF format. Internet Explorer 6.0 fully supports this format, while earlier versions may not. If your presentation contains PNG files and this option is not selected, then they will be converted to a supported file format when you save the presentation.

  • Rely on VML for Displaying Graphics in Browsers. Vector Markup Language, or VML, enables graphics to appear more quickly in Web pages. You must have at least Internet Explorer 5.0 to see graphics that rely on VML; people with older Web browsers cannot see the graphics.

  • Save an Additional Version of the Presentation for Older Browsers. This check box is deselected by default, regardless of the version that you select. Selecting this option will insert the needed codes for backward compatibility with older Web browsers (all the way back to Internet Explorer 3.0); however, this will also increase the file size.

  • Save New Web Pages as Single File Web Pages. This option either enables or disables the use of the MHT format, which was discussed earlier in this chapter. To view a Single File Web Page, users must have at least Internet Explorer 4.0.

File Options

On the Files tab, shown in Figure 22.18, you can set the following options to control how your files are saved, named, organized, and updated:

  • Organize Supporting Files in a Folder. This option is the default setting. PowerPoint saves the needed files in a folder with the same name as the presentation home page. If you deselect this option, all of the supporting files are saved in the same folder as the home page.

  • Use Long File Names Whenever Possible. This option preserves the long filenames of Windows 95 and higher, which are usually more descriptive than the shorter eight- character names in DOS and Windows 3.1. If you need to transfer the presentation to a server that does not support long filenames, deselect this option.

  • Update Links on Save. With this option selected, every time you save your PowerPoint presentation in Web format, all of the links are also updated.

  • Check if Office Is the Default Editor for Web Pages Created in Office. Deselect this option if you want to use a third-party editing program as the default program for editing Web pages. This prevents the appearance of a warning message each time you open the file in the third-party program.

image from book
Figure 22.18: All of these file options are enabled by default; you can deselect the ones that you do not want.

Pictures Options

There is only one control on the Pictures tab: Target Monitor. In most cases, the default setting of 800x600 is the right choice.

The presentation can run at several screen resolutions, with the smallest being 640x480. These numbers refer to the number of pixels, or individual dots, that make up the display. Most people run Windows at 800x600 or higher, but people with older, smaller monitors may still be using 640x480. If you choose a higher setting for the presentation than users have on their screens, then they will have to scroll in Internet Explorer to see the complete slides.

Encoding Options

The Encoding tab contains a few settings that only multilingual offices will use:

  • Save This Document As. Choose a language character set here. The default for United States usage is US-ASCII, which is acceptable in most cases. A more general setting for any English-speaking country or for languages that use the same alphabet as English is Western European (ISO).

  • Always Save Web Pages in the Default Encoding. If you want PowerPoint to always rely on Windows' information about what kind of alphabet you are using, select this check box; you will never have to worry about the character set again.

Fonts Options

The Fonts tab enables you to select a character set to encode with the Web presentation. This is mostly an issue when you are creating a presentation in a non-English language. The default setting is English/Western European/Other Latin Script, as shown in Figure 22.19.

image from book
Figure 22.19: You can choose default fonts.

EXPERT TIP 

What's all this about character sets? To see a demonstration, open Microsoft Word and choose Insert image from book Symbol. Then open the Subset drop-down list. Notice all of the different subsets within this font? Each of these is a character set. Each character has a unique four-digit hexadecimal code - that's over 65,000 possible codes. As a result, there is much more flexibility to a given font than just the few characters that you can generate by typing on your keyboard.

You can also select a font for any text in the Web presentation that does not have a specific font assigned to it. Actually, you select two fonts: one proportional and the other fixed-width, or mono- space. Leaving these fonts at their default settings is a good idea because the defaults (Times New Roman and Courier New) are available on almost every computer.




Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Bible
Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 Bible
ISBN: 0470144939
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 268
Authors: Faithe Wempen

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