Making Native PowerPoint Presentations Available Online


If you plan to distribute the presentation as a regular PowerPoint presentation, you must do some extra work. You cannot assume that every member of your intended audience owns a copy of PowerPoint, and so you should make the PowerPoint Viewer available to them. If you are distributing your presentation internally (that is, only to people in your company), then you can make the PowerPoint Viewer program available on your LAN. However, if the presentation will be available to the entire Internet, then you should create a Web page from which the audience can download both the viewer and your presentation file.

EXPERT TIP 

If you are providing the presentation in PowerPoint format, you might want to save it as a PowerPoint Show rather than a regular PowerPoint file. A PowerPoint Show is the same as a normal PowerPoint file, except that it opens in Slide Show View instead of normal editing mode.

Creating a Viewer Distribution Package

You first need to package the presentation for distribution. You can do this with the Package for CD feature, except that you save it to a folder instead of a CD. You can then make the contents of this folder available to users.

Use Package for CD to copy the presentation and all of its support files to a folder on your hard disk, as you learned earlier in this chapter. Next, you need to compress, or "ZIP," the contents of the packaged-for-CD folder so that you can make this file available for download on the Web. It is easy to compress files in Windows Vista and Windows XP because they both include built-in support for the ZIP format. To compress your packaged files, follow these steps:

  1. In Windows, open the folder where you have copied the packaged files.

  2. Select all of the files (Ctrl+A).

  3. (Optional). If you want to make the presentation file available separately from the PowerPoint Viewer files, deselect it. To do this, hold down the Ctrl key and click the file.

  4. Right-click the selected files and choose Send To image from book Compressed (Zipped) Folder. A compressed folder is created with the same name as the first file in the group.

  5. Give the compressed file a more meaningful name, such as pptviewer.zip. To do this, right-click it, choose Rename, type a name, and then press Enter.

Note 

Should you type an extension when renaming the ZIP file? This depends on whether or not you have Windows set up to show the file extensions for known file types. If the file that you are renaming appears with a.zip extension on-screen, then type .zip at the end when renaming it. If the extension does not appear, then do not type an extension.

EXPERT TIP 

If you want to make many different presentations available online, then you may want to ZIP only the PowerPoint Viewer and its support files, separate from the presentation file. You can then make each presentation file a separate download from the PowerPoint Viewer. To do this, after selecting all of the files in step 2, hold down Ctrl and click the presentation files that you want to deselect.

Creating the Starting Web Page

You can use any Web page creation program to create a simple start page from which to make your presentation available. For example, you can use PowerPoint (which has the advantage of being familiar to you already), FrontPage (Expression Web Designer), Publisher, or Microsoft Word. In this section, I show you how to create a start page with PowerPoint.

To create a single Web page in PowerPoint, start a new presentation that contains a single slide. Then, create instructions and hyperlinks on the slide to access the PowerPoint Viewer and your PowerPoint presentation. Follow these steps:

  1. Start a new presentation. It can either be blank or based on a design template.

  2. Change the layout of the slide to Title and Content.

  3. Add some text to the Title placeholder.

  4. Click in the body area, and then click the Bullet List button on the Formatting toolbar to turn off the bullets.

  5. Type the instructions, as shown in Figure 22.20.

    image from book
    Figure 22.20: An instruction page such as this one provides links to the downloadable PowerPoint file, as well as to the PowerPoint Viewer program.

  6. Create the hyperlinks to the files that you have placed on the server. Make sure the links refer to the file copies on your server, not on your hard disk.

  7. Save the presentation to the server.




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

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