Ordering Presentations To Go

Ordering Presentations "To Go"

Once you finish your presentation, you will present it, but you cannot always take your computer with you to your presentation's venue . If you create a presentation on your laptop, you might be able to take your laptop to your meeting, but if you have no laptop, or if you're distributing your presentation to users who might not even have PowerPoint, you need a way to get your presentation in front of your audience.

PowerPoint 2003 provides a new feature called packaged presentations that enables you to save your presentation on a CD and give your presentation on other computers. Even if those computers don't run PowerPoint, your presentation will run fine.

To save your presentation as a packaged presentation, follow these steps:

1. Once you finish your presentation, select File, Package for CD. The Package for CD window shown in Figure 13.9 appears.

   Figure 13.9. PowerPoint enables you to save your presentation onto CD-ROM to present on other computers.

   

2. To include other presentations, click the Add Files button and select the other presentations you want to save to the CD.

3. Click the Options button if the target computers don't have PowerPoint. Clicking the first option copies a special PowerPoint viewer program onto the CD that allows anybody with a computer and the CD to watch your presentation. You can force the viewer to play your packaged presentations in order or let the user select when the playing begins. You must also select the Linked files and the TrueType options if your presentation relies on them.

4. From the Options window, you can also require the end user to enter a password you designate here. (You must type the password twice for verification that you've entered the one you really want to use because the password does not show on the screen as you type it.)

5. Click OK to exit from the Options menu.

6. Insert a blank CD in your writeable CD drive and click Copy to CD. PowerPoint collects the needed files and writes your presentation and optional viewer to the CD. PowerPoint notifies you when the process ends and you can then eject the CD.

If you want to save your presentation to another computer's folder that is networked to your computer, click the Copy to Folder button and select the target folder instead of the Copy to CD button. (You can even save to Web folders if you have those set up; doing so allows you to save your presentation across the Internet to other computers to which you have access. )