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PowerPoint: Presentations and Posters By:

Jim Waddell

Last modified: August 2007

PowerPoint: Presentations and Posters

Topics to be covered: Introduction to PowerPoint _______________________________________________ 4 What is PowerPoint? _________________________________________________ 4 What PowerPoint is NOT! _____________________________________________ 4 Why not just use a word processor? _____________________________________ 4 Caution – don’t use it all! ______________________________________________ 5 Starting with a Blank Presentation _________________________________________ 5 Slide Layouts ________________________________________________________ 5 Title Slide (PowerPoint assumes you will start with this) ____________________ 5 Bulleted list _________________________________________________________ 5 Waddell’s 7 and 7 rule:________________________________________________ 5 Two column bulleted list ______________________________________________ 6 Tables ______________________________________________________________ 6 Combinations________________________________________________________ 6 Save Your Presentation __________________________________________________ 7 Different Views_________________________________________________________ 7 Normal View ________________________________________________________ 7 Slide Sorter View_____________________________________________________ 7 Outline View ________________________________________________________ 7 Slide Show View _____________________________________________________ 7 The Zoom Control ______________________________________________________ 8 Adding Clip Art or Images________________________________________________ 8 Pasting from other programs______________________________________________ 9 A note about “Paste link”_____________________________________________ 10 Changing the Look of the Presentation ____________________________________ 11 Applying a presentation design.________________________________________ 11 General Tips on Color __________________________________________________ 12 LCD Projector______________________________________________________ 12 Color overheads ____________________________________________________ 12 Beware of red and green! _____________________________________________ 12 Editing the Master _____________________________________________________ 12 Transitions and Builds__________________________________________________ 13

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PowerPoint: Presentations and Posters Transitions _________________________________________________________ 13 Builds _____________________________________________________________ 13 The Finished Product __________________________________________________ 14 Printing ___________________________________________________________ 14 Output Your Presentation _______________________________________________ 14 Important - Make sure your presentation is formatted to your output. _______ 14 Print from the “File” menu ___________________________________________ 15 Making Posters________________________________________________________ 16 Making Your Poster the Right Size_____________________________________ 16 Adding Text (In Text Boxes) _____________________________________________ 16 Formatting a Text Box__________________________________________________ 17 To add a picture: ______________________________________________________ 17 Image Resolution____________________________________________________ 18 Positioning the Elements of Your Poster ___________________________________ 18 Grouping Elements __________________________________________________ 19 Printing a poster preview ________________________________________________ 19 “I’ve got my PowerPoint File – Now What?”________________________________ 20 Addendum: Customizing PowerPoint! _____________________________________ 21 Toolbars ___________________________________________________________ 21 Buttons ____________________________________________________________ 21

These materials assume that you are using Microsoft Office version 2003. Versions 2000 and XP are very similar. The interface for version 2007 has been completely revised and is beyond the scope of this class.

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PowerPoint: Presentations and Posters

Introduction to PowerPoint Presentations and posters without pain What is PowerPoint? PowerPoint is in the software category “Presentation Graphics”. It is used to create a “presentation”, which is a series of slides usually shown directly from the computer. As a backup, the presentation can also be printed on overhead transparencies. Anyone giving a talk which will be illustrated with slides can use PowerPoint. It can also do a fair job of making small and large posters. Its collection of clipart and color capabilities can make it a convenient way of quickly making up a poster to announce a seminar or a poster presentation

What PowerPoint is NOT! PowerPoint is NOT a word processor! It is used to display small amounts of text in a large font. You have probably sat through a presentation where the speaker showed a slide containing a paragraph of text and said “You probably can’t read this, but ….”. If the audience can’t read it – why show it! If you have a large amount of text you want your audience to read – give them a handout. To make sure that you have a reasonable chance of producing slides that can be seen be anyone with reasonable eyesight, keep in mind the “Waddell’s 7 and 7 Rule”. This says that you should have no more than 7 lines of text on a slide and no more than 7 words on a line. PowerPoint is NOT a spreadsheet. It can create charts from numbers that you enter. However, the charting capabilities are not as extensive as those of Excel, and the calculation abilities are significantly less. Although the charting interface in PowerPoint and Excel look remarkably there are some frustrating differences. PowerPoint is NOT a graphics program. It does have some image manipulation features, but if your image needs adjusted, it should be done in an image editing program before being imported into PowerPoint.

Why not just use a word processor? A presentation graphics program is designed to let you mix words with various kinds of pictures, such as clipart or charts. The default display takes on the format of a slide, so it is much easier judge how much material will fit comfortably on a slide (or page). PowerPoint has templates with a variety of attractive backgrounds. Changing the overall look of every slide in a presentation is very easy. There are templates for various types of slide, for example: one with a title and a bulleted list; title and a two column list; title, list and clipart; title and chart; etc. PowerPoint has a facility to print the series of slides in the form of handouts, with from 1 to 6 slides on a page. Presentation graphics programs can’t Page 4.

PowerPoint: Presentations and Posters be beat for live, direct off the computer presentations. There are many transition effects between slides, as well as animated builds. You can even add sound and movies to your presentation.

Caution – don’t use it all! With all the bells and whistles available, it is very tempting to put together a multimedia event instead of a presentation. Before you add a special effect, consider whether it will enhance or detract from the delivery of information.

Starting with a Blank Presentation When you start PowerPoint, you will be given a “Blank Presentation” to work with. As its name implies, this option brings up a blank slide – no colors, no graphics, just a plain slide. This may be the way to go for those of us that just want to get the words in first, and worry about how it looks later. Once you have the content in place, there is plenty of time to apply a color scheme and add background graphics.

Slide Layouts A panel at the right allows you to pick from a wide variety of layouts. The more common ones are listed here. Title Slide (PowerPoint assumes you will start with this) ¾ Title in large font ¾ Subtitle in smaller, different color font ¾ Footer optional Bulleted list ¾ Title at top with smaller bullet lines below ¾ Can pick different bullet style, color & size (from the Format menu) ¾ To keep the slide readable use the “Seven and Seven” Rule Waddell’s 7 and 7 rule:

⇒ ⇒

Use no more than seven lines per slide And no more than seven words per line

Indents on Bullet Slides The amount of intent of a bullet also controls its level in the hierarchy. When you increase the indent, the bullet style changes and often also the font. 9 The key increases the amount (Sometimes labeled with two opposite arrows) 9 + decreases the indent (When changing the indent of an existing bullet, make sure to select the whole bullet before using the or keys, otherwise you may put a tab in the middle of a bullet!)

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PowerPoint: Presentations and Posters Changing the bullet style You can use plain or very fancy bullets, depending on what fonts are installed on your computer. To change (or remove) the bullets: 1. From the “Format” menu choose “Bullets and numbering”. (Or right click in the list to bring up a pop-up menu with “Bullets and numbering” as a choice.) 2. Click the “Bulleted” tab. You can choose from any of the bullet styles listed by simply clicking on it. “None” removes the bullet 3. There are many more options available if you click the “Customize” button. You can even select a fancy picture using the “Picture” button. However, these options are not recommended! If your presentation may be delivered or printed from another computer – beware! The other computer may not have the same fonts or graphics installed and your bullet style will be very unpredictable. Changes apply to the line you are currently editing only! If you clicked on a line of text, the insertion point (flashing cursor) is in that line and the bullet change will only apply to that line! To change all the bullets in the box, click on the fuzzy line around the box, or drag over all of the bullet lines to select them all.

Two column bulleted list As you might guess, the same as a bulleted list, except in two columns!

Tables The slide layout for a table is way down at the end of the list, however, you can insert a table into any slide from the “Insert” menu. A note about formatting tables. When you use a “PowerPoint table”, either from a table slide, or by inserting a table into another slide, the format of the table will change when you change the slide design. Font styles and colors, background colors, borders, etc. will change to match the design of the presentation. A table that has been pasted in from Microsoft Word, or Excel will retain its original formatting! So if you are going to cut and paste, make sure that the table at least somewhat matches the final design of your presentation.

Combinations There are slide layouts with various combinations of bulleted list boxes, charts clipart etc. When used, you simply follow the instructions for adding the component chosen

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PowerPoint: Presentations and Posters

Save Your Presentation Use the File menu, Save command (or the disk icon on the toolbar) to save your work. The first time you save, a dialog box will ask for a name and location to save it to.

Different Views PowerPoint allows us to look at our presentations in 4 different ways. You can change the view from the “View” menu or by clicking on the appropriate icon on the bottom left of the window (above any toolbars that may be on the bottom of the screen).

Normal View This is the default view. The screen is split to show the current slide on the right and a thumbnail or outline on the left. Clicking anywhere in the left panel displays that slide on the right of the split screen.

Slide Sorter View In this view, all of the slides are shown as thumbnails. The number displayed depends on the zoom level. At the 100% zoom level, 6 slides are displayed. At the 25% zoom level, over 40 very small images fill the screen and are unreadable! In slide sorter view, the order of the slides can be changed. To move a slide you simply drag it to where you want it. The “summary slide” button is also available in slide sorter view. Although the slides cannot be edited in this view, double clicking on a slide changes to normal view with that slide displayed

Outline View This view changed significantly with Office 2003. When you click on the “Outline” tab in the left pane, an outline of your presentation is displayed. The text in the outline is editable, and the , keys will change the indentation (bullet style, and font) of the line where the cursor is. You can also change the order of the slides by dragging the slide symbol at the left. Be careful – you can drag a whole slide into the middle of another! This really messes up the flow of your presentation!

Slide Show View Here the slide fills the full screen and all of the menus and toolbars are gone. The show starts with whatever slide was selected. A click of the mouse advances to the next slide. The up and down arrows on the keyboard can also be used to navigate through the presentation. Clicking the right button brings up a menu where you can choose to: go to the next, previous, or other slide, end the presentation, display the pointer on the screen, turn the pointer into a pen which will draw on the screen, among other less useful choices. Advancing beyond the last slides produces a black screen with a note to “click to

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PowerPoint: Presentations and Posters end the show”. The “Escape” key on the keyboard ends the presentation at any time. Slide show tip: There may be a time in your presentation when you want your audience to pay full attention to you, and not be distracted by the slide on the screen. Press the “B” key on the keyboard to turn the screen black. Press it again to return to your slide. The “W” key similarly turns the screen white – providing some light by which you can see your audience.

The Zoom Control This control, located on the right side of the standard toolbar, allows you to control how big the image is on your screen. It works in all views (except slide show). To change the zoom level, click on the down arrow to the right of the control and select the zoom desired. Alternately, you can click in the box and type in a number. The zoom control works on either the slide or the outline/thumbnail – whichever you clicked on last!

Adding Clip Art or Images ¾ PowerPoint comes with a large selection of clip art (if installed) ¾ You can also add any image you manage to get into digital format (micrographs, radiographs, photographs, etc.) ¾ Images may be used for effect or to add some humor to the presentation. To add a piece of clipart to an existing slide; 1. Click on “Insert” , “Picture”, then “Clipart”. (Navigating through the installed clipart is more complicated than it has to be in Office 2000 and later. To get back to a previous category, or back one level in the listing, use the left pointing arrow on the top left of the clipart dialog box.) 2. Choose the category of clipart that you would like, click on the picture you want to insert. This pops up a toolbar with four “buttons”. The top one inserts the selected clipart into the document. 3. You can now close the clipart dialog box. Adding an image is similar: 1. 2.

Click on “Insert” , “Picture”, then “From File”. Then browse through your folders to find the image you want. The first time you add a picture, PowerPoint starts browsing in the “My Pictures” folder. After that, it will return to where you found your previous picture

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PowerPoint: Presentations and Posters

A note about image resolution. Higher resolution (Pixels per inch/DPI, etc.) is not always better. Typically, a computer monitor or projector displays 72 pixels per inch. For presentations, images at any higher resolution simply add to the size of the PowerPoint file. So if you are scanning an image, 72 pixels per inch is just fine. Images of higher resolutions can be reduced using a graphics program such as Adobe Photoshop or Corell’s Paint Shop Pro. If you are using PowerPoint to make a poster, higher resolution is better. A typical 72 pixels per inch Web image will be very pixilated when magnified to poster size.

Do it! 1. The sample PowerPoint file has a presentation you can practice with, or you can start a new one of your own. 2. Practice changing the indent of bullets in a list. 3. Try adding some clip art. Choose a slide without much text on it. (The last slide has only a title and 2 lines of text.) 4. From the “Insert” menu, choose “Picture”, then “Clipart” 5. From among the categories, pick anything, and click on the “Insert” button. 6. Click anywhere inside the picture and hold down the button while you drag the picture to the lower right of the slide. 7. Now resize the picture so that it does not cover any text. 8. Hold the pointer over one of the squares that are at the corners of the picture until it turns into a double headed arrow. Now click and drag until the picture is a good size. 9. Try dragging with a square in the middle of one of the edges of the picture. (Did you make a long skinny picture or a short fat one?) 10. Click anywhere outside the picture to remove the “handles”. 11. Try adding an picture from a file. There are some on the CD.

Pasting from other programs The main thing to remember when pasting tables, charts, etc., from other programs is that their color scheme will not change if you apply a different design to your presentation. A table pasted from Word will retain its original lines and fills, as well as the font style, size and color. Sometimes the regular “Paste” produces undesirable results. If the table, chart, or whatever does not respond well to re-sizing, you may have to paste the item as a picture: 1. From the “Edit” menu, choose “Paste special” 2. You will then have a choice of formats to choose from. “Windows metafile” usually works well.

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PowerPoint: Presentations and Posters When an item is pasted as a picture, re-sizing it maintains letter and line spacing much better than a regular “paste”.

A note about “Paste link” One of the options under “Paste special” is to paste the item as a “hot link”. For example, if you paste an Excel chart as a link, any time you change the data in the spreadsheet, the chart in your PowerPoint presentation will also change. The drawback is that the Excel file and the PowerPoint file must remain in the same relative positions in the folder (directory) structure. If you have your Excel files in an Excel folder and your PowerPoint files in a PowerPoint folder, and you copy both files to a CD, PowerPoint will lose track of the Excel file with unpredictable results. You should only use the “Paste link” option if you are sure the presentation will be given from the same computer it was created on.

Do it! 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

The CD contains a sample Excel file with a chart. Add a new slide to your presentation. Make it a blank slide. Open the Excel file and copy the chart to the clipboard. Paste the chart into the new slide normally . Re-size the chart to see what happens to text spacing. Delete the chart. Now paste the chart as a picture. Re-size it and see if it behaves differently. If you want to try pasting the chart as a “link”, you should save the Excel file to your hard drive.

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Changing the Look of the Presentation Here is where you can spend hours looking for just the right look. You can change anything about the way a single slide, or a whole presentations looks. You can choose from pre-designed looks, complete with color schemes and fonts, choose the colors of the various parts of a slide or just change the background. You can go as far as your imagination will take you.

Applying a presentation design. From the “Format” menu (shown to the right) choose “Slide Design”. This will change the right panel to show all of the designs installed on your computer. Click on the look you like to change your presentation. (When you hover the mouse over one of the designs, a drop down arrow will provide more options, such as applying the change only to the selected slide.)

Do it! 1. It does not matter which view you are in, but for the most excitement, choose the slide sorter view. 2. From the “Format” menu, choose “Slide Design”. 3. Click on any of the designs that appeal to you to see what they look like.

Changing the Background From the “Format” menu, choose “Background”. This will bring up the dialog box shown on the right. Click on the down arrow (or anywhere on that line) for options. You may choose from a limited number of background colors that the designers of PowerPoint feel go with the original colors, or choose “More colors” to pick your own, or “Fill effects” to get wild and crazy. The fill effects vary from textured backgrounds, to gradient fills. You can also select a picture for the background. Warning – some textures, gradients and pictures can be very distracting!

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PowerPoint: Presentations and Posters The check box “Omit background graphics from master” has the obvious purpose of removing any background fanciness from the slides.

Do it! 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Switch to normal view. From the “Format” menu, choose “Background”. Choose a standard color scheme and click on the “Apply to All” button. Repeat step 1. Choose “More colors”. You can choose “Standard” for a limited selection, or “Custom” to use any color of the rainbow. When you have picked your new color (either standard or custom), click the “OK” button to select it. When finished, click the “Apply” (or “Apply to All”) button to close the dialog box and view your work. Repeat Step 1. Choose “Fill effects”. Experiment with textures and gradients. You can also try one of the pictures from the CD as a background.

General Tips on Color LCD Projector Experts advise using a dark background with light colored (white or yellow) text and lines. This makes the slides more visible, even if the projector is weak, or the room is not especially dark.

Color overheads When overhead transparencies are going to be used, a light background (white or a very pale color) with dark text is much more readable. Blue text on a white background is readable, with a touch of color for interest! Overheads are generally projected in a fairly bright room.

Beware of red and green! A significant proportion of the human male population suffers from red/green color blindness (as much as 10% of white males according to some estimates). For these people, red text on a green background can be particularly difficult to read. Also, when creating charts, avoid contrasting red and green bars/lines/etc for different treatments. (You can test yourself for color blindness at: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/8833/coloreye.html)

Editing the Master The “Slide Master” is the template on which all of the slides are based. It contains the background, font styles and colors which are used for all of the slides. If you really can’t

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PowerPoint: Presentations and Posters find a presentation design that you like, you can find one that’s close and edit the master. To do so: 1. From the “View” menu, choose “Master” then “Slide Master”. (The other masters are rarely used.) 2. The view is very similar to the “Normal” view, except there are only 2 slides to deal with – the title slide and the bulleted list. 3. To change any of the components, simply select the whole line and use the normal formatting controls for font style, size, color, etc.

Transitions and Builds Beware of using too many of these fancy features!

Transitions You may have PowerPoint introduce your slides with various effects from a simple fade to fancy, spiraling transitions. From the “Slide show” menu, choose “Slide Transition”. The tool panel on the right will change to a list of the various transitions. Click on a transition to see a preview. At the bottom of the panel there are options to select the speed of the transition and to add sound to it (highly discouraged!). It is recommended that you choose one transition for the whole presentation, or at least a few. When you use a different transition for every slide, the audience may be sitting there trying to predict the next transition rather than paying attention to your content!

Builds With a “build” you can introduce bullet points (or other slide elements) one at a time. For a quick convenient way to add builds to your presentation, from the “Slide show” menu choose “Animation Schemes”. The tool panel on the right will show all of the available builds, from subtle, to moderate to exciting. Again – use restraint! Clicking on a build will show a preview. Only the currently selected slide will be changed unless you click the “Apply to All Slides” button at the bottom of the panel (highly recommended). For even finer control of each element of a slide, you can go to the “Slide show” menu and choose “Custom Animation”. Setting up exactly how each line of text enters the screen can be very time consuming!

Do it! 1. 2. 3. 4.

Try it! Try some of the slide transitions. Apply a selected transition to all the slides and then run through the entire presentation. Try some of the animation schemes – subtle to exciting, to see how useful or annoying they can be.

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The Finished Product Printing You may print your presentation on paper in the following formats. ¾ Slides, handouts with 2 to 6 slides per page ¾ Notes pages (an image of the slide on the top half of the paper and speaker notes on the bottom) ¾ An outline of your presentation

Output Your Presentation Although most presentations are now given live off a laptop through an LCD projector, it could be good for the presenter’s peace of mind to have an alternate method of projecting the presentation available. Although problems are becoming fewer, you will occasionally run into a laptop/projector combination that just refuse to operate with each other. As a precaution, you may want to print your slides to color overheads (if you have a color printer)

Important - Make sure your presentation is formatted to your output. Depending on how you started creating your presentation, the slides will be formatted for either 35mm slides, overhead transparencies or an on-screen presentation (the usual default). The height to width ratio is different for each of these formats. If you want your slides to completely fill the medium, make sure the presentation is formatted for it. For example, if a presentation formatted for an on-screen presentation is printed to 35mm slides, there will be a black area on the sides of the slides. 1. To correctly format the presentation, from the “File” menu, choose “Page Setup”. The “Slides sized for” option allows you to pick the correct format. It is usually not necessary to change any of the other parameters. 2. Once the presentation is sized correctly, it is a good idea to quickly go through the presentation to make sure that nothing drastic has happened. For example, some bulleted lists may overflow the slide if they are particularly long.

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Print from the “File” menu Rather than using the printer icon in the toolbar, choosing “Print” from the “File” menu provides more control. From this dialog box (right) you can choose what you want to print (slides, handouts, notes pages, etc.). If you have modified a few slides in an existing presentation, you can print only those slides. If you are printing to a black and white printer, you may choose to print pure black an white as opposed to shades of gray. Depending on the background and any graphics used, this may make black and white overheads more readable.

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Making Posters Making Your Poster the Right Size From the “File” menu, choose “Page setup” to show the dialog box on the right. Choose “Custom” as the “Slides sized for” and then simply type your dimensions in the appropriate box. PowerPoint allows a maximum of 56” in any dimension. However, if you need a bigger poster, just scale it and inform your printer. For example, if you need a poster that is 48” x 60”, then enter the size as 24” x 30” and inform your printer to scale up by 200%. Also make sure to choose portrait or landscape.

Note: Conferences frequently have poster guidelines with regard to size, orientation, title placement and font size and poster number location, where applicable. Make sure you know before you start!

Do it! 1. Bring up the Page setup dialog box 2. If you wish to replicate the sample poster – it is 33” wide by 48” tall.

Adding Text (In Text Boxes) All text on a PowerPoint slide is contained in a “Text box”. You can have as many text boxes as you like on a slide. There are many formatting options for the border and background color. The text is formatted as any text would be for color, font, size, etc. To create a text box, from the “Insert” menu, choose “Text box”. You then “draw” the box on the slide. (In recent versions of PowerPoint, the box will be as wide as drawn, but only one line deep. It will expand as text is added. If you have planned ahead … you could have all of your text in a Microsoft Word file, then simply copy and paste the appropriate parts into your text boxes. You can position the text box by dragging its fuzzy border. It can also be re-sized using the handles.

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Do it! 1. Bring up the Page setup dialog box 2. If you wish to replicate the sample poster – it is 33” wide by 48” tall.

Formatting a Text Box With the text box selected, from the “Format” menu, choose “Text box”. (A shortcut to the same place is to right click on the fuzzy border of the text box and choose “Format text box” from the pop-up menu.) Although there are many tabs in the resulting dialog box, the “Colors and Lines” tab is where you will do most of your work. There you may select a fill color, determine its transparency and choose a line style for around the box.

Do it! Try formatting a text box with different lines and fill colors.

To add a picture: Click on “Insert” , “Picture”, then “From file”. Then “Browse” to where your picture is.

Do it! Insert one of the pictures from the CD

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Image Resolution You can insert a picture in any of the formats recognized by PowerPoint. The more common formats are “Tagged Image File Format” (.tif or .tiff), and “Joint Photographic Expert Group” (.jpg or .jpeg). When scanning an image, or taking using a digital camera, the TIFF format is preferred since it is an uncompressed format. If you must use JPEG, make sure you use a lower compression number. The resolution (pixels or dots per inch) can make a big difference in the quality of a picture on a poster. Most images captured from the Web are at 72 dpi. These images will be very grainy when enlarged. 150 dpi should be considered the minimum resolution for a poster, and more is better (up to a point!). [Note: for a slide presentation, increased image resolution only adds to file size and does not improve images viewed on a computer or from a projector.]

Positioning the Elements of Your Poster PowerPoint has an aid to help you line up the elements of your poster precisely. Right click on a blank part of the slide and choose “Grid and guides …” from the pop-up menu. You can now choose to display a grid on your slide to help line up your elements. You can also change the spacing of the grid lines. A check box will instruct PowerPoint to “snap” an object to the closest grid line when you let go! The “guides” are a horizontal and vertical line that you can position at will. You could set the vertical line to where you want to line up several elements, and when they are all in place, move it to line up another set. If you want to know exactly where your guide lines are, you can turn on the rulers by right clicking on an empty part of the slide and choosing “Ruler”. This displays vertical and horizontal rulers marked off in inches. If your eye-hand coordination with the mouse is not all that it could be, you can “nudge” selected elements small amounts. Click on the item to be “nudged” and from the “Draw” menu (on the “Drawing” toolbar, usually at the bottom of the window) choose “Nudge” and then the arrow pointing the way you want the object to move.

Do it ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾

Turn on the display of the gridline Experiment with the “Snap to” on and off Display the rulers Return the display to your preferred look when you are finished experimenting

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Grouping Elements You can “group” elements together so that when you move one, they all move. This keeps the relative positioning of a number of elements constant if you move them around the slide. For example, you could group a chart element and its label so that they would move together. To select elements to be grouped, hold down the key while you click on each element in the group. This selects new elements while still keeping others selected. When all of the elements have been selected, from the “Draw” menu (on the “Drawing” toolbar, usually at the bottom of the window) choose “Group”. If you later want the different parts of a group to move separately, simple select the group by clicking on it and go to the “Draw” menu again and choose “Ungroup”.

Do it ¾ Add text boxes for the titles and legends of the figures you inserted (you can copy the text from the file “Figure_text.doc” on the CD) ¾ “Group” each figure with its text boxes ¾ Practice moving the “groups” around (this would be a good time to try “Nudging” as well)

Printing a poster preview You can print a small (8 ½ x 11) copy of your poster for preview. Print from the “File” menu rather than using the printer icon in the toolbar, choosing “Print” from the “File” menu provides more control. A check box allows you to scale the slide to fit the paper. If you are printing to a black and white printer, you may choose to print pure black and white as opposed to shades of gray. With pure black and white, graphics are often printed as outlines, reducing the clutter and making the preview easier to read.

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“I’ve got my PowerPoint File – Now What?” The College of Biological Sciences Imaging Center (http://www.cbs.umn.edu/ic/posters/) will print your PowerPoint file on various paper types: Photo Paper (Glossy & Satin) $5.75 per square foot

Adhesive Backed Photo Paper (Glossy & Satin) $12.50 per square foot

Tierney Brothers Inc 3300 University Av SE Minneapolis, MN 55414 - 3326 (612) 331-3149 will laminate your poster for protection during travel. About $4.50 per square foot.

University of Minnesota Printing Services Contact: Joe Soboda 2818 Como Avenue SE Minneapolis, MN 55414 612-625-4827 e-mail: [emailprotected] will print ($8.00 /sq.ft.), laminate ($4.00 /sq.ft), and mount on foamcore ($5.00 /sq.ft.) They prefer files in Acrobat (.pdf) format but can handle .ppt.

Kinkos 2189-B Snelling Avenue Roseville, MN 55113 651-639-8000 will print ($10.00 /sq.ft.), laminate ($3.00 /sq.ft), and mount on foamcore ($5.00 /sq.ft.) They prefer files in Acrobat (.pdf) format but can handle .ppt.

This information was correct as of summer 2006. Prices and availability change!

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Addendum: Customizing PowerPoint! PowerPoint (and other Microsoft programs) come with a standard arrangement of toolbars, and each toolbar has its standard array of buttons. This may suit the way you work, or it may not. There may be buttons displayed that you never use. There may be tasks that you do often, that you wish had a button. You can have it your way (within limits).

Toolbars You can position the standard set of toolbars to suit the way you work. To move a toolbar, drag it by the vertical dotted line on its left edge. You can dock a toolbar on the top, bottom, or either side of the window. You can also have it float free anywhere in the window. You can remove the standard toolbars and add some with features you use often. From the “View” menu, choose “Toolbars”. You will see a list of all the available toolbars. Those with a check next to them are displayed. Remove the check to remove the toolbar. Add a check to a toolbar and it will be displayed. (You may have to move it to a convenient location.)

Buttons Are there some buttons you never use (Document map)? Would you like a button to create a hanging indent? Do you wish the “Print” button gave you more choices? You can remove buttons from any toolbar and add more useful ones. For example, The standard “Print” button automatically prints what Microsoft thinks you want to print on the default printer. I would prefer to have the print dialog box come up so that I can choose what I want to print and what printer I want to print it on. From the “Tools” menu, choose “Customize”. While the “Customize” dialog box is open, all of the buttons are fair game. To remove one, simply drag it off the toolbar. Drag it to anywhere (except another toolbar). To rearrange the order, simply drag a button to where you want it and drop. To add a toolbar, you need to know which menu its command lives in. For example, to replace the “Print” button, you have to know that the “Print” command is under the “File” menu. With the “Commands” tab selected in the “Customize” dialog box, click on “File” on the left side of the box. Scroll down the right side of the box until you see a command “Print..”. (Note the two dots after the word.) Drag that button up to the toolbar and drag the existing “Print” button off it. Now close the “Customize” dialog box and try the “Print” button. More options……? There is a drawback to heavily customizing any program … new versions! When you upgrade your software to the latest version, you lose all of your customization. It may take you a few weeks to tweak your new version to suit your work habits.

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