Wednesday, April 20, 2005

More on PowerPoint

I know that many creators of PowerPoint presentations like to use Action Buttons to navigate slides. These are particularly useful if learners are using the PowerPoint themselves and gives unambiguous navigation commands for going forward, backwards, ore even restarting from slide one.

However, I can usually tell if creators have laboriously placed the navigation buttons on each slide. This takes time and can be very frustrating. If you don't get the button in exactly the same position on each slide your viewers will see the tell tale jumps as they move from one slide to another.

Save yourself a lot of time and effort by creating a Master Slide (View, Master....., Slide Master). Place the action buttons on this slide (and at the same time you can place logos and other design features that are the same for all slides) and you will be delighted to find that every subsequent slide created has perfectly positioned buttons by default.

Once in the Slide Master View you will find the Action Buttons in the Slide Show Menu. PowerPoint provides a selection of buttons for most actions, but when you bring the button on to the slide an editing window opens to allow you to change the action if you wish.

For absolute perfection make sure that any button created is of a standard size. Switch on the grid lines if you have a more recent version of PowerPoint.

If you want a full set of instructions for using the master slide and action buttons then add a comment and include your e-mail address.