Crabby Office Lady

When it comes to creating business presentations, everyone's an artist. From adding perfectly timed music to fashioning business-specific templates, PowerPoint users are figuring out new and ingenious ways to make their message heard.

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Yeah, yeah, you're the big fancy-schmancy presenter among your office-mates — the one who knows all about using enormous organization charts, snappy themes, and inspirational music. What your fellow employees don't know is that the night before a big presentation, you're wringing your hands, pacing the floor, and desperately searching for my personal home phone number. Why? Because you're in over your head, my little overachiever.

Never fear, Crabby is here. And believe it or not, you're not the only one with these problems. Take a look at what some of my readers are going through.

Big organization charts: Every shape deserves to be heard and seen

Although it appears the reader below is simply ignoring his need for bifocals, I came up with a dandy solution to his problem.

"In PowerPoint 2002, when we insert an organization chart and keep adding co-worker or subordinate boxes, the font size of text becomes so small that we can't see it."

— Squinting Stan

Dear Stan,

I have one word for you and your company: downsize. If that's not an option, once you've added your organization chart, try this:

1. On the Organization Chart toolbar, click the arrow on the Layout button, and then click Scale Organization Chart.
   
   

    Note    You may or may not need to do this step, which will allow you to move the handles of the drawing canvas (thereby making your shapes bigger or smaller).

2. And you're right: Although the shapes may be bigger, the text isn't. So, click any shape, and, on the Organization Chart toolbar, click the arrow on the Select button. Then click Level, Branch, or All Connecting Lines, depending on whether you want to change the font size of all or some of the shapes.
3. On the Format menu, click Font.
4. Adjust the font size, color, style, or effect. Go crazy.

Or, if that's all too much trouble, buy two pairs of those magnifying glasses you can get at the drugstore and wear them, one on top of the other (for double magnification, of course).

Use music and sounds in presentations: Have music, will travel

Adding sounds or music to a presentation can be tricky — especially if you plan to present on another computer.

"How do you get music from a CD to play without breaks through an entire PowerPoint presentation? In other words, how do I embed music for a smooth presentation?"

— Sing-Along Sam

Dear Sam,

The only way to get music from a CD to play without breaks between the songs is to create a single file (in a format PowerPoint supports, such as *.wav) that's made up of all the songs strung together. However, I can neither sanctify nor condone illegally messing around with a pre-made CD that you purchased legally and lawfully. On the other hand, if it's a homemade CD that you made on your four-track, go for it.

After your music is all wrapped up nicely in a single file, you insert it into your presentation and off you go. Talk about smooooooth.

And this brings up another issue: Let's say that you (not you, Sam, the general public "you") create a presentation with sound and music on your home computer. Why, then, is there dead silence when you present it on another computer, thereby forcing you to hum the theme to Hawaii Five-O for the last 17 slides? There are a couple of possible answers to this question:

• The music is a linked file (instead of an embedded file), and it's linked to a source (such as a piece of music) that lives on your home computer.
  The problem with this is that your while your presentation is desperately looking for the music file, the music file is at home on your computer, twiddling its thumbs and waiting for something to do. This is akin to offering to pay for that expensive dinner when you realize your wallet is in your other jacket or purse. While your date might believe that story out of pity, it doesn't solve the problem.
  
• Your file is embedded but it's in a format that PowerPoint doesn't recognize.
  When this happens, PowerPoint decides for itself to add the file as a link, not as an embedded object. (Of course it doesn't tell you first, so you spend the next five hours trying all the wrong things and cursing Microsoft. You think we don't hear you?) Sound files need to be in *.wav format to embed them in a presentation. Don't say I never told you.
  
• The size of your embedded files is more than 50 megabytes (MB).
  You've embedded the file, so it should have traveled nicely from one computer to the next. But it's a lengthy piece (think Brahms' Tragic Overture, think Pink Floyd'sSheep), thereby forcing PowerPoint to add it as a linked file. The default setting for automatically linking sound files is 100 kilobytes (KB), but you can change it to 50,000 KB (50 MB). However, remember that this will substantially increase the overall size of your presentation, so be aware that it might take some time to open it.

So how do you know when to embed and when to link? I just happen to know of an article that will explain this at length (although it's not "Brahmsian" in length).

• Using embedded and linked sound files in PowerPoint 2002

To change the default setting for linking files

1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
2. On the General tab, increase the Link sounds with file size greater than ___ Kb setting to a size just larger than your largest sound file, up to 50,000 KB (50 MB).
3. Click OK.

Create templates: What, ours aren't good enough for you?

Some features in PowerPoint are customizable and some aren't. The trick is to know which is which.

"I have to find a way to make my own slide layouts and move some of these 24 preset layouts out for a break! I work in a laboratory environment, and my technician just needs a layout to plug in three pictures and three areas of explanatory text and a couple more combinations. So I intend to build a variety of presets layouts and voilà! Can I?"

— A Questioning Québécois

Dear Québécois,

You say you work in a lab and you want to send our pre-made slide layouts "out for a break"? What exactly does that entail? A run-around hamster wheel? A swim in a beaker? A fly-by over a Bunsen burner?

The bad news is that you can't build slide layouts yourself. What you get is what you get — they're stubborn little things. The good news is that you can create design templates that will accomplish the same goal. Take a look at this article, which explains how to create a template:

• Working with templates in PowerPoint 2002

Voilà yourself, monsieur. Now go mix up a potion or something.

"I read your article about customizing templates for presentations but I just don't know how to change the background. I've imported a piece of clip art into a presentation, but how do I make it the background? Currently it is in FRONT of the text."

— Template Temptress

Dear Temptress,

To use a piece of clip art (or any image) as the background in a slide, you don't import it (add it) to your slide as a regular image. You need to save it to your hard drive and then add it as a background.

To add a background image

1. First, find the piece of clip art you want to use and save it to your hard drive.
2. On the Format menu, click Background.
3. Under Background fill, click the arrow on the right of the box, and then click Fill Effects.
4. Click the Picture tab, click Select Picture to find the picture file that you saved, click Insert, and then click OK.
5. If you want to apply the background to selected slides, click Apply. If you want to apply the background to all slides, click Apply to All.

Now you can save it as a design template.

While we're here, I do want to point out that your problem of wanting the clip art to be in BACK of the text instead of in FRONT of it is a completely different issue. This has to do with ordering objects.

First, select the object you want to move. (An object could be a text box, a piece of clip art, a spreadsheet, a table, and so on.) Then:

• If you want to bring it to the front, on the Drawing toolbar, click Draw, point to Order, and then click Bring to Front.
• If you want to send it to the back (like you did with the clip art), on the Drawing toolbar, click Draw, point to Order, and then click Send to Back.

Print notes: When the bottom falls out

People use PowerPoint notes for just about everything: presenting, printing, and reviewing. And it appears that some people, like our next reader, are more wordy than others.

"For one of my slides, the notes pane has a lot of text. When I try to print it, the bottom is cut off."

— Note-Lovin' Nancy

Dear Nancy,

One thing to remember is that there is only one notes page per slide. It's possible that, although you can see all your notes on one pane, you've actually run out of room. Therefore, all your notes won't print.

First let me make sure you know about the text AutoFit feature in PowerPoint 2002: this reduces font size if there's text overflow. (To verify that AutoFit is turned on, on the Tools menu, click AutoCorrect Options. On the AutoFormat As You Type tab, make sure the AutoFit body text to placeholder check box is selected.)

A couple of suggestions, depending upon the type of person you are:

• For those of you who constantly rearrange the furniture:
  On the notes page, make the slide area smaller by clicking to select the slide placeholder and dragging it by the sizing handles. Use the same procedure to make the notes area larger.
• For SUV drivers who park in the compact parking spaces:
  In the presentation, create an additional slide after the current one so that you get another notes page. Or send the notes to Microsoft Word (on the File menu, point to Send to, click Microsoft Word, and then select one of the notes options), where you can have as many pages for notes as you want (note hog).

Thanks for the insights

Thanks for all your letters about PowerPoint. I've learned a lot about how to use it in ways I never dreamed. Not that I dream of PowerPoint on my time off. Not that I have any time off.

"Nobody ever drowned in his own sweat" — Ann Landers (1918-2002)

About the author

Annik Stahl, the Crabby Office Lady columnist, takes all of your complaints, compliments, and knee-jerk reactions to heart. Therefore, she graciously asks that you let her know whether this column was useful to you — or not — by entering your feedback using the Was this information helpful? tool below. And remember: If you don't vote, you can't complain.

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