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CSCU9B1: ESSENTIAL SKILLS FOR THE INFORMATION AGE POWERPOINT 2 - PDMU9L6 STREAM

COMPUTING SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS PAGE 1 OF 11

CSCU9B1/PDMU9L6

MS POWERPOINT 2

LEARNING OUTCOMES

By the end of this practical students should be able to:

Understand the different multimedia formats.

Add multimedia to presentations.

Animate slide transitions and builds.

Use PowerPoint to create a poster.

Remember to register your attendance.

Remember to check your student email.

Remember to check out the CSCU9B1/PDMU9L6 web pages for any news and

announcements.

Further Skills: Adding Multimedia to a Presentation

Last time you created a simple PowerPoint presentation, including images. This made it a

multimedia presentation. What’s multimedia? Basically anything that contains more the one

medium, for example a Word document or web page containing text and pictures could be

called a multimedia document. The term is more frequently applied to media containing

sounds, music, animation, video and stuff like that.

We begin by adding some additional features to your presentation from last time, on

CSCU9B1/PDMU9L6.

Open your presentation from PowerPoint 1. Save and rename it (so this time you’re

working on a different version). Give it a suitable name.

Background pictures

Pictures don’t only belong on individual slides. You can add pictures to the master slide and

they’ll appear on all slides. The next two pictures can be found in Groups on Wide

V:\CSCU9B1\PowerPoint.



Find the file crest.gif (may just be called crest). Copy it onto the clipboard (Right click and

choose Copy)

Go to the master slide (View: Master: Slide Master). Paste the picture into the Master

Slide and drag it from wherever it appears down to the bottom of the slide between the

footer and the slide number. You may need to make it a bit smaller. Switch to Normal

View. The image should be visible on all slides - check it out!

We can use an image as the slide background. Go

back to the Master Slide.

Open up the Background Styles menu and choose

Format Background. From the Fill selection,

choose Picture or Texture Fill.

Select Insert From File and then navigate to the

sunrise.jpg picture in the Groups folder where you

found the crest picture. Or you could choose

campus.jpg

Press OK. Fantastic! Of course, it may not look

quite right with the design you choose, but you

know how to change that stuff.

Another useful feature for picture is Recolor, which you’ll find on the Format tab: Adjust

panel. This has lots of preset options to fade out the picture, or make it monochrome.

Try them out.

Using a background image like this, as a novelty, is one thing but unless you choose the image

very carefully, you could easily end up with a very distracting slide show so it’s probably best to

stick with a plain or finely textured background.

SPECIAL EFFECTS - ANIMATION

When you move to the next slide in your slide show, all that happens is that the next slide just

appears. While this may have impressed you in the past, you now want more, and PowerPoint

can supply it!

There are two main kinds of animation available. We can:

1. Animate the transition from slide to slide.

2. Animate the way that the contents of each slide build or appear during the

presentation.



Transitions

To see what kind of transition effects are available:

Go to Slide Sorter View. Select the Animation tab and locate the Transitions to this

Slide panel. The Transition panel offers you more transition effects than you will ever

need. Make sure one of the slides is selected (the first one will probably be selected

already - look for the thick line around it).

For a smooth, sophisticated transition effect, take a look at, for example, Fade Smoothly

or Fade Through Black. For something a bit more in your face, try, for example, Wedge

Uncover Down. Just clicking on the effect name will cause it to be applied to the selected

slide and also gives a thumb nailed preview. Notice that you can also vary the speed of

the transition. You can even add sound to really wind your audience up. You might need

your headphones to hear it in the labs, though!

Choose a number of different kinds of transition and you will see the effects in the preview

panel. When you’ve found one you like click Apply to All Slides if you want the transition

between every slide to be the same (this is generally a good idea) and view in Slide Show to see

the result.

You can even vary the transition animation between slides: there’s a Random Transition option

tucked away at the bottom of the list (where it should be). Stylistically this is bad: pretty

distracting for the audience. You want them to pay attention to your content not your fancy

animations.

Build (the scary stuff)

The other kind of animation is a build. You can have all the bullet points on the slide arriving at

the beginning, or each bullet arriving on a mouse click. This can be good if you don’t want the

audience to see the whole text at once. Of course there are lots of different ways for each

bullet point to arrive.

To begin to create a build, switch back to Normal View. Select one of your slides, and then

select the slide content (in other words, the textbox containing your content). Note that the

Animations panel within the Animations tab becomes available.

This panel contains options for animating your text. The drop

down menu contains a few pre-configured options which can be

applied to groups of text. Typically, this animation is applied to

paragraphs. Each paragraph then appears in an animated

manner.

You can check out these animations by applying moving the mouse over a style and watch the

screen … You can also select one and then click Preview (from the Preview panel of the

Animations tab), or click on the wee star below the slide miniature. Try out some of the pre-

defined options. You can of course view the animation using slide show too.



If you want to apply your own personal animation style, you have to go back to Normal View

(as if you were editing the slide contents) and this time select Custom Animation from the

Animations panel. Then you can control the way and order in which each ‘chunk’ appears. This

can be useful if, for example, you have a complex diagram which you want to build up piece by

piece.

Exercise

You can customize your own slide builds on a per slide basis by selecting any object on the slide

(e.g.title, body text, graphic) and using Custom Animation from the Slide Show menu to adjust

the behaviour of the object. Investigate this for yourselves. You may have to remove any

previously applied animation from the slide.

› Animate the diagram on slide 3. You may find group useful so you can make a number of

objects appear together in an animation.

Action Buttons

If you want to give the viewer some control over the slide show or just make it a bit more

interactive, you can add Action buttons, which allow the user to select a predefined task, for

example, to go forward to the next slide or back to the previous one.

To illustrate this, move to slide 2 in Normal View.

Inserting an action button is a two stage process:

› Insert an action button

› Attach a link between the button and a slide.

First let’s choose a button from some inbuilt buttons provided by PowerPoint.

› Switch to the Insert tab. Select the Shapes menu

(on the Illustrations panel) and scroll down to the

bottom of the list where the Action Buttons are

presented

› Choose a Back or Previous button.

› Your cursor now changes to a crosshair. Draw your

button on your slide. Click and hold the mouse to

draw the button.

› When you let go of the mouse button, a dialog

pops up asking where this button should link to.

› From the drop down menu, choose First Slide

This action results in your button linking to the first slide. During a presentation, when you click

on the button, you should return to the title slide. Try this for yourselves.

CSC9B1: ESSENTIAL SKILLS FOR THE INFORMATION AGE POWERPOINT 2 - PDM9L6 STREAM


More multimedia

» Copy the Multimedia folder from the CSCU9B1 Groups folder to your own file space.

Open the file BandJ.pptx. It’s a PowerPoint presentation with only four slides and no design

features, yet.

Open the master slide for the presentation. (ViewSlide Master)

Choose a Theme for your slideshow (see the Edit Theme tab). This is better than

choosing custom colours, fonts and backgrounds individually.

Close the Master View.

On the Transitions tab set the transition between all the slides to Fade through Black at

a slow speed. The slides should advance automatically after 5 seconds or if the mouse is

clicked before the 5 seconds are up.

» Check your work. Run the slide show to make sure it’s working as expected.

Let’s add some other forms of media to the PowerPoint presentation. First we’ll add some

animations.

» Switch to Jasper’s slide. We are going to customise the animation. Select the Animations

Panel.

» Select the slide title text.

» Repeat the above for each of the two lines in the body text.

» Choose Fly In and set a short Duration. Try different Directions to see what that looks like.

» Press the Play button to see the effect if you missed it

the first time.

» Select the title again and choose any Emphasis effect.

For more choice select Add Animations in the

Animations Tab.

» Do the same for the other two lines.

» Select the title again and choose Add Animation: and

then any Exit animation.

» Do the same for the other two lines.



» Notice that all the animation effects added appear in the panel on the right hand side.

Reorganise the animation events so that each element’s entrance and emphasis occur

consecutively and the elements exit in reverse order. You can just select an element and

use the Re-order buttons in the Animations Tab to move up and down one place in the

sequence.

» Press the Play button to see the effect.

» Try experimenting with the Motion Path settings (available under Add Animation) for the

title (Jasper) by dragging the motion path start and finish handles and selecting one of the

motion path settings.

OK. This is getting a bit much. Clearly you wouldn’t really use this much animation in a

normal presentation, but you can see that it

might be useful as a special effect to add

emphasis to something.

» Switch to the first slide.

» Add the pictures JasperCutOut.gif and

BarneyCutOut.gif to the first slide. The

pictures are a bit basic. Make them better

using the Picture Tools.

» Make them large enough so that they overlap

significantly.

By right-clicking on an image you can select which image appears on top of the other.

» Now apply an animation to the images. Choose whatever you like.

» Lastly, choose an animation for the main title ‘Pets R Us’. Select the desired text and chose

an effect with Add Animation. Play around. Try different options.

» View the whole slide show.

Sound

Sound, in the form of sound files, can be added to your slide show to enhance the experience.

Sound files, like any computer files are just binary data. They have their own file types with

their own filename extensions. You’ve seen lots of filename extensions like htm, css, docx, txt,

.pptx, xls, gif, jpg, etc.

MIDI

One of the earliest digital sound file formats was the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface)

format. MIDI files have the mid or midi extension and are recognised by all sorts of software

including browsers. Generally the only thing you need is a sound card to be able to play MIDI



files. The advantage of MIDI files is that they are very small while the main disadvantage is that

they cannot record sounds, only notes in digitised form so the output will depend on the device

that is playing it.

» Switch to the first slide and choose InsertInsert Audio Audio From File and insert the

file LetItBe.mid from the Multimedia folder (in the PDMU9L6 folder).

» Choose to let the sound play automatically in the presentation. You will need

a set of headphones to hear it of course.

» Use the volume control at the bottom right to set the sound at a low value

initially so that you don’t get an unpleasant surprise when the sound kicks in.

Once the slide show is running you can adjust the level to one that you find comfortable.

» Press the Play button to see the effect.

Hmmm. This may not be quite what you want.

The music plays, but after the other

animations. Let’s change that.

The Animation pane should display the order

which elements will appear and also an indication

of the timing of each element. If you can’t see the

timings then right click on an item in the Custom

Animation pane and select Show Advanced

Timeline. You may need to drag the left edge of

the Custom Animation pane across to the left to

see this. At the moment the MIDI file should be

the last element in the list.

» Move the MIDI file up to the top of the list and

select Effect options from the drop down list on

the right of the pane.

»

» We want the music to run as a background track

through all the slides so choose to stop playing

after 4 slides.

» Press OK.



The next item should be set to start with the previous item (the music track) all the remaining

items should start after the previous one has finished. If you want to play around with the

timings you can set an item to start with the previous item but introduce a delay for the

current item.

» Drag the sound icon off the slide and onto the surrounding area in Normal View – this means

it won’t show up in the presentation, but the sound will still play.

» Run the slide show. Ask for help if it doesn’t work as it should.

Wave

The WAVE format is one of the most popular sound formats on the Internet, and it is supported

by all popular browsers. Wave files contain recorded sound and usually have the filename

extension wav.

Insert the files woofing.wav and miaow.wav to the last slide so that each sound is played after

the relevant text.

MP3

MP3 files are actually MPEG (Moving Pictures Expert Group) files. The MPEG format was

originally developed for video by the Moving Pictures Experts Group. MP3 is one of the most

popular sound formats for music recording. The MP3 encoding system combines good

compression (small files) with high quality. Expect all your future software systems to support

it. Sounds stored in the MP3 format have the extension mp3 or mpga (for MPG Audio).

Replace the LetITBe.mid file in the first slide with bach.mp3.

Select the LetItBe item and choose remove from the drop-down list.

» Add bach.mp3.

» Move the mp3 file to the top of the animation list and set the effect options so that the file

will play as the slide show progresses.

There is a price to be paid, however. If you open your Multimedia folder and select

View: Details, you will see that the MIDI file is around 23 Kb in size and plays for nearly five

minutes, while the mp3 file is 100 times bigger and plays for less than three minutes.

Video

Video can be stored in many different formats. Some of the most common are:



The AVI format (Audio Video Interleave - developed by Microsoft). The file extension is avi.

The MPEG (Moving Pictures Expert Group) format is the most popular format on the Internet. It

is cross-platform, and supported by all the most popular web browsers. The file extension is

usually mpg.

The QuickTime format (developed by Apple) is a common format on the Internet, but

QuickTime movies cannot be played on a Windows computer without an extra (free)

component installed. The file extension is mov.

» There are two video clips in the Multimedia folder, barney.mpg and jasper.mpg. Try

inserting then into slides 2 and 3. You can resize and move them around.

Check out the file sizes of these video clips. For a ten to fifteen second movie with a screen

resolution of 320 x 240 pixels, we’re talking about 2-3 Mb.

Slide Show Kiosk

The most common use of presentations such as the one you’ve been working on is when you’re

giving a talk and you’re there to move the slides on from one to another. Another handy

feature is that a presentation can be set to loop

to provide information (for example, at an Open

Day event, on a conference stall …)

» Save your PowerPoint presentation as

BandJ_v2.pptx; so you don’t overwrite the

one you’ve been working on.

» To make the presentation loop select Set Up

Slide Show. You’ll find this in the Set Up

panel of the Slide Show tab.

Under Show Options choose Loop

continuously till ‘Esc’ and under Advance Slides choose Use timings, if present.

Now run the slide show! The slides will advance automatically, and loop back to the beginning.

To stop, press Esc (it’s usually top left on the keyboard).

There is one problem with this. If you have a musical sound track (as we do) then the sound

also restarts when you go back to the beginning of the slide show. There is a fix for this, but it’s

a bit tedious:

» Remove the audio clip from the title slide.

» Add a new slide to the show, before the title slide.



» Add the audio clip to the new first slide.

» Create a new Animation The Animation should consist of just slides 2-5.

» Add an action button to the new first slide. First insert a shape (any shape you like) using

Insert:Shapes. Now add an action to that shape using Links:Action. Make the action a

Hyperlink to the custom show you just created. Be sure to click the Show and Return box.

» Run the slide show from the beginning. When you click the special action button it should

start the custom show. The sound track should play continuously while the custom show

loops. Ask for help if it doesn’t work as it should.

PowerPoint for larger documents

PowerPoint is also very useful for creating posters. A poster is essentially a presentation with

just one slide. But the slide is really big.

» Create a new presentation. (Select New from the Office menu).

» Select Page Setup from the Design tab. Select Custom size. A good size for a poster is A1

(84cm × 59.4cm). Landscape is also good, but posters can be portrait too.

What is A1? In the UK, paper sizes are described as A0, A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6 …

where A0 is the largest size and A6 is the smallest size. You should be familiar

with A4: you’re looking at it right now. It’s what we might regard as “normal” paper

size. To get A3, just double A4. To get A2, double A3 (or multiply A4 by 4). And so

on.



» Choose a layout for the slide. Title only is a good option.

Make the title of the slide “Graduate Skills: <your name>”. Format the title with a nice font.

Note the size of the title. For example, 144pt is a good title size. (Remember that 72pt = 1 inch =

2.5cm). Although the slide just looks like a page on your screen, remember the poster will be

big! You want the text to be readable from a few metres away.

The poster will be a set of text boxes. This means you can easily move chunks of text around

and redesign your poster. Recall graduate skills were addressed in the first lecture. What do you

think are the skills you already have? What skills do you think you’ll gain before graduation?

Use the WWW to find some graduate skills text to help inspire you.

» Add a text box for each skill. (Insert: Shape: Text Box) As a guide, the size of the text should

be at least 24pt, but probably 36pt is better.

» Add some pictures to your poster.

» Arrange the text boxes.

» Choose a good background.

You may even use some Smart Art to enhance your message. You could get them from Getty

Images (education).

Checkpoint

Demonstrate your fully functioning presentation to a tutor by giving a slide

show. Your presentation should additionally include (since last time) an

animated diagram on slide 3, an action button on slide 2, and examples of

builds and transitions on at least some of your slides.

Demonstrate your skills.pptx poster, which must be poster-sized.

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