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Gabor Szarnyas edited this page Sep 27, 2020 · 27 revisions

Formatting and editing

Selection pane

For managing complex slides, go to the Home tab on the ribbon. From the Editing group choose Select | Selection pane. This allows you to set the visibility of the objects on the current slide, thus allowing you to hide the objects you are not concerned with at the moment (e.g. when creating an animation).

See also http://www.powerpointninja.com/powerpoint-2007/new-selection-pane-will-keep-you-sane/.

Changes in Slide Master not applied to slides

If you change the footer or other parts of the Slide Master slides, sometimes you find that these changes do not appear on your slides. This happens if you changed something in your slides (such as deleted the footer). You can reapply the layout by right-clicking on the slide and selecting Layout and the selected template.

If that still doesn't help, you can try deleting the problematic elements from your slide and re-add them through Insert.

See also: http://office.microsoft.com/en-001/powerpoint-help/why-arent-slide-master-changes-showing-up-in-my-slides-HA104020628.aspx

Generating table of contents

The table of contents feature was removed from PowerPoint from version 2007. This free VBA macro generates the TOC: http://joelblogs.co.uk/2010/08/31/auto-summary-slides-for-powerpoint-2010-vba-macro-with-hyperlinks-free/ (mirror).

Create a polyline using the Curve tool

The default connector cannot be used to create sophisticated polylines and realignes automatically when you drag an endpoint. To work around this behaviour, you can use the Curve tool to create a polyline.

  • Select the Curve from the Shapes
  • Hold down Ctrl and click to start the polyline
  • Keep holding Ctrl and place points in the polyline.
  • Double-click or Enter to end the polyline.
  • You can move the points in the line using the Format tab, Format shape and Edit points button.

Animations

Adding animation endpoints as separate objects

If you would like to use the objects in their position after the animation, use the Motion Path End Position macro.

According to the page, it supports "PowerPoint 2002 or later" – it works with PowerPoint 2016 as well!

You need to allow the Developer tab on the ribbon. To allow it, follow this guide: File | Options | Customize Ribbon page, Customize the Ribbon | Main Tabs | check the Developer check box.

Create perfectly horizontal animation effects

Let's suppose you want to move an object to the right across the slide and you would like to make sure that the object moves following a perfectly horizontal path (without jumping a few pixels up or down). Here's how to do it:

  1. Select the object and click Add Animation | Motion Path | Lines.
  2. Click Effect Options | Direction | Right.
  3. Hold the Shift key and resize the red endpoint of the animation path.

Converting a slideshow with animations to PDF

PPspliT

PPspliT is available on http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~rimondin/downloads.php

Visual Basic script

PowerPoint in VMware: the vector graphical image on the clipboard gets rasterized

This applies if you run PowerPoint in VMware on a Linux host machine. If you put a vector graphical image (e.g. an arrow) on the clipboard and switch to the host machine, the image gets rasterized. If you go back to the virtual machine an insert it, it will be inserted as a simple rasterized image.

Saving and exporting

Exporting to PDF

The recommended approach is to use PowerPoint's own PDF export feature.

If PowerPoint's own PDF export does not work properly, try a PDF printer. For Adobe PDF, use the following configurations:

  • Use Landscape layout.
  • For widescreen (16:9) slides, set the width to 90 mm and the height to 160 mm. (That's correct - set the opposite values as you normally would.)
  • Go to fonts and remove all embedded fonts from the blocklist. (Otherwise, Trebuchet MS et al. would only render properly on machines with MS fonts.)
  • Increase the resolution (e.g. to 1200 DPI).

Note that it is not possible to get the hyperlinks working with a PDF printer.

Converting PPT to PDF with notes (and not rasterized slides)

  1. File | Export | Create Reminders | Create (Fájl | Exportálás | Emlékeztetők létrehozása)
  2. Notes under the slides (Jegyzet a diák alatt).
  3. Include attached (Csatolt beillesztés) – if you select the other or do anything during the export, Word may crash. This could take time.
  4. In Word, remove the "Nth slide" text with the following regex: <([0-9]@)>. dia^13^13. (Replace with nothing.) Don't forget to select in the advanced settings, that this is regex.
  5. Remove the unnecessary page breaks with the following regex: ^13^m^13. (Replace with nothing.) Don't forget to select in the advanced settings, that this is regex.
  6. Remove the unwanted double paragraphs, replace ^13^13 with ^13.
  7. If you want the notes like paged slides, resize the page to the size of the included slide (9,55 cm x 7,16 cm). Set the margins to zero and dismiss the warning.
  8. Don't forget to enable automatic hyphenation.
  9. Export the Word document to PDF.

Embedding fonts in the PowerPoint document

  1. File | Save as | Tools | Saving Settings
  2. Scroll down till the end of the save settings.
  3. Embed fonts into the presentation.
  4. Decide whether you need every font glyph or just the ones already in the presentation.

If you save to OneDrive, this could be slow.

Embedding OpenType Fonts (OTF) to exported PDF documents is not possible, therefore the text in the exported document will be rasterized and not searchable. A possible workaround is to obtain TrueType Fonts (TTF) version of the same font family. If this is not possible, you can try converting the OTF files to TTF ones using FontForge. For details, see the "How do I convert from one outline format to another?" in the FAQ.

Editing text is very slow

  • Problem: Editing text is lagging by 3+ keystrokes.
  • Solution: The cause of the problem was that I used an embedded font which was not installed on the system. Installing the font and restarting PowerPoint solved the problem. See also this support forum for details.

Find big files in a PPTX

unzip -vl presentation.pptx | tail -n+4 | head -n-2 | sort -hr -k3 | numfmt --to=iec --field=1,3 | less

Save slides in high-quality PNG

If you select a part of a slide and choose Save as picture from the local menu, the quality of the exported image will be sub-par. Instead, save the whole slide and crop if necessary.

  • Registry change: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/827745
  • Use Save as, select PNG
  • If you select All, a folder is created with a PNG for each slide
  • If you select Only this occurrence, a single file is created from the current slide

Fix number format of charts

Have you ever seen labels such as 190001900ral in your PowerPoint file? (If not, just Google it.)

Why is this happening? This is most probably caused by editing a presentation in an English version of PowerPoint, then opening it in a Hungarian version. (I haven't found any explication yet on-line, thus I'm guessing after some trials.) The English PowerPoint will use by default the General number format for the labels. This will be serialized as <c:numFmt formatCode="General"/>. However, the Hungarian PowerPoint will try to parse it as a regular number format.

  • G is most probably a valid format character for some exotic calendars, which results in an empty string.
  • e seems to be equivalent to yyyy, even in the English version of PowerPoint/Excel.
  • n is not recognized as a number format character in the English version, but in the Hungarian version, it stands for day (of month).
  • ral will not be recognized as a number format string, and thus displayed as it is. Therefore the Hungarian PowerPoint will display the number 0 as 190001900ral, the number 20 as 1900201900ral, the number 40 as 190091900ral (as 40 represents the day 1900-02-09), etc.

How to solve it? Modify the number format to Number (0 without any special formatting, #,##0 with thousands separator, #,##0.00 with decimal separator). These will be unambiguously serialized, e.g., <c:numFmt formatCode="#,##0"/>. If you don't need any separators, use 0. The #,##0 causes some troubles sometimes due to the differences in decimal separators (the number 100,000 might be shown as 100000,0 in the Hungarian version, furthermore it caused PPT2007 to freeze).

Why does it work in Excel? Excel assigns IDs to each custom number format and they are stored separately (in xl/styles.xml). If a cell has a custom number format, it is referred using its ID (e.g. <f t="shared" si="0"/>). If a cell has a General number format, no format setting is serialized for the cell.

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