Monday, July 18, 2005

How to add Flash to Your PowerPoint Slides

Now here's one I get asked all the time.... you can find free Flash embedded slides here at the Brainy Betty site here as well as Flash and Swish samples and downloads here, but most people want to know how to do this themselves.

It's pretty easy - but requires a visual walkthrough - so go take a look here.

You can always find all kinds of other tutorials and demos on the site any time. Happy Monday!

Thursday, July 07, 2005

How to Record Your Own Sound Effects or Music for Presentations


If you don't have a WAV file on your PC, don't worry, you can record your own WAV files using your PC's sound recorder. All you need is a microphone and a sound card with a mic input.

To record a sound effect, make sure your microphone is hooked up properly and then choose Programs | Accessories | Entertainment | Sound Recorder from the Start menu to open the Sound - Sound Recorder dialog box.

Once you're ready to begin recording, click the Record button and say something into the microphone. Use your imagination and try to create your own unique sound effect. As you're recording, the green line in the center of the Sound - Sound Recorder dialog box should begin moving in a wave format. When you've finished recording, click the Stop button.

You can play back your recording by clicking the Play button. If you like the recorded sound, you can save it as a WAV file. To do this, first choose File | Save As to open the Save As dialog box. Next, choose a location for your sound and enter a name for it in the File Name text box. Finally, click Save.

Now go try it out! It's a lot of fun!

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

Reduce Your Presentation File Size


I often get questions about how to reduce the file size in PowerPoint presentations. Here's a flash demo of how you can do one thing to make files smaller, quickly and easily in PowerPoint 2003!

Everybody's Blogging Except You??

This is a great intro and review of current tools. - Betty

Starting a Blog - Yahoo! News

Monday, July 04, 2005

Creating a Panaromic Slide Show!

Using the Panoramic Effect!

Here’s an eye-catching novelty effect for your next PowerPoint presentation: the wide-screen or “letterbox” view. It seems that every time you turn around, you see another movie coming out on video in a wide-screen or “letterbox” edition, one that has those black bands running across the top and bottom of the screen. It’s easy to simulate this wide-screen effect in a PowerPoint presentation – all you have to do is change the height of the slides. Here’s how:

¨ Select Page Setup from the File menu.

¨ In the Page Setup dialog box, change the Height from the default 7.5” to 4 or 5 (play with it and see which one you like best).

¨ Click OK.

That’s all there is to it. You might want to scale down your text and graphic objects by about one third, so they’ll fit onto your slides better. And try to use pictures and clip art with a landscape, rather than a portrait orientation, because they’ll fit better. Otherwise, work with your wide-screen slides just as you would with regular ones. And expect your wide-screen presentation to turn heads whenever you show it.

Introduction

Hi Everybody,

I'm setting up this blog because Brainy Betty gets so many questions about understanding Microsoft PowerPoint that I thought it might be worthwhile to set up a blog and talk about some of the things you can do with the program.

This is Nan Shastry, blogcasting to you (hopefully via FeedBurner some time this week( and glad to meetcha. Subscribe to this feed by adding it to your RSS newsreader (Bloglines is a great free reader) and you can always learn something new each week about cool tips, tricks and useful ways to use Microsoft PowerPoint.