PowerPoint 2007: The Missing Manual

Chapter 7. Delivering Presentations

In the old days, giving a PowerPoint presentation almost always meant connecting your laptop to a computer projector. You’d stand in front of a live audience and use a remote control to click through each slide while you explained each of your points in detail. You can still give a “stand and deliver” presentation, but today you also have many more options. For example:

• Publish your presentation as a collection of Web pages.

• Package your presentation for delivery on CD. This option is ideal for interactive, audience-paced presentations like tutorials or continuously running kiosk presentations.

• Email the presentation to your audience.

This chapter covers each of these presentation delivery options. It also shows you how to optimize your PowerPoint presentation file to make running it and passing it around the Internet easier.

Note

Purchasing and installing PowerPoint add-ins gives you additional delivery options, such as converting your slideshow into a Flash animation, using your slideshow as the basis for a real-time collaborative meeting, and broadcasting your presentation live over the Web. For details, see Section 13.3.3.

Setting Up a Slideshow

After you’ve put together your slideshow—created slides, added text and graphics, and so on—you have to give PowerPoint a few instructions on how it should display the slideshow when it’s show time. Say you’re creating a slideshow that you want to run continuously on a kiosk, with no human intervention. You ...