PowerPoint 2010 Help

Monday, August 1st, 2011 27 comments

powerpoint-2010-help This part of our PowerPoint Help section is for queries specific to PowerPoint 2010 or PowerPoint 2007.

Are you unsure how to use a certain tool in PowerPoint 2010, or are trying to get round a PowerPoint bug? Here is the place to ask.

Simply leave a comment below and our PowerPoint experts will do their best to solve the problem for you!

The Ultimate Guide to Sales Presentations

27 Comments to PowerPoint 2010 Help

#1

Joby Blume

10:41 am, August 11th, 2011

This is cheating somewhat – as I work at m62… But I asked the question, and figured others might want to know the answer.

How do I save a .ppsx file so that I can stop it entering show-mode, and edit it? I just want to save it as a .pptx file.
#2

John Bevan

10:54 am, August 11th, 2011

Chances are if you’re having this issue then you didn’t create the .ppsx file. In which case, make sure it is saved to your PC and then open it via the File menu > Open… (in 2010) or Office button > open (in 2007). The presentation will open up in Edit View, so you can amend it, or resave it as a regular .pptx.
#3

Joe

3:37 pm, August 15th, 2011

Is it possible to get some of the cool Prezi zoom effects. Workaround or otherwise?

If not, is this likely to be in the next version of PowerPoint?

Thanks

Joe
#4

Richard Goring

8:03 pm, August 15th, 2011

Hi Joe,

The answer is yes, but whether you do it, depends upon how much time you have and who is presenting.

If you have a lot of time and are fairly confident in PowerPoint, you can use a series of animations:
1. Grow/shrink to give the effect of zooming in an out.
2. Motion paths to move objects on your slide around. If you create large, oversized complex diagrams then you can move these around the slide and in slide show mode only see the portion that is on the slide at any one time.
3. Simple transparent object emphasis effects and then additional objects over the top with zoom entrance animations.

Have a play and see. You can also use slide transitions to achieve similar effects sometimes, particularly the Pan tranistion, which allows you to set the direction. If you use a blank or really plain background, then this can work really well. The following PowerPoint tutorials might help with this one:
Slide transition – http://www.m62.net/powerpoint-training/powerpoint-animation/slide-transitions-powerpoint-2007/

Another alternative is using a PowerPoint plug-in. Something like PPTPlex (http://www.officelabs.com/projects/pptPlex/Pages/default.aspx) gives you the opportunity to create content on lots of individual slides and then combine all of these into a navigable diagram that allows you to zoom in and out and take control of where your presentation goes. It’s a very cool tool, but as you would have to download it on every computer that you need to present with, if you have to share your presentation with others, it might be tricky.

Hope that this helps,

Richard
#5

Dawn

2:36 pm, September 13th, 2011

Hi! I have a question about looping slides in a presentation. I have PPT 2010. I am trying to loop a few slides together to display annoucements, then what I want to happen is to be able to hit a button and have the presentation go to the next slide instead of exiting the show. For example I might have slides 1-5 loop indefinately until I intervene and tell the presentation to go immediately to slide 6. Is this possible? If not is there another way to put two presentations together to make it appear that this is happening? Please help!
#6

Richard Goring

4:09 pm, September 14th, 2011

Hi Dawn,

What you are trying to achieve is certainly possible. First, create your looped slides, by making the slide transition automatically after all animations are completed or after a certain time limit (use the ‘Transitions’ tab on the ribbon and the Timing controls on the right to do this) and also play the entire presentation in a loop (use the ‘Slide Show’ tab and Set Up Slide Show option in the Set Up section – ‘Loop continiously’ is top of the ‘Show options’ in the pop-up menu). Doing this will mean that all of the slides in your presentation cycle through and loop automatically.

To get to ‘slide 6′, in your example, create a new slide anywhere in the presentation (after your looped content is fine) and hide the slide (right click on the slide thumbnail in edit mode and select ‘Hide slide’ from the pop-up menu). Now, create a small object on any one of the slides (anything is fine), right click on it and select ‘Hyperlink’ from the pop-up menu. Within the Hyperlinking options, you can choose to hyperlink the object to your new ‘slide 6′. This means that when you are in slide show mode, if you click on the object, the slide show will jump to the hidden slide 6, but not normally show it. Simply position the hyperlinked object and copy/paste it onto every slide.

If you use a group of objects as your hyperlink button, you can’t hyperlink the whole group in one go, but have to hyperlink each component of the group first.

Hope that this helps,

Richard
#7

Merv Nash

3:40 am, October 19th, 2011

PP2010 Animations.
Try as I might, no matter how I set the animations to play one after the other none of the animation setting do what they say they will do.
I have imported a number of animations from Presenter media and inserted them into PP.
I set pic 3 to play after pic 1 and they both play together. I set pic 4 to play with previous and it plays at the same time or is all over before it gets to play even if I set “delay”. I set No matter how I fiddle with these settings they don’t do what I want or they do something else. Sometimes after hours of mucking about I get it to nearly do what I want but this is rediculous.
Am I stupid or does PP2010 not work with imported pictures?
Thanks,
Merv
#8

Richard Goring

2:55 pm, October 20th, 2011

Hi Merv,

It’s an interesting question, but one that I can’t answer without seeing the file that you are having issues with. Would you be able to send me an example at all? I’ve sent you an email directly requesting the file. Thanks,

Richard
#9

Dawn

9:12 pm, October 20th, 2011

How do I apply a transission to only one slide in a presentation
#10

Jessica Pyne

8:19 am, October 21st, 2011

Hi Dawn, you can do this by selecting the slide you wish to apply the transition to, clicking the Animations tab, and then selecting the transition you wish to apply. And that’s it! This will only be done for the slide you have selected.
#11

CLB

12:07 am, November 15th, 2011

Hi. I need to import graphs from Excel files into PowerPoint 2010, and I need to ungroup everything in the graphs in order to animate specific parts. If I use Paste Special, Enhanced Metafile, I can then ungroup most of the graphs as objects, but sometimes a series or even tickmarks still do not completely ungroup. Is there anything special that I should be doing while importing the graph that I am not? Or, is there something specific that I should be doing first in Excel to the graph before I try to copy it into PPT?
#12

Richard Goring

3:50 pm, November 15th, 2011

Hi CLB,

Unforetunately, if you want to animate your graph in a special order, then you’ve got the right process – it just has limitations. In some instances, there are groups within groups, so you might want to try ungrouping any objects that appear to be stuck together, which might help.

Otherwise, could you alter the way in which the graph is created (i.e. use simpler tick marks) so that the grouping issue doesn’t occur?

Another alternative is to put new PowerPoint objects over the tick marks, so that the PowerPoint objects appear first and then the tick marks underneath (along with any lines). This leads down the road of redrawing the graph and tracing over the Excel import, which is much more time consuming, but does mean that your graph will work exactly how you need it to,

Richard
#13

cat

1:13 pm, November 22nd, 2011

Hi there
My client has embedded their company font into their PPT presentation but are finding that when they view it on different computers it is not appearing correctly and the font is lost. I’m assuming this is because the computer they are trying to view it on does not support the font? Is there any way around this as they really would prefer to use their font and not a standard system one. Will this also depend on which verison of PPT is being used? thanks
#14

Jessica Pyne

11:49 pm, November 23rd, 2011

Unfortunately the only way to get round this is to either download the font onto each computer that the presentation will be run on, or to convert the presentation into an online format (such as Brainshark) and view it this way. PowerPoint version shouldn’t affect this – it’s whether or not the individual computer has the font.
#15

Rick

5:20 pm, December 4th, 2011

When doing a slide that has various entrance animations within it, I am getting a strange effect when I add an emphasis animation such as underline or a color change to a slide with an entrance animation.

That effect is that the original slide with the entrance animation which should not be seen when the slide opens and should only appear when you reach that part in the timeline, is in fact opening with that slide showing and not hidden…of course I can overcome that problem by adding more animated shapes like lines for the underline, but that also clutters up the animated window with a lot of unnecessary animations…is there a work around to use emphasis animations in combination with entrance animations, or is that just one of those issues we have to live with? Thank you…
#16

Richard Goring

1:15 pm, December 8th, 2011

Hi Rick,

Your problem may be in the order of the animation on the timeline, if I understand your problem correctly. If you have two animations set to happen together on the same object e.g. an entrance and emphasis animation, PowerPoint will act on the first one in the list (at the top) before the other (at the bottom). This means that you always need to have entrance animations on top/above all other animation effects, despite both being played at the same time.

Does this answer your question?

Richard
#17

Leslie

9:21 pm, December 15th, 2011

Hi,

I am having trouble stacking (or overlaying) my photos. My goal is to take one photo, blur the background in one and elimate the background in the other, and then overlaying the second photo to the first one. In turn, creating the ‘blurred background’ effect. But, when I try to cut or copy and then paste to the first slide, another inserted slide is created instead. What am I doing wrong?
#18

John Evans

5:57 am, December 18th, 2011

I created a presentation including sound in Powepoint 2010 running under Win7. This worked OK. Trying to run the same presentation on a labtop running Powerpoint 2007 under Win XP, the slideshow ran OK but there was no sound. Any Ideas?
#19

Jessica Pyne

10:55 am, December 19th, 2011

Hi Leslie,

What command are you using to copy and paste the photos? Are you making sure that you have only selected the photo you want to copy when you hit Ctrl+C, rather than the slide itself? If you can provide us with more details, we’ll look into this for you!
#20

Jessica

2:00 am, December 20th, 2011

Hi! Can anyone answer my question? When I go to choose a design for my slides, none of the names for the built-in themes show up. The same thing happens when I try to choose a specific color too! If anyone knows what I can do I would REALLY appreciate it, this is driving me crazy! Thanks!
#21

Jessica Pyne

11:46 am, December 21st, 2011

Hi John,

This could be caused by quite a few things. It may sound obvious but first we need to rule out that the problem isn’t the laptop – does it normally play music and sound with no problem? Has it had any issues with other sound files?

What format was the sound file attached to the PowerPoint? Does the sound file play correctly in the media player alone?

If we rule these things out it probably suggests a compatibility issue, but we can’t be clear until we receive further details.
#22

Annette

9:35 pm, December 27th, 2011

Can I animate a dot that would appear on a map and move along a route leaving a trail (line) behind it so when the dot gets to the “finish line” the line is still there?
#23

Jessica Pyne

1:05 pm, January 3rd, 2012

Hi Annette,

There isn’t a single animation that would do this automatically, but you could do this using two separate animations. First, draw a ‘Line’ to serve as the trail. You can edit this to consist of dashes if you like. Then select the Appear>Wipe from Left animation for this line (if it runs left to right).

To have your dot move along the same line, simply add a Motion Path>Draw Custom Path animation and draw along your existing line. Then set this animation to occur ‘with previous’. You will have to experiment with timings to get it just right, which can be a little fiddly, and you might find it useful to uncheck ‘Smooth Start’ and ‘Smooth End’ from the Motion Path > Effect Options menu.

Of course, you could just have the line Wipe across without the dot, if you want an easier option! Hope that this helps.
#24

Moshe

12:21 am, January 15th, 2012

Hi,
I enjoyed reading yor web.
I did not see any q’s like what I a=want to ask.

How do you move (transition) to next slide after showing a video clip? When the video is done it will start again and will not move to the next slide.

Thanks,

Moshe
#25

Mitchell

6:40 pm, February 16th, 2012

I was given an automatic powerpoint presentation. How do I open it up so I can edit it?
#26

Jessica Pyne

9:33 am, February 20th, 2012

Hi Mitchell, it sounds like you were sent a read-only PowerPoint file, in which case you will not be able to edit it. If you wish to do so, you should contact the person who sent it to you and ask for an editable version.
#27

Simon Hughes

5:34 pm, May 3rd, 2012

Hi, why does the “Effect Options” not allow me to enter a custom value on the “Amount” diolog box on the spin animation (PowerPoint 2010). I need to get a scale to “tilt” 10 degrees.