PowerPoint 2010 Help

Monday, August 1st, 2011 PowerPoint 2010 51 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!

51 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.
#28

jose

1:19 am, June 4th, 2012

I have Powerpoint 2010. I am using new Acer netbooks in several classrooms to show the same presentations. Some of the embedded videos in a few of the classrooms do not sync with the audio. When I pull the video from the file instead of clicking on the slide the sync is better but not perfect. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Jose
#29

vidya

1:34 pm, June 5th, 2012

If we are having any custom themes or templates created for powerpoint, is there a way by which we can embed those themes along with the presentation while sending it to others. So that when the presentation is opened on some other system where the theme is not installed we can view the presentation along with the theme desired.
#30

Geoff

9:24 pm, June 12th, 2012

Having saved a power point presentation as a video (.wmv) how do I get the video to play again and again continuously as a loop?
#31

Theresa

8:50 am, June 15th, 2012

Hello,

I actually have the 2011 version of powerpoint. I downloaded one of your template for a map of Europe. I was wondering if you had a tutorial or could explain how to edit the map in terms of colors, labels, etc.

Thanks!
#32

Jessica Pyne

1:31 pm, June 15th, 2012

Hi Theresa,

I’m afraid that we don’t currently have a specific tutorial on how to edit these slides, but it is certainly something we will now consider! We do, however, have more general tutorials on m62.net that you may found useful. Our Grouping Objects PowerPoint Tutorial and Formatting Autoshapes PowerPoint Tutorial are specific to PowerPoint 2007, but should enable you to grasp the basic skills you require to edit these slides, as PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 are very similar in terms of layout and use. For PowerPoint 2010 specific tutorials that provide an overview of the latest version, please visit the PowerPoint 2010 section of the website.
#33

Beverly Boyd

9:36 pm, September 22nd, 2012

I have a powerpoint 2010 presentation. I have set it up so that the slides advance automatically after 8 seconds. This seems to work. I have added an audio file and placed the icon on the first slide but when I click on the audio the slides won’t advance. If I manually change the slides the music quits. How can I have both happening at the same time?
#34

Mark Bullock

10:34 am, September 24th, 2012

Hi, thanks for getting in touch!

This is a fairly simple issue to resolve in 2010 and shouldn’t take long too fix. On the first slide you should see a small, grey speaker icon – the audio file you’ve inserted. Click the icon to select the audio file and you should see the control bar for the audio file appear below it as well as a new ‘Audio Tools’ section of the ribbon along the top of the window (highlighted in blue).

This Audio Tools section consists of two tabs – Format and Playback. Select the ‘Playback’ tab and locate the ‘Start’ drop down menu (around two thirds of the way across the tab, next to the volume indicator). From this menu, you should see an option that reads ‘Play across slides’. Selecting this option will allow your audio to continue playing beyond the duration of the slide and across the rest of your deck.

If you have any problems, please get in touch.

Cheers,

Mark
#35

Cathleen

10:47 pm, October 11th, 2012

I have a color power point 2010 presentation, which is 175 slides long. I know how to print this out to make it grayscale and 44 pages (4 slides per page) but what I want to do is SAVE it as a 44 page long ppt (4 sides per page) in grayscale. Reason being, I want to insert it into a word document. I have printed out the ppt onto 44 pages, scaned it to a pdf, saved it, then inserted it into my document but it is grainy and a bit distorted. I know if I insert a ppt into my document, it is clear, like a photo has been inserted. This is the quality I am looking for. But again, I do not want to insert 175 pages. I would like to insert a powerpoint that has been made grayscale and 4 slides per page (44 pages). Is there a way to save my 175 slide/page power point to a grayscale 44 page document? Thank you.
#36

Jessica Pyne

10:38 am, October 17th, 2012

Hi Cathleen,

One of our designers is looking into this for you – we hope to have an answer with you by the end of the day.

Thanks,

Jessica
#37

Jessica Pyne

10:48 am, October 17th, 2012

Hi Cathleen,

This can be done but it requires downloading a third party software. Would you like to send us the document so that we can save it in the correct format for you? If so, please send the file to ‘info@m62.net’ with the subject ‘PowerPoint 2010 Help – pdf’ and we’ll get this back to you.

Thank you,

Jessica
#38

Tom Schulte

4:38 pm, November 11th, 2012

I am trying to make a spinning wheel for a game I am created on PowerPoint. I have the wheel made with it’s values and when I go to “animations” / “amount” it gives me choices (Quarter spin, Half spin, Full spin, Two spins and Custom. It defaults on Full Spin. I want custom so I can direct the wheel to stop at different values on different spins. I have tried to select “custom” and it won’t select. The check mark stays next to “Full Spin” or whatever it was set to. I have changed the value manually in the custom box that is next to where it says “custom”. When I say OK it just defaults back to one of the other coices. No matter what I do I can get custom spin to work. A follow problem I am having is that even when I set it on one of the options (like Full spin) and go into presentation mode, it won’t respond on a “click”. I would be thankful for any ideas you can give me to resolve my problems?
#39

Jessica Pyne

9:27 am, November 12th, 2012

Hi Tom, I’ve passed your query onto our design team and will post back here when they have a solution for you!
#40

Jessica Pyne

10:32 am, November 12th, 2012

Hi Tom, I’ve now had a response from our design team:

This is a sneaky one and caught us out for a while. The secret is to press return once you have inputted the custom value into the spin box. This will confirm your selection and register the custom spin with the animation. As you mention, simply pressing OK will not take account of any changes you make. Annoying but easily solved!

As far as your other problem, I’m not sure why the animation wouldn’t be activating on a click as that is the default state. Could you perhaps give us more info and hopefully we’ll be able to help?
#41

Tom Schulte

4:21 pm, November 12th, 2012

Hi Jessica,
Great job on solving my custom “spin” problem. Who whoulda thunk you would have to press return to make that happen. The design team rocks! I don’t know what else to say about the spin annimation not activating on a “click”. It says it is on “click” but when I go into the presentation mode nothing happens when I click. Would it matter that I don’t have an “entrance” on my object? Can’t the annimation work on an “emphasis” command by itself in presentation mode? It seems like everything is set where it is suppose to be. It just doesn’t work. That might not be enough specific information to give your super sleuths a good chance at a solution but that is where it is at.
Thanks for your help,
Tom
#42

Tom Schulte

4:28 pm, November 12th, 2012

Jessica,
Since I posted my last comments … I opened a new PowerPoint presentation, copied my “spinner” wheel from the one I had been working on and pasted it into the new presentation. WALLA! The spinner works when I “click” in presentation mode. I have no idea what was going on in the other presentation but it doesn’t matter for what I am doing and the “click” problem seems to be solved. Thank you and the design team for your help. I was really out of ideas.
Grateful,
Tom
#43

Jessica Pyne

9:37 am, November 13th, 2012

Hi Tom,

Glad that you’ve managed to solve the problem! Please head back if there’s anything else!
#44

rakesh

7:04 am, December 28th, 2012

Can i move to different part of same slide after making maximum zoom in powerpoint 2010? pls let me know as soon as possible
#45

Jessica Pyne

3:04 pm, January 16th, 2013

Hi Rakesh, sorry it’s taken us so long to get back to you, but this has been a very busy time for us! I passed your query onto our design team but they’re unsure what exactly your issue is. Is this related to animation, or to the way you view a slide? If you can get back to us with more details we’ll take a look into this for you.
#46

Barbara

4:05 pm, March 11th, 2013

I recently discovered that simple “uncover” slide transitions created in PowerPoint 2003 undergo a change when the file is opened in PowerPoint 2010.

The transition that’s being used is “Uncover Left-Up”. In PowerPoint 2003, it is simple and straightforward, but PPT 2010 adds a tilting and shrinking effect, slightly before the “left-up” motion. If you go through the slides quickly, they can make you seasick. I looked in vain for a setting in PPT 2010 to tone down the effect.

It looks like my only option is to remove the transitions altogether, but correct me if I’m wrong.
#47

Deb

6:06 am, March 13th, 2013

I have a screenshot of a program that has several areas i would like to highlight/grow or emphasise in succession to talk about the features. How do i do this?
#48

Jessica Pyne

4:56 pm, March 13th, 2013

Hi Deb, there are a number of ways you can do this. You might find the following tutorials useful: Highlighting Objects and Grow/Shrink Animations. The tutorials are specific to PowerPoint 2007 but PowerPoint 2010 runs on a very similar format.

If you have any specific questions or encounter any difficulties after watching these tutorials, please get back in touch!
#49

zoey

7:37 pm, March 17th, 2013

I’ve been trying to embed a video from youtube into the powerpoint presentation and it goes in but afterwards I can’t view the video. On my computer it says something about needing to download the new adobe but I think that it is already downloaded. I’m not sure if you can help because I don’t know if the problem is just because of Adobe. I hope you can though.
#50

Mark Bullock

9:45 am, March 21st, 2013

Hi Barbara,

Microsoft refreshed all of the slide transitions in PowerPoint 2010 in an attempt to make everything more ‘dynamic’. This included adding animations to existing transitions that weren’t present in earlier versions as well as adding some entirely new options.

Unfortunately there’s no way to re-create the ‘Uncover’ animation exactly as it was in PP2003. We would instead recommend, and use ourselves, a simple fade transition. When creating slides it’s important to remember that it’s the content that should be speaking the loudest, not the animations used. A simple fade allows a smooth transition that won’t risk breaking the audience’s attention and taking them out of a receptive state.

FYI It doesn’t look like you’re subscribed to the thread so I’ve also emailed this to the address supplied.

Thanks,
Mark,
Senior Designer @ m62
#51

Harry Wilson

9:16 am, March 22nd, 2013

Hi Zoey, that sounds like an adobe problem. I suggest uninstalling then reinstalling the latest version. Thanks