JULY TUTOR ■

WEB PRESENTATIONS

web
presentations
If you’ve ever created a PowerPoint presentation then you know what it’s like to concentrate all your com-
munication skills into one tidy package of information. PowerPoint 2000 makes the most out of this con-
certed effort by allowing you to post your presentations on the Web. Thanks to a new ‘Publish’ button,
you can now pull out the slide show whenever the need arises, wherever your audience happens to be.

ou’ve spent countless hours via other types of distribution, in part be- available, there’s another compelling reason

Y p repari ng P owerPoint s lide cause you remain in control of changes to use this feature. Presentations are often
shows in an effort to impress your and updates.
investors, your clients, your re-
cruits and your future customers.
the basis for business meetings—a means
Beyond making your existing slide shows of conveying information and guiding dis-
cussions and decisions. Mounting
You’ve lived on the road most of the the presentations on the Web lets
past year using these presentations you give your presentations from
to get the word out to audiences large any Web-connected computer, elim-
and small. Now that you’re back inating the need to carry and set up
home, there’s no reason to halt your your notebook and also allowing for
initiative. You can continue to make spur of the moment presentations. In
the presentations available to an al- addition, Web-based presentations
most unlimited audience by posting let you conduct meetings with any
them on the Web. remote groups or individuals that
Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 makes have Web access. While perhaps not
this process quite easy. Like all the ap- as technologically leading-edge as
plications in the Office 2000 suite, a full scale videoconferencing sys-
PowerPoint 2000 is designed to pro- tem, a Web-based presentation com-
duce Web output, and the option to bined with a conference call would
save your files in HTMLformat is read- do the trick in a number of situa-
ily displayed in the File menu. Simi- tions, and much more frugally as
larly, a Publish button appears on the well.
Save dialog. Putting your slide shows We’ll assume two things for this ar-
Figure 1: The presentation in PowerPoint 2000 and the preview in
on the Web is more preferable to IE 5.0.
ticle. First, that you have a Web serv-
sending them as file attachments or er on which you can store docu-

84 July 2000 www.DITnet.co.ae ■ www.pcmag-mideast.com

 ■ JULY TUTOR
WEB PRESENTATIONS

POWERPOINT
PRESENTATIONS
ON THE WEB
LOAD YOUR PRESENTATION into PowerPoint. To see what the slide
show will look like to your Web site’s visitors, choose Web Page
Preview from the File menu. When you’re ready to finalise the
design, choose Save as Web Page from the same menu.

THE SAVE AS DIALOG BOX lets you change the title of the pre-
sentation to whatever you want displayed on the title bar of your
visitors’ browsers.

THE PUBLISH BUTTON takes you to the Pub-

lish As Web Page dialog, where you can cus-
tomise your presentation.

THE WEB OPTIONS DIALOG lets you specify the way

published files will be stored on the Web server
and whether to update internal links to these files
automatically.

YOU CAN CHOOSE to make your presentation view-

able in Netscape Navigator, though it won’t be as
user-friendly as in IE 5.

www.DITnet.co.ae ■ www.pcmag-mideast.com July 2000 85

JULY TUTOR ■
OTHER BROWSERS
Internet Explorer, of course, isn’t
the only browser in town and even
some IE users may still be using
earlier versions. Fortunately, Office
2000 recognises this fact. Power-
Point lets you tailor your presenta-
tion for IE 3.0 or for Netscape Nav-
igator 3.0 and later. In fact, this
save process should work for any
browser compatible with HTML
frames, which is what PowerPoint
2000 requires to make the presen-
tations navigable.
To save the document in this for-
mat:
Choose Save as Web Page
from the File menu, click the
Publish button on the Save As
dialog, then select the radio
button labelled Microsoft In-
ternet Explorer or Netscape
Navigator 3.0 or later in the
Browser Support section of
the Publish as Web Page dia-
log.
Specify a filename, then click
Publish. The result is a brows-
er-based view of your presen-
tation without some of the
aesthetics and functionality of
the standard IE 4–based ver-
sion.
Bear in mind: the user can’t
size the frames (which are
awkwardly sized), and the out-
line and speaker notes frames
can’t be toggled on and off.
Nor is there a full screen view.
As with all your Web designs,
you’ll probably want to give your
users a choice of browser options.
Follow the same procedure as
above, but select the radio
button labelled All Browsers
Listed Above (creates larger
files). When the browser loads
the presentation, it will dis-
play the presentation in the
most compatible format.
An alternative is to save two
different versions of the file,
one in IE 4 or later format and
one in IE 3/Netscape 3 or later
format and offer a link to each
on a Web page preceding the
presentation.
86 July 2000
WEB PRESENTATIONS
ments and make them available to others.
Second, that you have Microsoft Internet Ex-
plorer 4.0 or later installed on your ma-
chine. PowerPoint 2000 is naturally opti-
mised to work with Internet Explorer. When
you installed Office 2000, you installed IE
5.0 along with it by default, and this is the
preferred browser. We offer notes on oth-
er browsers in the sidebar “Other Browsers.”
MAKING IT HAPPEN
The first thing you’ll need, of course, is a
PowerPoint presentation. Launch Power-
Point 2000, load your document and make
any changes you wish. PowerPoint 2000 lets
you easily see what the Web version will
look like: simply choose Web Page Pre-
view from the File menu. The presentation
will load in IE. As Figure 1 shows, the re-
sulting Web page is divided into thre e
frames. The main frame shows the slides
themselves. Along the left is the outline for
the slide show, exactly as created in Pow-
erPoint. Speaker notes, if any, appear in a
frame below the main frame.
Along the bottom of the IE window, you’ll
see a control bar with a few useful but-
tons. The Outline button lets you toggle
the Outline frame on and off; the button to
its right lets you expand or collapse the
outline. The Notes button toggles the speak-
er notes frame on and off and the naviga-
tion arrows let you move among the slides.
The button at the far right launches the
slide show in full screen mode, which you
can exit by pressing Esc or right clicking and
choosing End Show.
In other words, saving a PowerPoint 2000
presentation as a Web page makes your
browser into a PowerPoint viewer.
SAVING AND PUBLISHING
Your main assistant in converting Power-
Point files to Web-compatible HTML files is
the Save As Web Page dialog box, which
will save your PowerPoint files in HTMLfor-
mat by default. The dialog also lets you
change the presentation’s title (which will
appear on the browser’s title bar) and pub-
lish the files.
If you don’t use the Publish button, you
can still save your presentation as an HTML
file, but components such as embedded
graphics files may not function properly
when you load the HTML file into a brows-
er. Publish takes care of the necessary links
to make sure the presentation works prop-
erly; it offers a variety of other options as
well. If you’re converting an existing pre-
sentation for viewing on the Web, you
should definitely use the Publish feature, so
that all components are together and mu-
tually supported.
Typically, you publish the presentation to
www.DITnet.co.ae
your hard drive first and then put it on a
Web server. From the Publish As Web Page
dialog, browse to whatever folder you wish,
give the HTML file a name, change the pre-
sentation title if you want to and then click
Publish. To see your handiwork immedi-
ately in IE, check the box called Open Pub-
lished Web Page In Browser. When you’re
ready, you’ll transfer all the files and fold-
ers created by the Publish feature to the Web
server, using the procedures outlined by
your hosting provider. This is usually a sim-
ple FTP upload. You can also save your
files directly to Web folders, as in all other
Office 2000 applications, so if these are ac-
cessible, save yourself a step and use them.
Several options let you tailor the presen-
tation. You can indicate which browsers
you want your presentation to support.
You can also specify how many slides you
wish to publish—either the entire presen-
tation or a specific range of slides. If you
have speaker notes in your presentation
and you want them to show up on the Web
as well, check the Display Speaker Notes
box.
The Web Options button on the Publish...
dialog lets you choose, for example,
whether Vector Markup Language (VML)
should be used when displaying graphics
(reducing download time but supported
only in IE 5.0 or later) and whether to col-
lect supporting files, such as graphics, in a
separate folder.
If you want still more control, you can ei-
ther create a new slide show in PowerPoint
and drag the appropriate slides into it, or
create a set of custom slide shows and con-
nect them via hyperlinks. You create a cus-
tom slide show with the Tools | Custom
command, giving the new show a name
and adding your choice of slides to it. For
a custom presentation, you might want to
create two or more of these shows and
then use PowerPoint’s hyperlink feature
(Insert | Hyperlink) to link the custom slide
shows together. Alternatively, you could
create the custom shows and then create a
new slide in the main presentation that
would act as a table of contents. The TOC
slide would provide a hyperlink to each of
the different custom presentations.
Mounting a presentation on the Web typ-
ically isn’t a complete solution. Presenta-
tions are rarely standalone items: they ben-
efit from a speaker and an interactive au-
d i e n ce . B u t yo u c an c r ea t e a mo r e
comprehensive package for those who tune
in by linking your slides to other appro-
priate Web documents (including, say,
streaming audio). In any case, a Power-
Point presentation on the Web can provide
a number of real advantages for your busi-
ness.
■ www.pcmag-mideast.com