PowerPoint Tips

Back to Hints and Tips Index                                                Back to Main Index

Blanking your screen during a slide show

Sometimes during a slide show, someone will ask a question that's unrelated to the slide onscreen. When this happens, you want to focus attention on the question at hand, not on the slide. Or, you might be ready to give the audience a break, but you didn't plant a signal slide in your presentation. In these situations, all you need to do is display a black (or white) screen. Doing so gives the impression that you've pulled up a blank slide for the occasion.Fortunately, you can blank the screen during a slide show with one simple keystroke.

  • To display a black screen, press the B key.

  • If you would rather display a white screen, simply press the W key.

  • When you press the B or W key a second time, the slide show picks up where you left off: the slide that was displayed when you blanked the screen.

Create scrolling credits in PowerPoint (95/97/98/2000)

You can create a scrolling list of credits in PowerPoint.

  • To do this, you create a text box, add text, and place the text box above the PowerPoint slide you want your credits to scroll across.

  •  Once you position your text, you can use the Custom Animation feature's Crawl From Bottom effect to animate your credits.

  • When you run your slide show, the credits will scroll from the bottom of the screen and disappear when they run off the top.

Creating embossed images in PowerPoint (97/98/2000)

You can create embossed images using Microsoft's Clip Gallery.

  • To do this, select a clip art image and ungroup it so that it becomes a drawing object.

  • Immediately regroup the object once you ungroup it.

  • Next, click the Shadow Settings button on the Drawing toolbar and select Shadow Style 17.

  • Once you apply Shadow Style 17, choose Format/Object to open the Format Object dialog box.

  • In the Format Object dialog box, select the Colours And Lines tab.

  • Then, select the same colour you used as a background colour from the Fill Colour dropdown menu and click OK.

  • If the embossed effect is difficult to see, use the Nudge Shadow buttons on the Shadow Settings toolbar to adjust the position of your image's shadow.

Back to Hints and Tips Index                                                Back to Main Index