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As jscher posited, someone has indeed created a styles add-in for PPT. I can’t tell you how many hours of work the RnR Shape Styles add-in has saved me!

1. We attempted to copy to a CD-RW. We got an error message that said there was no writeable CD. Instead, I copied to a folder using that option on “Package for CD” I then copied that folder to the CD-RW. Why could I not copy to CD-RW with Copy to CD? Ultimately, I used a CD-R and had no problems. The presentation played fine on more than one computer using PowerPoint.

Glad to hear you got the whole “package for CD” thing worked out.

For some reason I cannot remember, PPT has issues with using CD-RW with Package for CD. Or maybe it’s Windows that has the issue. Regardless, one of them doesn’t like CD-RW! (Which version of Windows do you have?)

You were smart to try CD-R, as that usually works. And for that matter, I think you were smart to try the option to Copy to Folder, as that’s actually how I prefer to do the whole package for CD thing — copy to folder and then burn the contents of the folder to the CD using Nero.

2. There was one slide where the text was garbled when it was played through the PowerPoint Viewer. Yet, when the slide was played through PowerPoint itself, it played perfectly. I noticed this on two computers. On two other computers, the slide played perfectly. The font used is Algerian. Is it possible that the viewer is a weaker program?

Well, the Viewer is definitely not designed to be PowerPoint. It doesn’t support macros or Active X or printing more than one slide per page or various things like that. But it usually does display properly. (I say usually, as there are a few known bugs.)

I suspect that the issue you ran into had to do with video drivers or hardware acceleration on the machines in question. I know, I know, the file played in PPT itself on those machines but not on the Viewer; unfortunately I can’t answer exactly why and can only offer guesses.

3. I insisted on using Package for CD. Another colleague stated that Package for CD was not necessary. He felt that File>Save As would be good enough. I explained that that procedure would not bring over the necessary audio files. Is there any other answer (clean) that I could have given him since he was not satisfied with my explanation?

This one’s a little harder to answer.
You can resolve the audio links with your PPT file and the multimedia by putting the files in the same folder with your PPT file before you insert the multimedia into the presentation. Then you could simply burn the folder onto the CD and the links should be intact.

So yes, your colleague is correct that you can do this “manually” and you don’t have to use Package for CD. But it kind of depends on where the sounds were when they were inserted into the presentation.

You can have a look at Sounds/Movies don’t play, images disappear or links break when I move or email a presentation for a more thorough discussion of this.

That said, Package for CD does indeed resolve the links to your multimedia files and so makes your life easier.

In addition, Package for CD gives you the option to include the PPT Viewer so you don’t have to rely on PPT being installed on other computers. And if you’ve used animations or transitions new to PPT 2002 and 2003, you’d want that installed version to be 2002 or 2003 — otherwise those new cool animations and transitions don’t work in PPT 2000 and 97! So that’s where the Viewer comes in — you don’t have to worry what version of PPT is installed on the other systems because the PPT 2003 Viewer plays the presentation from the CD.

Sure. Here’s a link to my response. http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/…59a6&sloc=en-us%5B/url%5D Dunno if it will work for you or not, though, so…

If you open the taskpane and choose Slide Design – Animation Schemes at the
top of the taskpane, you’ll see a list of possible schemes. If you’ve used
one in the presentation, it will be selected (highlighted, kind of) in the
list in the taskpane.

The same on the Slide Transition task pane — if you’ve used a transition,
it will be selected in the list in the taskpane. If you haven’t applied a
transition, “no transition” will be selected in the list in the taskpane.

I answered this same question yesterday in the Microsoft PowerPoint newsgroup. The questions were worded almost identically. So, assuming that you also posted that question, let me know if the response did not answer the question and we’ll try again.

There’s really no great way to do this if you need to maintain animations.

See http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00057.htm%5B/url%5D for some info on capture utilities and a link to TAJ Simmons’s tutorial on converting PPT to Video.

If converting to Flash is an option, there’s a list of converters here: http://www.echosvoice.com/autoruncdlinks.htm%5B/url%5D It’s out of date, but it will get you started. (I prefer and recommend Articulate.)

If you don’t need to maintain the animations, then you can convert your slides to JPGs and use any number of programs that allow you to drag and drop your images into a timeline, add sound, and then render as a movie. Windows Movie Maker is a free download for Windows XP. It will do a good job with this type of thing. Photo Story would be another good freebie option for this type of thing.

Glad to hear things are working.

It seems as if you are indeed experiencing a path-length issue.

“My Documents” is really kinda buried, if you ask me. For example, the full path to my “My Documents” folder is C:Documents and SettingsEchoMy Documents That’s 43 characters. If I’d used my last name on my profile, it would be up to 52. Then add your folder name to that, and we have 102. C:Documents and SettingsEcho SwinfordMy DocumentsKODAK–The Beginnings Of Photographic Composition (You can paste that text into Word and use Tools–>Word Count to count the characters and spaces.)

And what is the name of the actual sound file? I’d bet it’s longer than the name of the other sound files that you could insert from that folder. When you add another and that sound file name and its extension, you’re probably over the limit.

Those characters and spaces add up quickly.

And why is it that when I went back to the original folder name, expecting it not to work, it did?

Not positive, but I’m thinking that when you renamed the folder back to its long name, you left out one of the spaces or one of the hyphens or something, and that may have been just enough to put you back under the path-length limit.

If you give the folder a different name (something simple with no punctuation marks) and put it directly on your C drive (as opposed to maybe putting it on a server or in My Documents or whatever), can you insert sounds from the folder then?

Yes, you really want to keep your sound files in the same folder as the presentation so you can keep the links intact when you move the files to other systems.

I suspect you have a path-length issue here. See #2 at Troubleshooting Video. (This page is also applicable for sound, even though it says video.)

I think you’d have to break it into individual pieces and apply appropriate wipe animations to each piece.

Oh, try the Strips entrance animation. Changing the direction may allow this effect to mimic exactly what you’re after.

I don’t know about the adware quotient of these, but hopefully something listed here will work. http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00048.htm%5B/url%5D

Any idea what the color order is?

You know, that’s a really good question!

When I look at my task pane, I see blues, then greens and greys, then reds and browns, then a couple of templates with black backgrounds but reddish color schemes, then mostly whites (with one light yellow in the mix).

In my blues section at the top, I have a couple of black backgrounds with bluish color schemes.

Then at the end after the whites, I have all kinds of stuff! ??

Oooooh, I know what those are now! They’re actually listed alphabetically. They’re the old PPT 2000 templates! (I have both PPT 2003 and 2000 on this machine.)

So it looks as if the PPT 2003 templates are listed in color order (roughly dark to light) and then the older templates are listed alphabetically. How bizarre!

I was feeling very guilty coming in and posting that additional information after so very long, but I thought someone might find it useful so I went ahead with it. I’m very happy to learn that it was helpful to you and Alice (and hopefully others)!

Echo

Powerful PowerPoint for Educators: Using Visual Basic for Application to Make PowerPoint Interactive by David M. Marcovitz

http://office.microsoft.com/training/train…=RC061832591033%5B/url%5D Part III about editing addresses specifically the scenario you described.

You would have to apply a new color scheme to the presentation in order to do this. There’s no print setting that would print colors “reversed” in this manner.