Could somebody help me with my powerpoint project?
January 24, 2010 9:04 PM   Subscribe

I need to do a powerpoint about gun trafficking in Colombia. First of all, how do I get the powerpoint to go to the next slide automatically after a certain period of time after one slide is shown, and how do I incorporate music into the slide show? Secondly, can anybody point me to any useful charts/graphs/pictures on the web? I found this online pdf U.N. report that was really helpful but unfortunately I couldn't save or copy and paste any of the graphs as they were part of the text. Help is greatly needed and appreciated.
posted by bookman117 to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)
 
Parts of this seem too much like homeworkfilter to me (prev AskMe from August mentions being a rising HS Senior) but to your technical questions:

In terms of timing your powerpoints:

On the Slides tab in normal view, select the slides you want to set the timing for.
On the Slide Show menu, click Slide Transition.
Under Advance slide, select the Automatically after check box, and then enter the number of seconds you want the slide to appear on the screen.

Rinse+Repeat. Be sure to practice this beforehand.

Here's a tutorial for adding music to powerpoints.
posted by arnicae at 9:14 PM on January 24, 2010 [2 favorites]


If you have access to adobe acrobat (the full version, not just the reader) you can save your PDF as jpg which will allow you to use the charts and graphs. Photoshop will also rasterize PDF files and let you save them as JPG.
posted by davey_darling at 9:14 PM on January 24, 2010


1) Making slides switch automatically by time: at least on the Mac, right click on the slide and click on "Transitions..." then "Options..." You can set it to transition automatically following a set period of time and with the transition animation of your choosing.

2) For figures from PDFs, use a screen capture utility to save portions of the file on screen. Lots of freeware out there for the PC to do this. In OS X it's as easy as shift-cmd-4.

3) Can't help you with music. Never done that before.
posted by drpynchon at 9:21 PM on January 24, 2010


Response by poster: K, arnicae, thanks. As for davey_darling, I neither have the full version of Adobe nor do I have Photoshop on my machine. This looks tough. Any other suggestions?
posted by bookman117 at 9:21 PM on January 24, 2010


Response by poster: Okay, so to get this freeware, drpynchon, what should I google?
posted by bookman117 at 9:23 PM on January 24, 2010


Try here.
posted by drpynchon at 9:29 PM on January 24, 2010


Try hitting PrtScrn and then right-click paste into your powerpoint. I think powerpoint has some rudimentary cropping tools to clean things up.

Is your project due tomorrow? :)
posted by davey_darling at 9:29 PM on January 24, 2010


Response by poster: Yes, it's due tomorrow. I hate these kinds of projects. Did I learn anything? No I didn't. It's just a stupid "mutlimedia" project that requires no research except to find pretty stuff to put on slides. In fact, no more than five of your own typed words are allowed per slide. So stupid.
posted by bookman117 at 9:37 PM on January 24, 2010


GIMP can open PDF files as editable graphics. You can choose whatever raster resolution you like, it makes one file per PDF page, and it's easy to crop out the stuff you don't need and save the remainder in any picture format you like.
posted by flabdablet at 10:26 PM on January 24, 2010


Yeah, the "no more than five" is to keep you from reading things off the slides. Believe me, it's better than the alternative.
posted by NoraReed at 10:27 PM on January 24, 2010 [1 favorite]


If you go the GIMP route, you will also need GhostScript.
posted by flabdablet at 10:28 PM on January 24, 2010


If you can see it on your screen, you can put it on a slide.

In Windows, Alt+PrintScrn to copy a window, then paste into MS Paint and copy out only the graphic you want. Paste into PowerPoint.

Elegant it ain't, but it works. You would probably be horrified to know the number of very expensive slide decks produced in this manner. (No, really; I know people who don't know any other way of getting graphics into PowerPoint.)

On a Mac, Command-Shift-4 will turn the cursor into a crosshairs ... using this, you can select any area of the screen, and it will be captured to a .PNG file on the desktop. This is nicer than Windows because it avoids the MS Paint / cropping step, and gives you a PNG file you can come back to later if you want.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:58 PM on January 24, 2010


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