Microsoft PowerPoint

Once again, select Add Effect > Exit > Fly Out. In the options, select “Very Slow” as the speed, and “To Top” as the Direction. Use the Play button at the bottom to preview your animation.

Save Your Charts
If you’ve spent hours customising the formatting for a chart, make sure to save the formatting so you can use it in another presentation. Double-click on the chart, then right-click and choose Chart Type. Click the Custom Types tab of the Chart Type dialog box and choose User Defined. Click Add, enter a name for the chart type and click OK twice to get back to your presentation.

The Slide You Want
Sometimes, keyboard shortcuts aren’t as great as they’re made out to be. If you’re editing slide number, say, 80 in your presentation and want to see how it looks in slideshow mode, the shortcut key-[F5], is no use-it takes you to the first slide! Instead, stick to the good old mouse and click on the slideshow button at the bottom left.

Keyboard Warrior
If you want to get all your content into the presentation as fast as possible and bother about formatting later, you can enter all your text swift as a turbocharged bunny this way:

Start a new presentation
Press [Ctrl] [Enter]-this automatically selects the Title placeholder for editing. Enter your title text.

Press [Ctrl] [Enter] again-this selects the Body Text placeholder for editing. Enter your body text or bullet points.

Press [Ctrl] [Enter] again-since there are no more text placeholders on the current slide, this creates a new slide and selects the Title placeholder for editing, so you can begin entering the new title text immediately.

Play It Again, Sam
To restart your slideshow, hold down the left and right mouse buttons at the same time. If you can’t get the timing right, first press down the left mouse button, hold and then press down the right. In a few seconds, your slideshow should restart.

Hop, Skip, And Jump
During a slideshow, you directly jump to slides if you know their names-just type in the slide number and hit [Enter]. Voila!

Link Wisely
True, most people will recommend that you don’t use the “Link to File” option for images, for if you decide to take your presentation to a new PC and forget the file, you’ll end up causing a big faux pas. But what if you have an image that’s in all your presentations-like a custom background or a logo? If the image changes you’ll need to go to all those presentations and update them with a new image! This is where you should use the “Link To File” option, so that changes in the image are automatically reflected in all your presentations.

Copy Formatting
If you want to copy the formatting of text, but not the text itself, use these shortcut keys:
[Ctrl] [Shift] [C] to copy the formatting of the current selection, and [Ctrl] [Shift] [V] to paste the formatting

Teeny Slide Show
Isn’t it irritating when you’ve started a slide-show in full-screen and realise that it needs some tweaking? You have to stop the show, change the slide, start the show again, and then discover another slide that needs changing… Aargh!

Instead, when you start a slide show, hold down [Ctrl] and click the Slide Show button at the bottom left of the screen.

This opens the slide show in a separate, smaller window, so you can easily switch between the presentation and the show.

Take Your PowerPoint With You
Working on a colleague or friend’s PC? You don’t need to waste time tweaking PowerPoint preferences to get everything the way you want it-all your PowerPoint settings are in this file:

C:Documents and Settings[username]Application DataMicrosoft PowerPointPPT##.pcb (where ## is the PowerPoint version number you have installed.)

Simply carry this file around and place it in the same folder on the new machine, and now PowerPoint is just the way you like it! Do remember to back up your friend’s settings file, though!

Advanced Filtering
If you want your presentation to have a “background score” from an audio CD, go to Insert > Movies and Sounds > Play CD Audio Track. Select ‘Hide Sound Icon’, and click OK. When PowerPoint asks you whether you want the music to start automatically or when clicked, choose Automatically.

PPS? PPT? PPBoth?
You can save your presentation as a PowerPoint Show (.pps) if you want the slideshow to start as soon as you open the file. But if you want to edit some parts of the show in PowerPoint, all you need to do is rename the file with the .ppt extension. Windows will warn you that the file might become unusable-ignore this. It even works vice-versa-if you rename a .ppt to .pps, the presentation now starts in a full-screen slide show instead of opening PowerPoint for editing.

The Function Keys in PowerPoint

Go to Tools > Customize > Commands. In the list on the left, click on Insert and scroll down the list on the right till you find ‘Symbol…’ (there’s a blue Omega symbol next to it). Click and drag this to any toolbar you like and click Close.

So the next time you want a symbol, just use this button to quickly insert all those weird characters into your text.

Cycle Through Objects
If you have loads of overlapping objects on a PowerPoint slide, it can be difficult to select the object you want to work with. Instead of clicking to select objects, use the [Tab] key instead.

When you press [Tab], PowerPoint selects the first object on the slide. Every time you press [Tab] after that, it selects the next object, so you can easily cycle through the objects on your slide by repeatedly pressing [Tab]. If you overshoot the mark and miss the object you were after, hold down [Shift] while you press [Tab] to reverse direction and select the previous object.
 
Summary Slides
Creating slides that summarise your presentations is easy: in PowerPoint, Go to View > Slide Sorter to see miniatures of all your slides. Hold down [Ctrl] and click on the slides you want to include in the summary, and click on the ‘Summary Slide’ button. The summary slide now contains the titles of all the pages you selected.

Use Slide Masters For Consistency
Start with the Slide Master (Go to View > Master > Slide Master) to set up the layout for your slides and create a consistent look. Format the background, specify colours, select fonts and bullets, add text animation and logos, and insert slide numbers or other elements which you want to repeat for all slides.

Presentations
On The Web
To publish your presentations for the Web, go to File > Save as Web Page. In the dialog that appears, just clicking Save will save your presentation so that it can be opened again in PowerPoint and edited. You can also click Publish for some more saving options-if you want your transitions and animations to appear on your Web presentation, click on Web Options and check the box that says ‘Show slide animations while browsing’.

Remove The Ugly White Shadow
If you’ve turned on the Text Shadow option (the ‘S’ on the Formatting Toolbar), you will notice that the shadow turns a horrifying white when you make the background black. Fool the human eye-when you select a background colour, choose a custom colour with the values for Red, Green and Blue as 16 each instead of 0. Your text will get back its black shadow, and the background still looks black!

Flashy Flashy
You can include a Macromedia Flash movie in your presentation. Right-click on the PowerPoint toolbar and select Control Toolbox. At the bottom-right corner of the toolbox, click on the More Controls button and scroll down to select ‘Shockwave Flash Object’ to insert your Flash movie.

Soft Shadows
Instead of the coarse, often un-pretty shadow effects that PowerPoint offers, you can use a relatively simple technique to get good-looking shadows. Make a copy of the object you want to shadow, right-click on it and choose ‘Format’.

Under Fill > Colour, choose ‘Fill Effects’ and select the Gradient tab. In Shading styles, choose ‘From Center’, and tweak the gradient colours as you see fit. After you’re done, resize the duplicate object to around 150% of the original size, and place it behind the original object.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Slideshows

Draw the buttons-rectangles or any other shape you like-on the slide where you want them to appear, then assign them action settings by going to Slide Show > Action Settings and setting the options you want for each.

Test the buttons-start the slideshow and click each shape to make sure it’s doing what it’s supposed to.

To make them invisible, select the shapes and assign them a fill of No Fill and an outline of No Line through the Format Object dialog.

Command Line Switches

Now try running your screen show again. You’ll notice that even though the shapes are invisible, they still do what you’ve assigned them.

If you want these buttons on each slide, use the Slide Master-go to View > Master > Slide Master and create your action buttons on the Master slide. Anything you place on the Master slide appears on all slides in the presentation unless you specifically disable master items on a particular slide.

In your subsequent slides, you’ll want to make sure that you don’t completely cover up any action buttons you’ve placed on the Master slide.

Or, you could just put two of these invisible action buttons on each slide. Each one fills half the slide, so all you need to do is click the right side of the slide to advance to the next slide (if that is indeed what you want to do) in the presentation and the left side of the slide to go back to the previous slide.

Your Slideshow As A Whiteboard
Instead of using a separate whiteboard to write down stuff on, you can simply turn on a whiteboard in your slideshow itself and use the pointer to write down what you want.

First, right-click on your slide and go to Pointer Options to select what writing instrument your pointer is going to simulate. Then, press [W] to white out the screen, and you can now use it as you please.

Photo Albums In PowerPoint
Want to make a slide show out of your photo collection? It’s quite simple: go to Insert > Picture > New Photo Album. And in the Photo Album dialog box, to add a picture from a file or disk, do the following: under ‘Insert picture from’, select File/Disk. Locate the folder or disk that contains the pictures, select the ones you want, and click Insert.

If you want to format your photo album later, go to Format > Photo Album.

Replacing Fonts
If you want to quickly change the theme of your presentation, the first thing you should do is replace older fonts with new ones. Go to Format > Replace Fonts, and choose which font should replace which. There’s no need to worry about formatting either-all your old formatting stays intact.

Various Backgrounds, Same Presentation
If you are using a master slide to display backgrounds, and you want one particular slide to be different from the rest, go to Format > Background and click on ‘Omit background items from master’. This way, you can either have a plain slide or one where you can use a different background.

Compress!
In older versions of PowerPoint, it was essential to compress and save images as JPEG, lest your presentation become unnecessarily bulky. No more! Go to View >

Toolbars > Picture to bring up the Picture toolbar. The fifth button from the right is the ‘Compress Pictures’ button, which does the job for you. Just choose which medium you want to optimise for, and you’re on your way.

Stop Automatically Selecting Words
It’s often frustrating when an entire word gets selected when you only want to edit part of a word. You need to turn off the automatic selection of whole words-go to Tools > Options, and click the Edit tab. Uncheck the ‘When Selecting, Automatically Select Entire Word’ option and click OK.

Keep Only What You Need
If you found a clipart you like in PowerPoint’s clipart gallery, but only want to keep a part of it, you can convert it into a PowerPoint drawing object and remove what you don’t want.

Right-click on the object, go to Grouping, and select Ungroup. PowerPoint will then ask you for a confirmation, and you’ll then be presented with an object you can modify as you please. This works only for the Windows Metafile clipart, though.

Use the “cp” command to create a backup from text mode, or just use konqueror to browse to the folder and then copy/paste. A message window will appear in which you can key in a new name. This box appears only when the file you are trying to paste already exists in the directory. Rename it in such a way that you know it is the original copy and not just any other copy. We prefer to name backup files as “xorg.conf.orig” or “xorg.conf-backup.mine”-something that reminds us of the reason of such a copy being there.

To change the resolution: “system-config-display”

This will open the GUI through which you can change the settings for the monitor, and can also other settings that matter to X-server and X-client

Troubleshooting
If you have chosen a resolution that is not supported by your monitor, you’re in for some graphics-related trouble. The GUI tries to spawn, but the display doesn’t support it, so it re-spawns again and the cycle continues. To rectify this, you need to first switch to Single user mode.

In Single User Mode, reboot your machine, and on the Grub screen, choose the Linux OS and hit [E]. This will take you to the next screen that shows boot parameters, specifically three lines that control the booting of your machine. Move the cursor to the line containing “kernel”, and again hit [E] to edit that line. At the end of the line, give a space, type in “single”, and hit [Enter]. You will be taken back to the previous screen. Now press [B] to boot with the new parameter. The OS will boot to text mode. Now, follow the steps listed below:

#touch 0 > /[$home]/.Xclients
To clear the contents of the file.
#cd /[$home]/[$user]
#cp .Xclients-default.orig .Xclients-default. This will restore .Xclients-default to its original settings.

#cp xorg.conf. backup xorg.conf. This will restore Xorg to its earlier state.

After restoring all the files, switch to run level 3

(the text mode of the operating system):
#init 3 [Enter]

Log in as root and then try “system-config-display”. Check the settings. If all is OK, boot, then switch back to the graphics mode either using the “startx” command or “init 5”. (Init 5 is the graphics mode of the Linux operating system.)

Single user mode is an important tool for trouble shooting certain problems. If problems cannot be resolved from this mode, the Rescue CD is another option. Keep single user mode in mind… it is very useful!

Browser Problems
Browser related problems are common to those using older versions of Linux distros. You are often reminded by Web sites such as Gmail to upgrade to a newer browser-so let’s do it! Most Linux systems either come with the Mozilla browser or an old version of Mozilla Firefox. Here, we’ll upgrade the older Mozilla to the new Firefox 1.5. We shall also take a look at Opera 8.5 and demonstrate that it works just like its Windows counterpart.

At www.mozilla .com/firefox, you’ll see the download link for the Linux version for Firefox. Download the 8 MB compressed archive. Once the download is complete, extract the files to a folder in /usr. In our example, we shall extract the files to /usr/more-apps. To do this, use the following commands listed in Commands Box 1.

You will not find any installer packages like RPM or DEB in the extracted folder; instead, you will find a few source object files (*.so) and some folders. Actually, there is no installer: all you need to do is to create symbolic links to your current plug-ins. It is better to switch to root user than using sudo all the time. Sudo will be necessary for Ubuntu users, but they can choose to open a root terminal instead of the normal Gnome terminal.

Whenever you click on the Firefox button or type “firefox” at the command line, the old version of the browser pops up. So to ensure that only the new Firefox opens, you need to change the symbolic link that relates to the action of opening the browser. Use the “which” command to figure out the path to Firefox. Change your directory to the directory where Firefox is located. Rename the old Firefox from “firefox” to “firefox.old”. (Command Box 2)

Now click on the button that opens Firefox or just use the command line. In the browser that opens, click on Help > About Mozilla Firefox. This should show you “Firefox version 1.5.0.1”.

Opera 8.5 is very easy to install, but new users generally manage to just install it and can’t proceed thereafter.

Download the latest Opera browser from http://opera.
com/download/

Choose the right package from the list available. Opera is compiled as an installer package for all versions of Linux. We downloaded it for Fedora Core 3. To install it, just run the command for installation, which is “dpkg -i” for Debian users and “rpm -ivh” for distros following the RedHat Package Manager. Issue the following command to install Opera on RPM systems:
#rmp -ivh opera-8.51-20051114.5-shared-qt.i386-en.rpm [Enter]

Adding extensions, add-ons, themes or skin is a piece of cake after you have the browser up and running. To change the skin, for example, open Opera. Go to Tools > Appearance; in the window that appears, choose the Skin tab and then click “Find more skins”.  This will list all the skins available from the Opera community. Choose and download the one you like. After the download is complete, Opera changes to the new skin and asks you if you’d like to keep it. Click on Yes to have it offline, otherwise you will have to search and download it again.

The same applies to Firefox as from this point, the method of developing your browser is simple and identical to that followed by Windows users.

Ripping Audio CDs In Ubuntu 5.10
Ubuntu 5.10 comes loaded with Sound Juicer 2.12.2 which is a audio CD ripping tool. This tool can be accessed under Applications > Sound & Video > Sound Juicer CD Ripper. The supported ripping formats are FLAC lossless, OGG lossy CD quality and WAV audio. MP3 format is not supported due to license issues-Ubuntu is a free OS and can only provide free utilities.
To rip an Audio CD; insert the ACD into your CD or DVD drive and then start the Sound Juicer software. It will automatically look for the Audio CD in the drive and extract all the track information from it. The list of tracks will be displayed; use the label on the CD cover to rename all the tracks from “Track 01”, “Unknown Artist” to say, “Sweet Child of Mine”, “Guns n Roses” and so on. To set a file format and file naming system click on ‘Edit’ and choose Preferences.

In the dialog box that appears you can select the path to which you want the ripped audio files to be saved. The only problem with Ubuntu is that it allows only local user to login and therefore you do not have the admin istration rights to save on a folder other than the ones permitted to a user. So be sure to choose a folder you have permission to write on. OGG Vorbis and FLAC both are equally good alternatives to MP3 format.

Here in Sound Juicer you will get a lossy CD quality profile for OGG audio format and Lossless CD quality profile for FLAC audio format. Once you have renamed the Tracks and have chosen the ones you want to rip by checking the box across the track name; click on ‘Disc’ and the on ‘Extract’ to start ripping. Alternatively you can use [Ctrl] [Enter] key as the shortcut. The progress of audio ripping is indicated by a progress bar and remaining time at the bottom of the window. The process will take some time according to the length of the audio file and your system configuration.