PowerPoint® 2007 Bible

Chapter 21. Designing User-Interactive or Self-Running Presentations

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding user interactivity

Using navigational control

Creating text hyperlinks

Creating action buttons

Creating other graphical hyperlinks

Creating self-running presentations

In the last few chapters, you've been learning how to build and present slide shows that support you as you speak to your audience directly When you build such presentations, you design each slide to assist you, not duplicate your efforts. Slides designed for a live presentation typically do not contain a lot of detail; they function as pointers and reminders for the much more detailed live discussion or lecture taking place in the foreground.

When you build a self-running or user-interactive presentation, the focus is exactly the opposite. The slides are going out there all alone and must be capable of projecting the entire message all by themselves. Therefore, you want to create slides that contain much more information.

Another consideration is audience interest. When you speak to your audience live, the primary focus is on you and your words. The slides assist you, but the audience watches and listens primarily to you. Therefore, to keep the audience interested, you have to be interesting. If the slides are interesting, that's a nice bonus. With a self-running or user-interactive presentation, on the other hand, each slide must be fascinating. The animations and transitions that you learned about in Chapter 18 come in very ...