Re: Powerpoint 2003: Any better editing features?
Has anyone found any good ways to see more information about the text in a slide? I edit presentations from other people in the company, and find (via File->Properties) that there are weird fonts in the presentation, yet have a very difficult time going through 100+ slides to find the one slide where some funny font got inserted.
Keri,
I haven't had the pleasure of PowerPoint 2003, so I don't know if there is any more information available than before. However, there are some cleanup techniques that might help:
1. Clean up your template before you clean up slides. Open your template for editing. On each slide of the template (title master and slide master), with _nothing selected,_ pick your basic text font in the dropdown. This will be the default font for new items created. Next, Select All (Ctrl+A), so that all the placeholders are visible, and pick the font in the dropdown again. This eliminates any surprise conflicts with the first step. Now create a new slide (Ctrl+M) and pick a different slide format. Set up font sizes, colors, line spacing, positioning, etc., for different objects. Run through the slide types that include double text boxes, tables, org charts, and graphs, at a minimum. You can also add comments to these sample slides to give tips to users. In slide sorter view, make all of these sample slides hidden, but don't delete them. Edit your color palette if necessary. Save the template. (Bonus tip: On the title master and slide master, set the view to something like 66% so you can see quite a bit of pasteboard around the slide. Create short dotted lines to point to key guideline positions. Add text boxes with instructions. Add another textbox with the path to where the latest revision of the template is stored on your network. Keep all this stuff outside the slide, so it is available to users when the start a new presentation.)
2. Apply the revised template to the presentation that was sent to you. Sometimes it's actually better to just copy all the existing slides (slide sorter view), and paste them into a new presentation started from the revised template. Delete hidden slides that came in with the template, unless you need those objects to capture styles for the style painter.
3. Go to the three-pane outline view. Put your cursor in the outline page. Select All. If your template uses just one font (for slide titles as well as text), you can now pick the font from the dropdown to change everything to that font. This will not change stray user-created text boxes, though. So keep reading. Now go through the presentation one slide at a time. Again, you can Select All and pick the font from the dropdown, if that makes sense. Or you can Select All and then manually deselect the slide title, if that's supposed to be a different font. Next, find an object that is correctly styled, or edit one so that it is correctly styled. That means font, font color, font size, background, border, text indents per level, bullet styles, line spacing, margins, alignment. Now select the placeholder and double-click the style painter button (the yellow paintbrush). Double-clicking keeps the style painter turned on until you either click the button again or touch the Esc key. Having loaded the style painter, page through the presentation and touch each placeholder that should have that same style. Repeat for other types of objects.
For a really awful why-didn't-you-use-the-damn-template 100-slide presentation, you should be able to do a pretty good cleanup, including line breaks, spelling, punctuation, grammar, and all of the above (once you've got a good template), in about an hour or an hour and a half, although why anyone would ever consider presenting 100 slides in a session is totally beyond my comprehension.
Dick
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Powerpoint 2003: Any better editing features?: From: Keri Morgret
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