Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 Bible

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 handy in creating interest, as do sounds and videos, discussed in Chapters 16 and 17.

Understanding User Interactivity

Letting the audience take control can be scary. If you aren't forcing people to go at a certain pace and view all the slides, what's to guarantee that they don't skim through quickly or quit halfway through?

Well, there are no guarantees. Even in a show with a live speaker, though, you can't control whether people pay attention. The best you can do is put together a compelling presentation and hope that people want to view it. The same applies to a user-interactive presentation. People are either going to watch and absorb it or they're not. There's no point in treating the audience like children. On the contrary, they will likely respond much better if you give them the options and let them decide what content they need.

Navigational controls are the main thing that separates user-interactive presentations from normal ones. You have to provide an idiot-proof way for people to move from slide to slide. Okay, technically yes, they could use the same navigational controls that you use when presenting a show (see Chapter 20), but those controls aren't always obvious. Moving forward is a no-brainer (click the mouse), but what about moving backward? Would you have guessed "P" for Previous if you hadn't already known? Probably not. And what if they want to end the show early? The first half of this chapter shows you various techniques for creating navigational controls.

Here are some ideas for ways to use navigational controls:

• Web resource listings. Include a slide that lists Web page addresses that users can visit for more information about various topics covered in your presentation. You can also include Web cross-references throughout the presentation at the bottom of pertinent slides.

• Product information. Create a basic presentation that describes your products, with For More Information buttons for each product. Then create hidden slides with the detailed information about each product and hyperlink those slides to the For More Information buttons. Don't forget to put a Return button on each hidden slide so that users can easily return to the main presentation.

• Access to custom shows. If you have created custom shows, set up action buttons or hyperlinks that jump the users to them on request.

• Quizzes. Create a presentation with a series of multiple-choice questions. Create custom action buttons for each answer. Depending on which answer the user clicks, set it up to jump to either a "Congratulations, you're right!" slide or a "Sorry, try again" slide. From each, include a Return button to go on with the quiz.

• Troubleshooting information. Ask the user a series of questions and include action buttons or hyperlinks for the answers. Set them up to jump to the slides that further narrow down the problem based on their answers until they finally arrive at a slide that explains the exact problem and proposes a solution.

• Directories. Include a company directory with e-mail hyperlinks for various people or departments so that anyone reading the presentation can easily make contact.

Besides navigational controls, the other big consideration with a user-interactive show is distribution. How will you distribute the presentation to your audience? Some of the methods you've already learned about in this book will serve you well here, such as packaging a presentation on CD (Chapter 20). Or you may choose instead to set up a user kiosk in a public location, e-mail the presentation file to others, or make it available on the Web.