Special Edition Using Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003

You might sometimes need to deliver a presentation to several audiences, but you need to adjust the presentation for each audience. Use a custom show to create one presentation, but set in advance which slides you'll show to which audience. This saves you from creating several nearly identical presentations.

For example, you might want to create a sales presentation that you can use with three different types of prospective clients . Let's say that the first seven slides of your show cover information about your company and its history, which remains the same for all three types of prospects. But you've also created individual slides for each of your three prospect groups that detail your successes in those industries. You can then design three custom showseach of which includes the seven main slides, plus the specific slides that pertain only to a certain prospect type. This helps save you time and effort when you need to update information in the seven main slides; this way, you need to do it only once.

To create a custom show, follow these steps:

1. Choose Slide Show, Custom Shows to open the Custom Shows dialog box, shown in Figure 9.7.

   Figure 9.7. Customizing your slideshows saves time and reduces duplication.

2. Click the New button to open the Define Custom Show dialog box, shown in Figure 9.8.

   Figure 9.8. Add a new custom show in this dialog box.

3. Replace the default name in the Slide Show Name text box with a title for your show.

4. From the Slides in Presentation list, choose the first slide to include in your custom show.

5. Click the Add button to copy this slide to the Slides in Custom Show list.

6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until you've copied all the slides you want to this list. If you need to remove a slide from the Slides in Custom Show list, select it and click the Remove button.

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   You can reorder the slides. For each slide to reorder, select it and click the up and down buttons on the right side of the dialog box until you have it where you want it.

7. Click OK to save the custom show and return to the Custom Shows dialog box. From this dialog box, you can edit, remove, or copy any selected custom show.

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   Copying a custom slideshow is useful if you want to create several similar versions of a custom show and don't want to repeat the same steps.

8. To preview what the show will look like, click the Show button. The show previews in Slide Show view.

9. Click the Close button to close the Custom Shows dialog box.

To play a custom show, select it in the Custom Shows dialog box and click Show. Or select it from the Custom Show drop-down list in the Set Up Show dialog box. Then either press the F5 key or select the Slide Show, View Show menu command.