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How To Create A Slide Show This week I thought we would get really daring and make a slide show. I'm going to learn this right along with you. I choose this time to write about it because of all the summer events that you might want to save, savor, or share. For instance, do you have a beloved child or grandchild getting married this summer? How about a special slide show to present at a shower or at the reception that shows the bride or groom (or both) from childhood to the day of their wedding. How about an end of summer barbecue with all your vacation shots from Tahiti? O.K., maybe for you it is Chicago not Tahiti, but you get the idea. Do you have a family reunion or a school reunion coming up? Think of the possibilities! Once you make your slide show you will have to have your computer set up to show it unless you are renting a fancy conference site that has built-in equipment to run slide shows from computer creations. It is really quite easy to make a simple slide show using ClarisWorks 5.0 or AppleWorks 5.0 and there are a lot of pre-designed backgrounds you can use. The first step is to pick out the photos or the downloaded items you want to use. You need to scan them or have them scanned and then you will need to use the trusty Graphics Converter (see December 23rd and 30th columns) to get your pictures ready for inclusion in the show. Graphics Converter will help you focus in on just the part of the picture that you want to use. That is important if your computer screen isn't large. Too much background can muddy the effect you want to achieve. Once you have that done you are ready to make the slides. Go under the File pull down menu and click on New. Then click on Assistants and then click on All Assistants. When they come up scroll down to Slide Backgrounds and click. When it opens you will find some directions, but you can just scroll down the document until you come to the background choices. There are backgrounds for professional presentations, black and white presentations, and education and home presentations. For my slide background I choose Butterfly by simply clicking on the icon of the page. It opened for me with 4 pages as options. I knew I wanted many more than that so I went under the Format pull down menu and clicked on Document. I left the margins and page displays at the default because when I actually show the slide show none of that will be visible. Under pages I increased the number to 20 down. On the first slide page there will be a little box with some directions in it. Read it and then go to the button bar and click on the close links icon.
If it is not present on your button bar you can add it. Directions for doing so are in the May 19th column. Once you click on that icon you will get a message that the links have been turned off. You click on O.K. and then click once somewhere inside that message box that appeared on your first page. When you do so, small black boxes will appear at each corner and you can hit delete to make it go away. Now all you have to do is decide what you want on each of your slides. Open any pictures that you want to add to the first slide and, following the directions for Graphics Converter, copy your selection. Go to the first slide page, click the icon about where you want the picture to show up, and click on paste under the Edit menu. Your picture will immediately be on your page. You can make it larger or smaller by moving the black boxes on the top left or bottom right of the picture. Changing the picture with either of those boxes will keep the picture in the proper proportion. You can move by clicking the mouse inside the picture and holding it down while you drag it where you want. Add any other pictures that you want on that page as well. Then look over to the left side of your page and click on the large A in the dialog box. (If the dialog box isn't showing look at the bottom of the page on the left. You will see a number, probably 100, which is the percent of page you are showing; a couple of small boxes with small and large peaks and valleys, which allows you to increase or decrease the view size of your page; and a third small box with a square with a dark side and a light side. Click on that and your dialogue box will become visible). If you want to add words to the slide you click your cursor where you want to start the words. A small text box will appear. Choose the type font and size you want and then type the appropriate words. If you want to change them or give them a different color just highlight them while still in the text box and choose a different size, font, or color. You change the color by holding down the small box next to the font size and clicking on the color you want. Click somewhere on the page that is off the text box and your words will appear with four small black boxes at each corner. If you are happy with the looks you can just click somewhere on the page and the small boxes will disappear. You can change the length of your text box by clicking on one of the black boxes and moving it around and you can move the whole text box by clicking once in the middle of it and, when the black corner boxes appear, hold down the mouse button and drag it to the spot you want. If you want to eliminate it and start over just hit delete while in that same posture and it will disappear. And one last thing -- at the bottom of your slide you will see slide 1 of how many you set up, and the date of creation. You can remove both items as well as create text that will appear on every slide. You do this by editing the master page. Choose Edit Master Page from the Options menu. You will be switched to the master page view. Your slides will not go away so don't worry about that. You will know you have the master page because it will say so at the bottom of the page. Click your cursor on the large A in the dialogue box and then click on the words you want to change. Delete or change each box as you wish. If you want text to appear on every slide then click on the large A again, place the cursor where you want it and add the text. Here is my first slide.
After you have finished all your slides you are ready to view your slide show. Choose the Window pull down menu and click on Slide Show. You will get a box that looks like this.
Make your choices and click on start. Your slide show will begin. If you choose Advance every x seconds, it will just run on its own. If you don't, it will move when you click the mouse. To make it automatically show over and over click on loop. If you choose fade it will fade out between each slide. Suppose that after you view the show the first time you realize that you want to rearrange it, or add more slides, or put text boxes in between some pictures. That is easy also. To add more pages (or remove ones you don't need any more) choose Document from the Format pull down menu and change the number of slides. To reorder the slides, choose slide show from the Window menu again and the Slide Show dialog box will open. On the left, select the slide you want to reorder. Hold down the mouse button and drag the slide to its new position and release the button. Click Done to save your changes and close that box or click Start to see how it looks now. Any time you are running the slide show you can stop it by hitting the “q” key. That's all there is to it and once you make your first one you will be able to experiment in a lot of different ways. Feedback: I received a nice letter from Mark Hayes of Mark Hayes Design this week as a follow up on the column on button bars. Mark recommended MacOS Launcher. I don't use the Launcher because my gifted son told me that the PowerBar was better. However, it comes free with the MacOS and some Observers may want to check it out. Mark points out that you can make the buttons smaller in the Launcher by Command-clicking in the launcher window and accessing a contextual menu, but even with smaller buttons, the Launcher still takes up more screen space than other products like PowerBar. Another feature is that you can make a tabbed launcher (buttons along the top that identify programs). To do this you go into the launcher items folder (in the system folder), create folders and name them with a bullet before the name (option-8). You then put the aliases into the folders and they will appear under the tabs in the launcher. Thanks to Mark for sharing this information. If you have any tips, hints, or thoughts on these topics, make sure you write me so that I can share your thoughts with other readers. |
