You have crafted a presentation and are ready to head off to the meeting; your concern is how you can be sure that the presentation will run smoothly.
Does this scenario sound familiar to you? The content is too sensitive for the "The Cloud", and carefully crafted. You want to be certain that the presentation will look exactly the same at your meeting and you must use someone else's computer. The last time you ran a presentation on another person's computer it looked different.
To make sure this doesn't happen again you can use a PowerPoint feature that "grabs" all linked files for your presentation and packs them into one folder.
This feature includes a viewer, enabling you to present on any setup (even if they don't have the same version of PowerPoint). Your presentation will run smoothly so long as you keep the folder intact, and run it from the desktop.
In PowerPoint 2003: To use the feature Package for CD (called Pack and Go in previous versions) simply select File, Package for CD. You can create a new Folder and store it to a CD ROM, or any other location such as a Flash Memory Stick. I recommend that you take the CD ROM or Flash Memory stick and copy the entire folder to the "Desktop" of the destination computer and then conduct a "dry run". Make sure that you run the presentation by first launching the "pptview" executable file, which then asks you for the PowerPoint file name. It is this step that allows you to use a viewer which will insure the presentation looks like it did when you created it.
In PowerPoint 2007: To use the same feature in PowerPoint 2007, click on the Windows button on the top left corner of your screen and go to Publish, and select Package for CD. The subsequent steps remain the same as in PowerPoint 2003. Please note that when using this feature, PowerPoint 2007 will automatically save the file as a PowerPoint 2003 file onto the CD/USB stick.
In PowerPoint 2010: In the most recent version of PowerPoint, click on the File button on the top left corner of your screen, then go to Save & Send. Under the File Types category click on the Package Presentation for CD button, and then click once more on the Package for CD button on the right.
Remember that unlike PowerPoint 2003, PowerPoint 2007 & 2010 do not save viewers onto the CD/USB.
The onus is therefore on the recipient of the presentation to install the PowerPoint viewers on their computer themselves.
If the recipient of the presentation does not have PowerPoint 2007 or 2010 installed on their computer, they can download the viewer here.
Please feel free to contact us for assistance if you are experiencing problems transferring your presentations to another computer.
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