(This article covers PowerPoint 2000 and 97.)
We recommend a series of adjustments to PowerPoint upon first
installing or using it. Most of PowerPoint's Tools, Options
settings will be familiar to someone who has used another Office
application, and we cover the optimal Office-wide Options
settings extensively in our book "Office 97 Annoyances."
http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/405/tr.cgi?offannoy
But there are some PowerPoint settings that aren't in its siblings' Options dialogs. On the General tab, you can set a threshold at which sound files are linked instead of embedded into a presentation; this helps reduce a presentation file's size. We recommend you set "Link sounds with file size greater than" to 300 KB (the default is 100), but adjust to suit your needs. Warning: it is very annoying to install your presentation on the boss's PC, get part way into the slide show, then realize your awesome sound effects are all links to files that aren't on that PC.
Another variation from standard Office Options settings is the Edit tab's "Maximum number of undos" control. In Excel 2000 and 97 you get a paltry maximum of 16 undos. In Word 2000 and 97 the undo stack is limited only by system resources and document size (FWIW, we once clocked Word at up to 2,400 undo actions). In PowerPoint 2000 and 97 you can set it yourself; the range is from 3 to 150, with a default of 20. Why is this user-selectable in PowerPoint and not the other Office applications? Our best guess is that the PowerPoint development team was trying to let users save resources in a pinch. Since presentations are often graphic intensive, tracking undo levels can eat up precious system resources if you're working in a constrained environment, say on a laptop (although with modern laptops this is less of a concern than back in the Office 97 days). We recommend you crank this control to its maximum.
Another interesting PowerPoint option is setting the default file type for all your presentations (Word has a similar option, Excel does not). On the Save tab, you can select the following formats from the "Save PowerPoint files as" list box: "PowerPoint Presentation", "PowerPoint 97-2000 & 95 Presentation", "PowerPoint 95 Presentation", "PowerPoint 4.0 Presentation", and "Web Page". These choices are helpful if you are collaborating on a presentation with someone outside your firm who's stuck with an older version, or if your firm is upgrading over time (instead of overnight) from Office 97 to 2000.
Note: If you have a Microsoft Office consulting project,
development idea, macro quandary, or are just plain stuck trying
to get something--easy or hard--done with Microsoft Office, WE
CAN HELP YOU! This is what we do for a living: handle Office
projects of all shapes and sizes. You can reach our software
consultants by email 24x7 at:
mailto:code@PRIMEConsulting.com
or you can call us in the U.S. at 310-318-5212 (someone's usually
on hand Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Pacific time,
or leave us a voice mail anytime).
