This issue of Impatica Tips will focus on PowerPoint design considerations that will make your content creation task much easier. Designing for performance will enable you to connect with your audience more easily and effectively. Volume 01-03 April 15, 2005 Want to review our previous editions of Impatica Tips? Please visit our archive.   Receive Impatica Tips in your Inbox! You can subscribe and get Impatica Tips twice a month.   Are you up to date? The latest version of Impatica products is currently 3.3.3 for Windows and 3.0.0 for Mac OS X. Version 2 users: Version 3 of Impatica for PowerPoint requires new registration information. If you would like to upgrade your software, please contact the Impatica Sales Team Version 3 Users: - Click here to download the latest version of Impatica for PowerPoint. - Click here to download the latest version of Impatica for PowerPoint for Mac OS X. - Click here to download the latest version of Impatica OnCue.   Your feedback is very important to us! Send your ideas for future editions of Impatica Tips to Impatica Customer Support Designing for Performance: Dividing Large Presentations Viewing long PowerPoint presentations online can be daunting for your audience. Impatica for PowerPoint allows you to link several smaller presentations together so that the content can be absorbed in small increments. Impatica Customer Support suggests that you break up larger presentations into several chapters. For example, if you have a 100 slide PowerPoint file you could divide it into four sections of 25 slides each. This will allow your viewers to watch a section of the presentation and then return to it later to view the remaining sections without having to navigate through the slides they have already seen. To produce a group of presentations like this, you would: Divide your large PowerPoint into logical chapters (or sub sections). To do this quickly, save the original presentation once for each chapter. Then open each chapter presentation, view it in slide sorter view and delete the slides that are not relevant to that chapter. For this example, let’s say there are four chapter PowerPoint files. Create a single slide table of contents (TOC) presentation. The single slide PowerPoint file must have the same slide dimensions as the chapter PowerPoint files. Place all of the PowerPoint files (the four chapters and the TOC) into a single folder on your computer. Create hyperlinks from the TOC to each of the chapter presentations. A good tip here is to include the number of slides per part and viewing time beside each of the chapter headings. Import the single TOC slide into each of the chapter PowerPoint files as the last slide in each presentation. This will avoid your viewers from having to navigate back to the TOC at the end of each chapter. Add all five PowerPoint files to the Impatica for PowerPoint software. Choose your settings for all of the source presentation files. Note: If you would like Impatica’s playback controls to appear throughout the presentation, simply select "include playback controls" for the TOC presentation. Once the conversion has completed, you can launch the presentation by double-clicking the TOC’s HTML file. When you click the hyperlink for chapter one, it will display within the HTML file for the TOC. The same is true for all of the other parts. Upload all of the -imp.jar files, the TOC HTML file and one player ImPlayer333.jar file to a single folder on your server and provide your viewers with a link to the HTML file. PowerPoint Text Alignment In order to ensure a faithful impaticized rendering of your PowerPoint content, you should align or space out your text using a tab stop instead of the space bar. For example, often PowerPoint designers will want to create a white space gap within a paragraph to make space for a graphic and will use the space bar to create this white space. This method of creating white space is less precise than using tabs and therefore the image may appear on top of the text in the impaticized version. When tab stops are used instead of spaces, Impatica for PowerPoint interprets and converts the file faithfully. Replace Missing Fonts in PowerPoint During the conversion process, Impatica for PowerPoint uses the font groups that are installed on the converting computer to complete the process. If you notice that your fonts or bullets are not appearing as you thought they would then this may be because that specific font is not installed on the converting computer or is not a TrueType (TT) font. To verify that all of the required fonts are TrueType and installed: Open your PowerPoint file on the converting computer. Under the Format menu, select Replace Fonts. Within the Replace Fonts dialog box, there are two drop-down menus: "Replace:" and "With:" The "Replace:" drop-down list will list all of the fonts that are used in the open PowerPoint file. If any of the fonts in the list has a question mark (?) to the left of the font name, then that font is not installed on that computer. You should replace these fonts. To replace the missing fonts with installed fonts, select the missing font from the "Replace:" drop-down list. Select a new TrueType (TT) font from the "With:" drop-down list that is similar to the missing or non-TrueType font. This change will replace the original font with the new font you selected throughout the presentation.