Doug,
My apologies in advance for the very long post here...its
just that I wanted to be *very clear* in my response, and I
sincerely hope that the following will make sense!
Formatting quiz/question slides in 5.xx has been a problem
for quite some time and it wasn't until the release of Presenter
6.0 where, finally, things have begun to settle down. I will admit,
however, that I've still seen instances where jumping in and out of
the Quiz Manager has messed up the formatting of question slide
text, it's positioning and so on.
However, those of us still operating with 5.1 are forced to
combat formatting issues and although rolando is correct (you can
go into the Breeze 5 Images folder and style the individual radio
buttons, checkboxes, etc), there is a couple of things worth noting
here.
1. You could always create a
second Images folder where your buttons could be styled or
branded a specific way. What I'd recommend first is renaming the
existing Images directory to something like "Images_original" so
you have a way of recalling the original artwork when question
slides are generated...especially if something goes wrong. Once
that's done, create a new folder called Images and then you can
easily copy/paste the 6 .emf files into the newly created Images
folder and then go about the process of coloring them to suit your
needs. This of course assumes that you have Illustrator to begin
with. You may even be able to get away with using Corel Draw...
2. Under no circumstances should you try to
create/edit/modify the .emf files with PowerPoint. Although it is
true that you could edit/create .emf graphics in ppt, the results
are absolutely catastrophic!
With respect to default positioning and font sizes, I'm not
aware of any specific "fixes" beyond upgrading to 6.0. However,
there is
one technique we've been using for some time that does work,
and I've written an article about this on my forum at
http://robrode.com/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1179168045.
Although not entirely clean, I have experiemented with the
following (which has reduced some of the amount of re-formatting,
but it does mean that I've had to recheck every question slide)
By default, you get one set of slide/title masters with every
ppt deck. Therein lies the problem. Depending on how you've created
the look and feel of your presentation, the question slides have
the same formatting applied as governed by the slide master of your
ppt deck.
STEP 1. Create a new set of slide masters. In ppt, go to
View from the main menu. Trace down to Master and select Slide
Master. Usually, you'll see a set of slide thumbnails on the left
side. Within the thumbnail area, if you right-click, you should get
a contextual menu with an option to add a "New Slide Master".
Having another set of slide masters is going to pave the way to
fixing some of the formatting problems with question slides.
STEP 2 Copy any objects, treatments, styling from the
original slide master into the newly created slide master. This
will ensure design consistency between the masters.
STEP 3. Make whatever adjustments necessary so that you have
the kind of formatting you'd like to see on your question slides.
STEP 4. ...and this one's really important...what we need to
do now is identify the new slide master. Reason: since the slide
masters look alike, it might be hard to tell them apart, and the
bigger picture here is that we need to assign the new master to the
question slides ONLY. So...select the new slide master (it should
have a bold-looking highlight around the thumbnail), and then right
click it! From the menu that appears, select "Rename Master". Give
it a new name ("Question Master" might be a good one!), then click
the Rename button and you're done.
STEP 5. Click on View in the main menu, and select Normal.
Then click on Format in the main menu and select Slide Design,
which will bring up another set of thumbnail images...only this
time, you should see 2 versions of your slide masters! If you hover
your mouse over each of the thumbnails, a "tooltip" will appear
with the title of the thumbnail that you just created.
STEP 6. All that's necessary now is to apply the new slide
master to the question slides in your deck. Before you start
clicking away here, let me recommend the following: select the
slide that you want to apply the new master to, and then, move your
mouse over the slide master thumbnail in the Slide Design
viewer....DON'T CLICK YET! When you move your mouse over the
thumbnail first, you should get a drop down arrow that appears over
the thumbnail. Click the downward-facing arrow and select "Apply to
Selected Slide". That's it!
Visually speaking, not much may have changed. The pay-off,
however, is when you have to go back into Quiz Manager and edit
stuff. Again, this isn't exactly pretty, and it certainly DOES NOT
remedy ALL problems, but it can help and I use this technique all
the time now. My question masters have their text elements &
positioning adjusted in an attempt to make editing in the Quiz
Manager a less painful experience.
Rob
robva65@netscape.net
visit my Breeze Forum at:
www.robrode.com/yabb/
8
Replies
AdChoices