If you have a PowerPoint presentation running in show mode, you can clear or hide the mouse pointer, and the navigational icons in the lower left-hand corner of the presentation screen by pressing the ‘a’ key once.

If you want to permanently prevent the navigational icons from appearing in your PowerPoint presentation during show mode, open the Options menu (either ‘Tools’, ‘Options’ in PowerPoint 2003, or the ‘Office button’ then ‘PowerPoint Options’ in PowerPoint 2007), and under ‘Advanced Settings’, deselect ‘Show menu on right-mouse click’, and ‘Show popup toolbar’.

You might also want to stop that annoying black slide from appearing at the end of your presentation – deselect ‘End with black slide’ from the same menu. Your presentation will then finish with the final slide, without going to a black slide if you keep clicking.

The common advice when creating a PowerPoint presentation at a custom resolution is to enter the aspect ratio in the page setup box – for instance, 16in x 9in to create a 16:9 presentation, or 30in x 15in to create a 30:15 ratio presentation.

But how does the ratio relate to the resolution? You can create a 16:9 PowerPoint presentation, but output that presentation at 1920×1080 or 1280×720 (both 16:9 ratio resolutions).

Well PowerPoint will automatically scale a presentation’s slides to match the output resolution of the display – this includes letterboxing or pillarboxing to convert the aspect ratio to the output resolution (e.g. you can output a 16:9 PowerPoint presentation at a resolution of 1024×768 (4:3 ratio) and the presentation will appear letterboxed – with black bars top and bottom).

What this means is that you will need to ensure your source images and content is suitable for being scaled to the resolution that you wish to output at – for instance, if you want to insert a photograph that will consume half of the width of a slide, and you want to output your slides at 1920×1080 resolution, then you will need to ensure your photograph is at least 540 pixels in width, or else quality will be compromised.

Interestingly, though, you can use page sizes to give yourself some more screen real-estate when designing slides – for instance, if you create a presentation that is 16 in by 9 in, and insert a photograph, the photo might take up the entire slide, and you will need to size it down to fit anything else on the slide – whereas if you create a presentation with dimensions of 160 in by 90 in, and insert the same photo, it’s likely to consume only a small percentage of the slide – you can then size it up, or use the space to add other elements to the slide.

Regardless of the page size, remember that so long as your source image is at least the same resolution as your output screen resolution, the image will show up without any loss in quality.

[caption id="attachment_43" align="alignright" width="150" caption="PowerPoint Slide 32x20"][/caption]

Once upon a time we were all amazed at the ability to project our computer desktop onto a screen or wall and push out PowerPoint presentations at a scaled-down 800×600 (SVGA) resolution. Today, anyone can afford an HD-capable DLP chip data projector, and it’s becoming more and more common to install 16:9 aspect ratio screens in venues, or to use Plasma screens instead of projectors in smaller venues.

Every week I end up handling the task of reformatting presenter’s presentations to fit onto a 16:9 ratio display without squashing photographs and corporate logos or skewing charts and graphs. It’s a tough problem to tackle when you’re trying to convert a 4:3 presentation into 16:9 ratio – but it’s so easy to create the presentation in 16:9 format to begin with.

Within PowerPoint, you have the option of defining your own page size – here, you can enter a size that maintains a 16:9 aspect ratio, and you’ll end up with pages that fit a plasma or widescreen projection.

While you’re at it, there’s a lot of scope for improving the way you present by using widescreen. I’ll go into it more some other time, but for starters – consider that most objects we wish to insert into PowerPoint presentations are close to square – screen shots, photos, pie charts, etc… – These objects would normally fill the entire screen in a 4:3 format, but with 16:9, you gain space either side of the objects which you can use for annotations, style objects, and branding/navigational elements.

You may also find that a 16:9 aspect ratio will better allow you to display complicated tables, organisational charts, and panoramic photographs, or photo montages.

If you prepare your presentation in 16:9 ratio and then need to present it on a 4:3 display, you can output it letterboxed (black bars above and below the image) or you could re-create it by cropping out your background image and resizing the objects on each slide.