• PC World
• »Software
• »Office

In a previous life, I worked for a boss whose main form of communication was PowerPoint presentations. This guy was so obsessive, he e-mailed slides detailing his lunch plans. To make matters worse, several of us worked from our homes on some days, where we didn't have PowerPoint installed. And since our boss was always making last-minute changes to his presentations, we were frequently out of luck.

If you need to share PowerPoint slides with remote sales reps, telecommuters, or clients in other locations, a great way to get your message out is to publish your presentation on the Web. PowerPoint 2002 makes it a snap to save your presentation in HTML format, then publish it to your company intranet or to a Web site. Once you do, your audience can view your presentation in a browser, from anywhere. Publishing on the Web offers several advantages:

• Your audience won't need PowerPoint or a PowerPoint viewer to view your presentation.
  
  
• You can easily update your presentation and offer your audience only the latest version.
  
  
• Your audience won't lose disk space to multiple copies of the same presentation if you change it.
  
  
• Any Web links you include in your presentation work seamlessly in the HTML version, and viewers are already using their browser.
  
  

Best of all, PowerPoint makes it easy. With just a few steps, you can save your presentation as a Web page. Then all you have to do is upload it to the Web (or your intranet), where your audience can view it in Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.

No Coding Necessary

To see what your presentation will look like before you convert it, open it in PowerPoint and choose File, Web Page Preview. PowerPoint fires up your browser and shows you the presentation. If you like what you see, the next step is to save it in HTML format.

The key to saving your presentation in HTML format is, appropriately enough, the Save as Web Page command on the File menu. By default, the Save as Web Page command does two things: It saves your entire presentation as one HTML file, and it creates a folder with all of the accompanying graphics and animations. When you later upload these files to the Web, you'll need to upload both the HTML file and its accompanying folder in order for all the links to work correctly.

To begin, open your presentation and choose File, Save as Web Page. When PowerPoint presents the Save as Web Page dialog box, use the "Save in" drop-down list to choose where you want to put your files. Next, select a title for your page. This is the title that will appear in the top-left corner of the browser window. If you're not happy with the text that PowerPoint suggests, click Change Title, type a new title in the Set Page Title dialog box, and click OK. Next, name your file in the "File name" text box.

Customize Your Presentation

At this point you can click Save to save your presentation as a Web page. However, if you want to be more selective, click the Publish button. The Publish as Web Page dialog box offers several options. You can choose whether to publish your entire presentation or just certain slides, as well as whether to display speaker notes. In the "Browser support" section of the dialog box, you can choose which browser you'd like PowerPoint to optimize your page for. If your audience will be using older versions of IE or Netscape, choose the middle option; if you're sure your audience will use the latest browser versions, choose the top option. If you're unsure, choose "All browsers listed above." When I tested the top option in an older version of Netscape, I got about a thousand JavaScript errors, so it's probably safest to choose one of the bottom two options unless you're certain your audience is up on the latest browser versions.

You can further customize your presentation within the "Publish as Web Page" dialog box by clicking the Web Options button. The Web Options dialog box lets you tell PowerPoint how to treat slide navigation, animation, graphics, files and file names, pictures, and fonts. For example, you could include slide animations you've built into your presentation, or change your target monitor from the default 800-by-600 screen size. You can also further pinpoint your target browsers. Once you're happy with your settings, click Publish. PowerPoint will save your page with the .htm file extension. Accompanying it in the location you specified will be a folder with your presentation's name, followed by "_files." So if your presentation is called "lunch.htm," your accompanying folder will be called "lunch_files."

All that remains is to publish your presentation online. Simply upload it as you would any other Web page, making sure your .htm file and its accompanying folder are in the same directory. When you view your presentation on the Web, you'll see that it looks much like it does in PowerPoint. On the left side of the browser window, you'll find the outline for your presentation. Your audience can expand or collapse the outline by clicking the icons at the bottom of the screen. Clicking any of the outline items opens that slide. Below the right pane there's a slide navigation bar that your viewers can click to view the presentation. Happy publishing!