Saving a PowerPoint for Mac Presentation as a QuickTime Movie

By Bob LeVitus from Office 2008 for Mac For Dummies

Sometimes, you can’t be there to present a PowerPoint 2008 for Mac slide show, but you want to share it, anyway. The answer is to export the presentation as a QuickTime movie.

Choose File→Save as Movie.

The Save As sheet appears.

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Click the Movie Options button near the bottom of the Save As sheet.

The Movie Options dialog appears.

In the Movie Settings tab, choose an optimization from the pop-up menu.

Your options are as follows: Size, Smooth Playback, Quality, and Automatic (Normal). You can’t go wrong sticking with Automatic.

Change the movie size, if you wish.

If you make it much smaller than the default (640 x 480), it may not be legible.

In the Slide Transitions pop-up menu, choose either Follow Slide Show Settings to use the transitions you applied or None to eliminate all transitions.

If you didn’t specify a number of seconds until the slide advances automatically in the Transition Options dialog, you might want to do so now. If you don’t, PowerPoint will arbitrarily decide how long each slide should appear, which is usually not long enough.

If you want to add music or narration to your movie, choose Select Soundtrack from the Background Soundtrack pop-up menu and then choose an audio file to serve as your movie’s soundtrack.

Click the Loop Movie check box if you want the movie to play over and over again.

Click the Show Movie Player Controls check box if you want the recipient to be able to start, stop, and pause the movie. Click the Credits tab and type in credits for this presentation, if you wish.

The Credits tab is odd. You’d expect it to add credits on-screen at the end of your movie, but it doesn’t. All it does is place the information you type in QuickTime Player’s Movie Inspector window, which appears only if the recipient chooses Window→Show Movie Inspector in QuickTime Player.

Click the OK button to dismiss the Movie Options dialog.

Animation Effects do not appear in your QuickTime movie, nor do sounds associated with animation effects. If you can’t stand the thought of not having Animation Effects and sounds in your movie, check out Snapz Pro X from Ambrosia Software, which can record your slide show as you present it on-screen, with all its Animation Effects and sounds, and then save the recording as a QuickTime movie.

An alternative way to share a presentation is this: If you know for sure that the recipients have a copy of PowerPoint and know how to use it, you could send them the actual PowerPoint file. But that assumes that they have the same version of PowerPoint as yours, have the same fonts installed, and won’t mess up your slide show before they get a chance to view it. Making your presentation a QuickTime movie secures its integrity.