Microsoft Office‘s PowerPoint is a pretty great tool for setting up presentations. It does however have its shortcomings. Take for example that you can’t change the slide orientation per slide. Some data or images will just display better in landscape than they would in portrait mode or vice versa. While PowerPoint limits you to one orientation per presentation, there is a trick you can use to get around this limitation.
Setting Up Your PowerPoint Project
This requires a little bit of organization so the first thing we need to do is create a folder to contain all the items our presentation will contain pictures, sound files etc.
Once you’ve completed this the next step will be to create TWO different PowerPoint presentations. You’ll set one in landscape orientation and one in portrait orientation and save them into the directory you created in the first part.
Now go about creating all the slides you’ll need using the landscape oriented presentation for slides that will display horizontally and the portrait oriented presentation for slides that you want to display vertically.
Linking Your PowerPoint Presentations
Now that you have finished setting up your slides we’ll use the “Action” feature to link them together. When everything is said and done your two different presentations will look like one seamless presentation to your audience.
- Go to the first slide you’ll be using as the opening slide of your presentation, or any slide where you intend the following slide to switch orientations.
- Select an object on this slide either some text, or a graphic.
- Navigate to the “Insert” tab and click the “Action” option in the “Links” section to open the “Action Settings” window.
- In the “Action Settings” select the “Hyperlink to:” option and “Other PowerPoint Presentation” from the drop down under it.
- Locate and select your other presentation from the folder and click OK.
- A numbered list of slides will load. Select the slide from this list that you want to navigate to when clicking the object you chose. Click OK in both windows to and the slide in this presentation will now be linked to the slide you selected in the other presentation.
Repeat these steps in whichever presentation is appropriate, to create a seamless PowerPoint presentation with varying orientations.
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