Presenting with Adobe Acrobat

Increase your presentation's effectiveness by converting PowerPoint slides to Acrobat PDF files and using Acrobat to present them

If you use Microsoft PowerPoint® to create your presentation visuals, you should be using Adobe Acrobat® to deliver them and prepare audience handouts.

Acrobat expands your presentation options and can help you avoid several frustrating problems.

Advantages

Here's six reasons why you should make Acrobat your presentation partner..

1. Easy navigation

With Acrobat, you can proceed forward or backwards through your presentation using space bar, mouse buttons, arrow keys, or your computer's numeric keypad. 

2. Flexibility

With Acrobat, you can insert pages created with other software programs between your PowerPoint visuals. I, for example, often include pages created with Microsoft Publisher, Adobe InDesign, and Mindjet Mind Manager XP-5 Pro. 

You can introduce a concept with a PowerPoint visual, then show an example created with a different software program.

3. No more font problems

With Acrobat, there's no chance that damaged or missing fonts can spoil your presentation, especially if you're not using your own computer. Fonts are embedded, eliminating potential problem.

When creating your original PowerPoint visuals, you may have used fonts that are not installed on your host's computer, which can lead to some pretty ugly visuals!

4. Zoom in, zoom out

During your presentation, Acrobat makes it easy to zoom in on important details, (Ctrl plus +). Or, zoom out, (Ctrl plus -), to show a full-sized page.

5. Security

Just about every computer already has the free Acrobat Reader software installed, (www.adobe.com). Simply copy your Acrobat presentation file onto a cd-rom, or FTP your presentation file to your web site. 

If needed, this back-up can be quickly loaded on another computer in case your laptop disappears at the airport.

6. Audience handouts

You can easily create e-mail friendly audience hand-outs that contain thumbnails of three visuals per page, plus lines for taking notes next to each visual.

These handouts can be personalized with page numbers, your name, contact, and copyright information on each page.

Preparing and presenting

Creating and delivering presentations with Adobe Acrobat involves two-steps:

1. Create your presentation visuals with Microsoft PowerPoint, as you normally would.
2. Use Adobe Acrobat Distiller to print your presentation as an Acrobat PDF-or, Portable Document Format-file.
3. To present from Acrobat, simply select Window>Full Screen View, (or press F11). This hides Acrobat's menus and resizes each page to fill the screen. You can also select Full Screen View by pressing the Ctrl+L keyboard shortcut.
   

Workflow

Start by preparing the framework of your presentation with Microsoft PowerPoint. Then, create a pdf by selecting "Acrobat pdf" as your printer.

Next, create audience handouts. Select File>Print. In the Printer Dialog Box, select "Handouts" and "3-up" to create pages with lines to take notes.

Inserting files in visuals or handouts

To insert a pdf file created with another software program between two of your PowerPoint slides:

1. Open the Acrobat pdf file of your presentation visuals.
2. Select Acrobat's View>Navigation Tabs>Pages. This reveals thumbnails of each of all your presentation visuals.
3. Right-click a desired thumbnail and Select Insert Pages...
4. When the Select File to Insert dialog box appears, browse, and select a desired PDF file by double-clicking it.
5. In the Insert File dialog box that appears, select location: "before" or "after." This often creates sharper images than if you convert the pages to jpeg files and paste them in to your PowerPoint files.

For more information