My trials and Tribulations in PPT

Well, my powerpoint is now complete, but it was a crazy adventure to get there. When you have a vision in your head, you have to stick to it and find a way to overcome the learning curve. I really wanted a Jeopardy game that linked back to the question page after each question. So, I had to first create my "choose a question" page and link the 12 question slides to that one. That was work, but it wasn't a problem. At first I just had ugly boxes representing the question links and I later replaced them with cute thematic clipart.

Here's where the trouble came. I then wanted the game to be able to return to the "choose question" slide after the completion of each question. No easy task. I had such a hard time with this because I may have messed up the creation of my slide set at the beginning. As an amendment, I moved my intro slide to the second, and figured I would manually start the slide show there.

Inserting the music was interesting. I downloaded the Jeopardy song in iTunes which made it a m4P (protected) file. I worked around it by burning this song to a CD and ripping it into windows media player. It felt like cheating, but it worked. I had to clip the annoying intro off, and I had no trouble inserting it into PPT.

Animation was a huge learning curve for me. I know how to animate good old text to show up one line at a time, but I didn't at all know how to animate a picture or ORDER the animations. I really, really struggled with this part. I found tutorial instructions really wishy-washy on this particular instruction. I figured it out just by trial and error, which is sometimes the best way for me to learn computers.

Inserting the sound wasn't a problem, but after I did it all, I realized I should have ensured that the volume on the recording was higher. Oh well, I won't make that mistake next time.

Honestly, I've always wanted to learn how to better use PPT and presentation software. I told myself that I would teach myself one day. This course really pushed me to play with all of the interesting functions in PPT. The funny thing is....I still have more to learn. . .The functions are endless. . .Now, I see myself changing my existing powerpoints with just some text and pictures and animating them a little. They need some spunk. . .