This document is intended as a general guide to creating simple Powerpoint presentations and uploading these presentations to Oncourse for student study and review.

Creating a Powerpoint presentation.

1. Find the images you wish to put in the presentation. These can be images on DIDO, from the web, or ones that you have digitized yourself.
2. If you are on a Mac, then you can drag images from Netscape or IE directly to a Powerpoint slide. If you are on a PC your must save the images to a folder on your hard drive before you can insert them into Powerpoint. Save the images from DIDO or the web by right-clicking on the image and choosing Save Picture As… (IE) or Save Image As…(Netscape). NOTE: You may have to rename the image. Make sure you name it something your will recognize and save it as a .jpg.
3. Open Powerpoint. Click on Blank Presentation. Click on the blank white slide.
4. If you are on a Mac, click and drag an image from your browser to the first slide. If you are on a PC, go to the Insert menu at the top. Choose Picture > From File. Find the folder where you have saved your images and choose one of the images. Click Insert.
5. The picture will now be in the center of the slide. It can be moved by placing your cursor over the image, clicking and dragging. It can be resized by holding your cursor over one of the little circles/boxes at the corners of the image, clicking and dragging.** REMEMBER: Once the image has reached its maximum dimensions, resizing it any larger will result in significant loss of quality.
6. If you wish to add text or a caption to the image, go to the Insert menu at the top. Choose Text Box > Horizontal, or just Text Box on a Mac. Your cursor has changed to a small cross. Move your cursor to the position you want to insert the text and click. A cursor in a box will appear. Type the text you want. You can move the text box in the same way as the image. Should you wish to change the size of color of the text, highlight the text and use the text toolbar at the top to make changes. If the Formatting toolbar is not visible, go to the View menu > Toolbars> Formatting.
7. To make another slide for another image go to the Insert menu at the top. Choose New Slide. Go to the window at the right and again click on the blank white slide. Repeat steps 4 and 5.
8. When you are finished with your presentation, go to the File menu. Choose Save As… Name your file and save it to your Desktop.

** Alternately, if you are on a PC and have a folder of images that you wish to insert, one image to a slide, then go to Insert > Picture > New Photo Album. Click on Insert Picture from File/Disk. Find the folder of images, select all of them (by drawing a box around them or by holding down the Shift key while using the arrows) and click Insert then Create. You will now have a series of slides starting with a "title page" and the images maximized to fit the slides. If you are working with images smaller than the dimensions of the slides, you may have to resize your images smaller to optimize their appearance.

To automatically insert a folder full of images with a text box for all of the slides go to Insert > Picture > New Photo Album. Click on Insert Picture from File/Disk. Find the folder of images and select all of them (by drawing a box around them or by holding down the Shift key while using the arrows.) Click on Insert. In the Photo Album dialog box, at the bottom under Album Layout, choose 1 Picture with Title from the Picture Layout pull-down menu. Then click create. Each slide will now have a text box at the top of the slide. You will need to go through slide by slide and insert the text you want for each image.

BE AWARE that creating a Photo Album turns off three of the tools you may want to use to modify your picture. Crop is the most important of these. If you want to select out a part of an image, as opposed to just changing the size of the image on the screen, you must do it before you load all your images (using Photoshop or similar image software) or delete the automatic version, create a New Slide and insert the picture manually.

Uploading a Powerpoint presentation to Oncourse

1. Go to the Oncourse website and log in. Choose the course you have prepared your presentation for and go to the Schedule tab.
2. Click on Create/Edit Schedule.
3. Click on New Item.
4. Give your Item a Category and a Title. In the Content box enter a short description of the presentation.
5. Click on Add Attachment.
6. Click on Upload a File.
7. Click on the Browse button next to the File to Upload box. Find your presentation and select it.
8. Click Upload Now. When the file has been uploaded, you will get a message saying the upload has been successful.
9. Check to make sure that the attachment show up by clicking the Schedule tab. Your presentation should now be listed. Click on the title. You will now see a page that has the title and description you gave and the attachment listed. If you click on the attachment you have the option of saving the presentation or opening it in the web browser.

That's it!

Other Points of Interest

• There is a limit of 20 MB for your attachment/presentation. Make sure you use only .jpg or .gif images. These are highly compressed images designed for web use. Anything you can see on a web page is one of these images. Large jpgs from DIDO (all images on DIDO are .jpgs) are about 200-500 KB each, so about 40 images can be placed in a presentation. If your presentation is too large to upload to Oncourse you will get an upload failure message. We suggest you split up large presentations and upload them to Oncourse separately.

• When using the DIDO search engine in Internet Explorer, if you right click on the screen-res image to save it, IE will only let you save the image as a bitmap. This seems to be a glitch with the interaction between the DIDO search engine software and IE that can easily be gotten around. If you don not have the software or the know-how to convert the bitmap to a jpg, we suggest you use our alternate method of saving images. See below.

• If you already know the DIDO number for an image, or the image was recently scanned and the new digital version has not yet had words attached to it for the search engine to search, you can look it up by going to the screen-res of ANY DIDO image and substituting the DIDO number at the end of the URL field in your browser. We recommend that you bookmark any full size DIDO image as a shortcut around our current, limited search engine. Also, if you are using IE to search DIDO images, we recommend you jot down the DIDO number (the seven-digit number at the end of the URL), go to your bookmarked image and insert the new DIDO number. This will allow you to save the image as a .jpg.

Questions? Contact Julia Simic or Eileen Fry at the Slide Library for more information.

JCS 8/21/03