Neel Nirjon

Many years back, Government agencies and private organizations used photos and image Slide shows to show their new plans and accomplishments to press and others. In this old method which used a slide projector, once the slide is created you cannot make any changes or modifications to the slide content. Without the Slide projector these slides were useless. But with the invent of computers this practice has become obsolete. With Presentation software and applications such as Microsoft Power point, the slide projection method is no more in use.

There are many Presentation applications. The more popular of them are Action, Harvard Graphics, Freelance Graphics, Power Point. It is undeniable that Microsoft's PowerPoint is the most popular among them all. The term 'Slide Show' is used in these presentation software. Every screen shot that is displayed on the screen is called a Slide. After creating many such slides you can store it as a single file. This file is called the presentation file. In PowerPoint .ppt is the extension of a presentation file. You can also call a presentation file as a slide show.

Power point has a 'Auto Content Wizard' feature. If you use this wizard and select the appropriate options (eg. Projects, Personal, Sales/Marketing) the wizard will show many slide shows under these headings. If you choose any of them and answer the questions that the wizard asks then the slide show is ready within minutes.

PowerPoint gives many themes and templates. Each template has a different background and fonts. You can select your preferred theme and start creating your presentation slide show. In each slide type the appropriate content.

PowerPoint has a 'Blank Presentation' option. If you choose this you will get slides with White background. Most experienced people use this option. In this you create slides according to your design and content. If required later you can apply a theme to this slide show. When you apply a theme to a blank presentation, all the content will be automatically changed to the selected theme.

Anybody can create a presentation easily. If you have family photos, scan it and save it in your computer as images. Or transfer from your digital camera to your computer. You can create a presentation using these photos and show it to your guests and friends.

In a single slide you can many objects. For example in a slide you have inserted a photo and below the photo you have added some text to explain about the photo then you have two objects in your slide. One is the image and the other is the text. You can make these objects in a slide appear in the screen at different intervals and different styles. This is called Animation. Between two slides, if the first slide is removed and the second slide is shown, you can remove and insert slides using different styles. For example the first slide enters from the left of your screen and moves to the right and disappears and after that the second slide emerges from a single dot in the center and zooms up to occupy the entire screen. This is called 'Transition' between slides. In your slide show presentation you can create Animation and transition techniques to make your presentation interesting and rich.

For home user as well as for Office user, here is a basic PowerPoint tutorial

• First determine the objective of the presentation. For example are you introducing a new product of your company? or you presenting a project proposal? First determine this objective. Your whole presentation should follow this objective.
  
• Also determine your target viewers. For example your audience is going to be 'Engineers' and your slide show is about marketing fo your product, your presentation will be boring to your audience.
  
• Next, make a list of what images, charts, audio or video that you already have and want to include in your presentation. Then copy all these files in a single folder in your computer.
  
• Now plan your story line. What you want to say first, and what should follow, what should be your conclusion. Your slides also should follow this story line. If you say something then move to something else then again move back to the previous slides then the audience will be irritated.
  
• Then choose the right template. Do some trial and error and see many templates to decide on the final one.
  
• Do not use the same style to show a big paragraph. Use different styles and better still break it and split it into more slides.
  
• Do not overuse animations. If you do, then the audience will be distracted and their concentration will move to animation rather than your content. In all slides do not use more that two animations.
  
• In the same presentation do not use different transition styles. Use the same transition style throughout your presentation. Otherwise the audience will be distracted.
  
• Do not insert audio into every slide of your presentation. You can include audio in two most important slides of your presentation. Otherwise use a soothing background music all through your presentation.
  
• Do not use all capital letters and do not use many styles or fonts in the same slide. Try to minimise the number of fonts that you use. It is better that you use the same font throughout the slide show. Otherwise it will be very difficult to read.
  
• Now run the show and see if all the slides come out well. If all of them are readable. Go back and modify those slides that are not OK.
  
• If you need to change the order of slides then you can use the 'Slide sorter' to change the order of each slide.
  
• Finally if you are satisfied with the look of the presentation slide show then practice your presentation skills by speaking out together with the slide show atleast two or three times before the actual presentation.
  
  Good luck

MP3 format has revolutionized the audio industry. MP3 was able to produce
the same quality of audio as in the audio CDs. However the size of MP3 files were just one tenth of the actual audio file size. That is the reason why MP3 is very popular and many download MP3 songs from the internet. With MP3, the size of the audio can be reduced to one tenth of the original size without compromising the quality. Many wondered, If only video can be compressed without compromising the quality, how wonderful it would be. DivX is the answer for video lovers.

Why should video be compressed?

AVI is the most popular video format. A 3 hours movie with the clarity of 640x480 size, if saved in AVI format will occupy 20GB to 30GB. The reason is that AVI is a non compressed video format.

If just one movie requires 30GB then imagine how many video files you can store in your hard disk. That is why video needs to be compressed. Motion Picture Group released MPEG1 format which is a compressed video format. MPEG1 even after compression gave the same quality as the VCR format.

Motion Picture Expert Group then released the MPEG2 format which was even more advanced. With MPEG2, the same 3 hours movie can be compressed to 1.8GB. The latest release from Motion Picture Expert Group is the MPEG4 format. Using MPEG4 the same 3 hours movie can be compressed to a mere 650MB. Which makes it possible to store the movie in a single CD.

What is DivX?

DivX is also a video compression format. DivX compresses the video using MPEG4 format and compresses the audio using MP3 format. Therefore both audio and video is compressed in the 10:1 ratio. Therefore a file which is initially stored in a DVD can be now stored in a single VCD.

How to play DivX files?

You need to have a DivX player software to play a DivX format file. You can download this free DivX player from www.divx.com . To play DivX files you need a computer with atleast Pentium II 300 MHz, 128 MB RAM and 4MB video.

Where to download DivX files?

DivX movies are available at many websites. Most of them are illegal ones. Therefore do not just download anything that is available and get into legal issues. You will not have any problems if you download those files that are declared as free or 'No copy rights'.

If you have video files in VCDs then you can convert them to DivX format using the software 'Virtual Dub'.

You can convert your DVDs to DivX format using software such as Smartripper, Virtual Dub, XvidBit Calculator and Xvid Codec.

What software you need?

• To convert AVI to DivX, MPEG to DivX, VCD to DivX or DVD to DivX you can use the following software.
  
• Virtual Dub. You can download Virtual Dub at www.virtualdub.org and use Virtual Dub to convert video from one format to another format.
  
• DivX Codec. You can download Divx Codec from www.divx.com
  
• To convert audio to MP3 format you need MP3 encoder. Win LAME or Lame MP3 encoder software are used to convert to MP3 audio files. You can download Lame MP3 encoder from http://miti.ok.free.fr
  
• You can calculate Bitrate using xvidBit Calculator, Dvt001. You can download Dvt001 software from www.musclesoft.de
  

If you get the error: "Error Number: OX80070725 / Description: Incompatible version of the RPC setup. Setup will terminate" while trying to install a game into my windows PC then the reason for this is that OLEAut 32.dll, OLDPRO32.DLL, ASYCFILT.DLL or such files are corrupt or incompatible.

To solve this problem, goto the Windows site at

http://download.microsoft.com/download/msninvestor/patch/1.0/win98/en-us/mcrepair.exe and download the .EXE file and install. While installing, you maybe prompted whether you want to replace the old files with the new files confirm 'Yes'. After that install the game and enjoy.

If you want to read more about this error from Microsoft, you can do so at this page:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;321915

Is it safe to download skin and themes for my computer?

What is a skin? What is a Theme? Skin is s most often used word by computer users. You may wonder what can be the relation between a computer and skin? What is the meaning of Skin. Now what is the literal meaning of skin. Skin is used to cover our body. Isn't it? Similarly, the term skin in computer is used to refer to the interface or look and feel of any program or application. There are many skins available in the internet that can be downloaded freely.

For instance, some popular media players such as WinAmp, Music Match, Real One or Windows media player have many skins provided by third parties. There are many ways you can download these skins and use it in your computer. In any windows software, from the menu choose 'Options' or 'Preferences'. There you may find the option to 'Change Skin' or 'Change theme'. Not all software will have this feature. If the software has this feature to change skin or theme then you can download your favorite skin or theme and apply it on your software.

For example, if you use Netscape version 6 or higher then select 'View' and click on 'Apply theme' and 'Get New themes'. This will bring you to the 'Theme park'. Here you will see many different skins and themes that can be downloaded. Once downloaded you can apply it to your Netscape software and the whole look and feel will change to the new theme.

But beware of one thing. When you download these free skins and themes from internet, the skin developer may embed the 'spyware or adware' in these skins to spy on your activities or to steal your personal particulars. For example a company that provides skins namely hot bar, openly states in its website that if you download skins from their website they will monitor the which websites you visit, which search engines you use and other details. Just for the sake of a skin, are you willing to share your personal details. Not only that, they will also show advertisements in your computer. Another such company is Neo Planet. In their website they declare that those who download and use their skins, their emails and browsing habits will be collected and shared with their partner companies. These partner companies who get your personal data will then send you SPAM emails selling and advertising their products.

In this world nothing comes free. How can someone give you skins and themes free after spending so much of their time on programming and developing the skin. Who will pay for their programming effort. Their only way to get money is to gather your personal details and sell it to companies.

Therefore, be very cautious and careful while downloading these skins to your computer.

Some times we create and use big files in Excel. It becomes difficult to search for the cell we want to work on. So we cannot use Go To features. Not only this we also get confused for go to new cell, print the new cell, create the print settings and make the builders.

Can we create and go to most used cells list. Yes we can. This depends on how do you see the Excel work sheet. The custom view feature gives the solution for this. First you decide the workbook view or printing view then you can save that. This makes some changes but this is to create your favorite views and settings. If you create the print setting for particular view that also gets saved in view setting. We can save and retrieve as many cells we want in a worksheet and hide others. This saves time and energy. Ways to creating the view setting.

1. First open your large workbook.
2. Then go to the place you are using.
3. Now make the changes you want. For example create print area, hide rows, filters, subtotals. Then create the view settings.
4. Go to view menu and select the custom view there. Now open the custom view window.
5. Press the Add button to create new view. The opened window gives the feature of decide the name of the new view. Select the view name that is used to identify easily.

You can also decide the new view print settings. After doing that give the name for view then click ok. This is a method for creating your favorite views and save these views. Now you return to the workbook and drop it there. Then you can retrieve the saved view. For that go to view menu then select custom views there. Select the wanted view in select the name of the view at the window and click show. Now you got a workbook with selected cells and settings. If you want delete the view setting go to custom views then press the delete button.