Mix Portrait and Landscape slides in a presentation

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If you'll be giving your presentation as a screen show, there's no reason to mix portrait and landscape slides in a presentation.

Consider

You import a long, tall picture onto your landscape slideshow and size it to fill the slide top to bottom as you see on the left.

Or

You import a long, tall picture onto your portrait slide and size it to fill the slide top to bottom as on the right.

Either way, when you start your screen show, the same thing happens: PowerPoint fills the screen with the slide without changing its proportions.

If the slide is wider than it is tall, PowerPoint fills the width of the screen as you see on the left. If the slide is taller than wide, PowerPoint fits it to the height of the screen, as shown on the right.

Your picture comes out the same size either way: the height of the monitor. No more. No less.

If you really, really want to force the issue, you can, but you have to think ... and link ... slightly outside the PowerPoint box. The general idea is to create separate landscape and portrait presentations then link the two together.

Visit the Multiple Masters section of Echo's Voice, PowerPoint MVP Echo Swinford's site, where you'll how-tos for this and other neat Master-ful tricks.

For more tips on outside the box linking thinking, visit PowerPoint MVP Taj Simmon's Linking Tutorial at Awesome PowerPoint Backgrounds

MS also has online help for linking Landscape and Portrait presentations

Key points to remember

• Set the presentation to run in KIOSK mode
• Use action settings to control the action. Draw/import navigation icons and assign suitable hyperlink actions to them to let the viewer control the show.
• If a particular navigation icon will appear on every slide in the presentation, put it on the Slide Master. That way it'll automatically appear on every slide.

Contents © 1995-2008 Stephen Rindsberg, Rindsberg Photography, Inc. and members of the MS PowerPoint MVP team. You may link to this page but any form of unauthorized reproduction of this page's contents is expressly forbidden.

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