3 Don'ts with PowerPoint

PowerPoint is a fine authoring tool for you to build a dynamic presentation. But there are some actions you'd better avoid in your PowerPoint presentation unless you are clearly aware of what you're doing and why.

Think these three don'ts when you work with PowerPoint:

Don't save PowerPoint to an earlier version

PPT serves as a common format for Windows PowerPoint 97/2000/2002/2003 and Mac PowerPoint 98/2001/2004. An earlier PowerPoint version simply ignore stuff that it doesn't identify in PPT files saved by later versions. Just save your PowerPoint file the way it is if you want to share it with users of the same version.

Things are somewhat different if you use PowerPoint 2007, where you may want to save back to PowerPoint 97-2003 format for using on a computer installed with 97-2003 version. But maybe there are still compability problems. To prevent version trouble, the safest way is to save your PowerPoint to video or DVD with PowerPoint to DVD Burner

The only other backward-saving options are PowerPoint 95, PowerPoint 4 (in older versions of PowerPoint) and "PowerPoint 97-XXX & 95 Presentation" which saves both current and PowerPoint 95 versions of a presentation in the same file. However, the result is not satisfying - you will get bloated oversize PowerPoint files.

Unless a must to share files with people who still use PowerPoint 95, it is not necessary to save your PowerPoint presentation as anything but the normal PPT file type. And for those people, you may find it simpler to give them a DVD or video copy of your PowerPoint presentation.

Don't copy and paste pictures or any other stuff from the Internet into PowerPoint

Instead, right-click the picture, choose Save Picture As and save it to your hard drive. Then use Insert | Illustrations | Picture in PowerPoint 2007 or Insert | Picture | From File in PowerPoint 2003 to bring the picture in to your presentation.

If you copy and paste a picture or else thing direct from Internet, you will run the risk of creating a hard-to-remove link to the Internet from your presentation. This may cause Windows to try to connect to the Internet every time anyone opens the presentation. A real annoyance if ever there was one. And one that can be darned hard to track down and get rid of.

Don't link images to your PowerPoint

Similar to Don't 2, if you insert images by its link, you may notice an option to Link to the file. Unless you have a good reason for doing it, don't. PowerPoint's image links break very easily. It's generally safer and more effective to embed the files (in other words, insert them normally, not linked) into a PowerPoint presentation.