Gobe Productive User's Guide - Laying-Out a Presentation

- Designing graphics
- Building a Word Processing document
- Developing a spreadsheet
- Creating a chart
- Laying-out a presentation
- Touching up a picture
- Being Productive: Tips for Integrating and Getting the Most from Gobe Productive

# Laying-Out a Presentation

In this section, you will learn how to create a simple presentation slide show. The presentation environment is essentially a graphics document that has the capability to make slide shows. When you place items on the workspace, they behave like graphic items.

This section contains the following exercises:

The Presentation Environment | Understanding Layers and Slides | Using the Presentation Palette | Building a Slide Show
Advanced Slide Design | Running the Slide Show | Printing Slides | Conclusion

## Launch Gobe Productive and Begin a New Document

- Run Gobe Productive.
- When the New Document window displays, select Presentation and click OK. This starts a new presentation document.

## The Presentation Environment

The presentation environment operates exactly the same as the graphics environment. The only difference is the addition of the ability to create and manage slide shows. A slide show consists of a number of slides. Each slide contains one or more layers. Without a layer, a slide is blank.

## Understanding Layers and Slides

When professional graphic artists create images, they use layers to build successive pieces of an image into a whole. Layering allows a graphic artist the ability to break up a complex image into modular sections. The Gobe Productive suite uses this same concept for presentations, allowing you to create numerous layers of content for inclusion into a whole slide.

This diagram represents how slides are put together. Using multiple layers you can break up the content of a slide for easy use and re-use.

## Using the Presentation Palette

Before you create any slides, it is a good idea to familiarize yourself with the use of the Presentation Palette. This palette designs the layout and structure of your slide show, as well as adds, moves, and edits layers and slides.

## Building a Slide Show

For this exercise, we will create a simple two slide presentation about a new pet store. The first page contains a graphic and the company logo. The second page contains a spreadsheet containing a break down of start-up costs. To demonstrate the dynamic features of Gobe Productive, the spreadsheet will be created in a different sheet and linked to the presentation.

### Set the Screen Size

Slide shows are meant to be shown on a screen. However, not all screens are the same size. The first step in creating a presentation is to set the size of the screen.

1. From the Document menu, select Document Size, the Document Size dialog box is displayed.
2. Enter the screen resolution you are using for your presentation. The most common monitor resolutions are 640 x 480, 800 x 600, or 1024 x 768.
3. Click OK. The slides for your presentation are adjusted to fit the screen size you indicated.

### The First Slide

By default, the application creates the first slide and a background layer. The first thing to do is design a background. We'll use this background on each slide so it needs to be as generic as possible.

1. In the presentation palette, open the Slide One layer list. To open a slides layer list, click the Open/Hide button beside the slide's name (see figure above).
2. Select Background. When you select a layer the workspace changes to display that layer. Any items you place in the workspace at that point are placed only on the layer selected. In this case, you have selected the Background layer.

The Background layer is intended for building a "master slide". This layer should contain all the underlying figures and images to appear on all slides. You can place anything you want on the Background layer. However, those items will appear on all slides where the background layer is associated.

For the background in this example, we'll create a background color as well as a standard footer for each slide.

3. Select the rectangle tool in the ToolBar.
4. Draw a rectangle that is as large as the entire slide.
5. Fill the rectangle with a nice gradient. From the FormatBar, use the Fill Color tool to select a gradient. Since this is a background it is best to use either a light background with dark letters or a dark background with light letters. Remember, some colors like black and blue and red and violet tend to blend together. Experiment with different colors and gradients until you have a pleasing background.

Next, let's place a footer on each slide.

6. Select the Line tool .
7. At the bottom of the slide, draw a straight line that extends across the entire slide.
8. Click and hold on the frame tool . Select Word Processing from the popup menu.
9. Draw a text frame below the line.
10. Type in the name of the slides or company.
11. Use the text font , text size , and text color tools to modify the font.
12. Next, draw another text frame.
13. Type Page - and then from the Format menu select Insert Page #.

The final version should look something like this:

Once the background is done, you can switch to building the contents for the first page.

1. Click Layer 1 under the first slide. This causes the system to change focus from the background layer to Layer 1.

| NOTE: Notice that when you change focus to another layer the background disappears. When you are working on a layer, all other layers (including the background) are not displayed. To see all the layers for a slide, click on the name of the slide in the presentation palette. Also, any items you place in the workspace are placed on the active layer while all other layers remain unchanged.

15. Draw a text frame on the left side of the page. Use this frame for the company name.
16. Format the font in the frame. You might want to consider making a text style. For more information about making a style, see the Styles topic in the Word Processing section.

Next, let's add a picture to the slide. You will need some kind of high quality image file. A GIF, JPG or other image file format will work.

16. From the File menu, select Open. A standard BeOS Open dialog box is displayed.
17. Use the Open dialog box to locate your image file. When you find it, select the file and click Open.
18. An image processing window opens and displays your image.
19. Select the portion of the image you wish to place on the slide. If you want to use the entire image, select Select All from the Edit menu.
20. From the Edit menu select Copy. This copies the image to the BeOS clipboard.
21. Return to the presentation window. Clicking on the window tab reactivates the window.
22. Check the presentation palette and make sure you are still focused on the correctly layer.
23. From the Edit menu, select Paste. A new image processing frame is placed in the workspace. Position the frame on the page where you want it. If you want to retouch the image, double-click in the frame to activate it. When the frame is active all the image processing features are available.
24. When you are finished positioning the image on the slide, click the slide name in the presentation palette. The presentation window will display all the layers for the slide you selected. You should have something like this.

## Advanced Slide Design

This next slide introduces a rather advanced feature of Gobe Productive. To do this exercise, you must create a new sheet, a new slide and then, link material from the new sheet to the new slide.

### Creating a New Spreadsheet

In this exercise, you must create a spreadsheet for accounting start-up costs at Samantha's Pet Store. Then, using a named selection, place a reference inside the presentation to the data. This technique allows you to work on data in one environment (the spreadsheet environment) and then link results to another environment.

1. From the Window menu, select Show SheetBar.
2. Click the Sheet tool and select New Sheet from the popup menu.
3. A dialog box is displayed asking you what kind of sheet you wish to create. Select Spreadsheet, enter a name for the new sheet and click OK.
4. A new Spreadsheet, sheet is created.
5. Enter some financial data. Use the following example table as a guide.

| A | B | C | D
1 |  | January | February | March
2 | Rent | $1200.00 | $1200.00 | $1200.00
3 | Inventory | $15,345.00 | $12,904.00 | $6,902.00
4 | Utilities | $278.00 | $375.00 | $350.00
5 | Payroll | $8,250.00 | $8,250.00 | $10,940.00
6 | Insurance | $214.00 | $214.00 | $214.00
7 | Totals | =SUM(B2..B6) | =SUM(C2..C6) | =SUM(D2..D6)

| NOTE: If you need more help creating a spreadsheet, see the Developing a Spreadsheet topic in this section.

6. When you are finished entering the data, select a range of cells that comprises the first quarter of the year. In the example above, you would select cells B2 through D6. Do not select the total cells.
7. Click the Named Selections tool and select Name Selection from the popup menu. A Name Selection dialog box displays.
8. Type First Quarter in the Name Selection field and click OK.

The next step is to return to your presentation and place references to this named selection on a presentation layer. Click the appropriate sheet tab for the presentation you were working on previously.

### Adding a New Slide

You need to add a new slide to your presentation to display the financial results in your spreadsheet.

9. From the Edit menu on the Presentation palette, select New Slide... A New Slide dialog box is displayed.
10. Enter a name for the new slide.
11. If you want to insert the slide at the current selection point in the presentation floating palette, select the At Selection option. Otherwise, select the At End of Presentation option to add the slide at the end of the slide list.
12. Check Create New Layer. This creates a new layer along with the new slide. If this is left unchecked, the slide will be created, but will have no layers associated to it.

After the layer is created, you may need to associate the background layer to the new slide.

13. Click the Layer Selection button beside the slide name. A popup menu lists all the available layers in the presentation document.
14. Select the background layer. The layer is now associated to the slide.

### Adding a Spreadsheet Frame

15. Make sure you are focused on the new layer for the second slide.
16. Click the Frame tool and select Spreadsheet from the popup menu.
17. Draw a small spreadsheet frame, 3 cells wide by 3 cells high is sufficient.
18. From the Format menu, select Display Options. A Display Options dialog box displays.
19. Uncheck the Show Column Headings and Show Row Headings options.
20. Now you are ready to create the link to the data in the spreadsheet sheet.

### Linking Data

21. In the first cell, type Total First Quarter Expenses and press [TAB].
22. In the next cell, type =SUM(First Quarter) and press [ENTER].

You have just created a named reference. Rather than have a "hard-coded" calculation, you can name a range of cells and then reference those cells elsewhere. This way, you can change the original scope of the cells without disrupting the calculations. Named cells are great for presentations because you can do you spreadsheet work elsewhere (even in another sheet) and then display the results of that work in the presentation slide. Since you are not "hard coding" the calculations into the presentation, you can alter the original amounts and the calculations will automatically update.

Format the font, color, and other features to your preference. The finished product for this may look something like this:

## Running the Slide Show

To start the slide show from the beginning click the Start button on the Presentation palette. The slide show begins from the first slide, no matter which slide is presently selected in the Presentation palette. You can also select a slide in the Presentation palette from which you want to start the presentation, and click Start Here.

- To move to the next slide, press the right arrow key.
- To go back to the previous slide, press the left arrow key.
- To go to the last slide, press the [END] key.
- To go back to the beginning of the slide show, press the [HOME] key.
- To stop the presentation and return to the normal workspace, press the [ESC] key.

## Printing Slides

See the Printing a Document topic for more information about how to print.

## Conclusion

In this topic, you learned how to design and develop a presentation. In addition, you learned one advanced topic of the Gobe Productive suite, using a named selection in a spreadsheet, to create a dynamic reference. The next topic introduces the features of image processing.

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