Publishing PowerPoint Presentations to the Web
If you have information already existing within a PowerPoint Presentation that you would like to share with others on a website, it is a fairly simple process to publish your PowerPoint presentations directly to the web. Those visiting your website do not have to have PowerPoint loaded onto their computers to view the presentations, nor do they need a particularly fast connection (individual file sizes are small). The only requirement is that their browsers are able to show frames (Netscape Navigator 2 or later, Internet Explorer 3 or later). While the vast majority of the visitors to your site will have frames-capable browsers, it might be wise to warn them ahead of time (“This presentation requires a frames-capable browser such as Netscape Navigator 2 or later, or Internet Explorer 3 or later”).
The resulting pages will look similar to the illustration below. Slide titles show as underlined links in the left frame, while the slides themselves show up on the right frame. At the very bottom of the page are two more small frames. The lower left one can be used to collapse or expand the content of the left-side links, while the lower right frame can be used to browse the presentation slide by slide.
To publish your PowerPoint presentation to the web, first bring up the completed presentation in PowerPoint. From the File menu, choose Save As Web Page. Click the Publish button near the center of the page. Under Publish what? choose whether you want to publish the entire presentation or a section of it (if you choose the section option, you need to specify the starting and ending slide numbers). There is a checkbox for Display speaker notes; check it if you want your notes to be displayed. Under Browser support choose which browser level you want to target (I highly recommend the “All browsers” option; the higher levels are problematic even when using recently developed browsers). Finally, under Publish a copy as you can change the file name and folder where you are saving this copy. It will save you confusion in the long run to create a separate folder for your web PowerPoint presentations. When you have all your options set, click the Publish button in the lower right-hand corner of the page.
Normally, PowerPoint presentations are one big file. When you create a web version, however, there are many separate files. The “home” page for the presentation will be your presentation name.htm (i.e. - drought.htm). The supporting files will all be in a folder called presentation name_files (i.e. - drought_files). When you transfer the files to the web, create a new folder and put the “home” page and the presentation files folder inside the new folder. When you link to the PowerPoint presentation from another page, link to the “home” page (i.e. - drought.htm). This page will automatically pull the files it needs from the folder as the visitor to the site navigates through the presentation.
If you have any questions about the process, please don’t hesitate to call me at 719-549-2045, or email me at jeffrey.wood@colostate.edu. Examples of the final product can be found in the class links on my website at www.coopext.colostate.edu/comptrain/.