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| Troubleshooting | |
| June 2001• Vol.9 Issue 6 Page(s) 91-93 in print issue | |
Lotus Freelance Picture A Problem-Free graphics Program |
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[LOTUS]
[FREELANCE]
 You might be able to convince yourself
that the members of your audience are wearing nothing but their underwear,
but you’re still going to have to deliver a high-quality presentation.
That’s where Lotus Freelance graphics comes in. This
application will help you create professional-looking presentations
complete with charts, clip art, sound, and movies and publish them in a
number of ways. While Freelance is pretty easy to use, you may run into an occasional show stopping problem. The solutions we’ve included below should help you over come these glitches and be on your way once more. 1. Problem: Some of the pictures I select to use in my bulleted lists look, well, bad. Is there any way to fix this? Solution: You can easily personalize the look of the bullets in a bulleted list (right-click the list and choose Text Properties, then the Bullets tab to select from a wide range of icons or clip art to use in place of the default bullets), but more complex art may not look very good when reduced to small images. To keep quality as high as possible, try to use images that do not have too many lines or colors in them.
Solution: graphics can really balloon the size of a presentation. One of the best ways to trim out a sizable amount of fat is to make sure you aren’t using more color in your images than you need to. If you have a program such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, use them to cut back on the number of colors in your graphics. You can usually cut down on size considerably without a tremendous hit to quality using this method. 3. Problem: Several pages in my presentation are similar to each other, and I don’t want to have to redo all the pages manually. Is it possible to duplicate one page to save myself time? Solution: It’s very easy to copy or duplicate pages within Freelance. While in the Current Page or Page Sorter view, right- click a blank area of the page and select Duplicate Page from the pop-up menu. Now when you look at the Page Sorter and Outliner view, you will see the identi cal pages and you can make any small changes that you want. 4. Problem: I would like others to be able to access my presentation on the Internet, but I don’t know much about uploading files. How can I do this? Solution: Freelance lets you easily convert presentations to a format that you can upload directly to a Web server or store locally in a folder and then navigate with a Web browser. During the conversion, Freelance saves sound, movie files, and images to a folder and links them into the presentation. There are a couple of different ways you can convert a presentation to a set of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language; the language of the Web) files in Free lance. First, from the File menu, select Internet, then Convert To Web Pages. This opens the Convert To Web Pages Wizard, which walks you through the process of making your presentation available on the Web. An alternate way to convert Web pages to is to save the presentation as a World Wide Web Presentation (.HTM) file. (Do this by opening the File menu, choosing Save As, and then selecting the appropriate file type from the Save As Type drop-down list.) Freelance will then convert all files and store them in a folder with the same name as the presentation file. 5. Problem: I have both a graphic and a text box on one page that I want to work on at the same time, but I can’t figure out how to select more than one item at a time. Solution: To group objects such as text and graphics in Freelance so you can work with them as one object, press the SHIFT key as you click each item you want to work with. Then right-click one of the selected items and choose Group from the pop-up menu. To ungroup the items when you’re finished making changes, right-click the group and choose Ungroup. 6. Problem: I want other readers of my presentation to be able to add their own data to one of my charts. How do I create a chart that allows this? Solution: Freelance uses something called a SmartChart that lets users enter their own data into a chart. The SmartChart appears on the page with a selection of prompt text, and when users click the prompt text, the data on the chart will disappear, letting them add their own numbers to the chart. The type, style, and attributes of the chart are predesigned by whoever sets up the SmartChart. To create a SmartChart, you’ll first need to open a content topic. From the File menu, choose Open. Click the Look In drop-down arrow and find the LOTUS/SMASTERS /FLG directory. Click the Files Of Type drop-down arrow and select Lotus Freelance SmartMaster Content (SMC). Double-click the content topic you want. In the Current Page tab, click the New Page button, select a chart page layout, and click OK. Then click the chart block to select it and choose the SmartChart option from the “Click Here” menu. Click Create and choose a chart type and style and click OK. Enter all the infor mation for the chart (such as data and text labels) and then click OK to exit the dialog box. A small image of the chart should now be on your page. You can customize the prompt text by double-clicking it.
Solution: It’s very simple to change chart types. First, double-click your existing chart to open the Properties For Chart dialog box. Select the Type tab and choose a different chart type. You can also open the Properties For Chart dialog box by selecting the chart and choosing Chart Type from the Chart menu. All of your chart information should easily map over to the new chart. (Depending on the chart type, you may have to tinker with the information or format a bit to get the results you want.) 8. Problem: I finished my presentation but then realized one of the pages was in the wrong place. How can I move it? Solution: Moving pages in Freelance anytime is as easy as dragging and dropping. The easiest way to move pages is in the Page Sorter view (click the Page Sorter tab). In this view, you can see all the pages in your presentation as thumbnail images, complete with the page number and name underneath each image. To move a page, click to select it and hold the mouse button down while you drag the page to its new location. As you’re dragging, you’ll notice that a dotted box and solid line show you where the page is and where it will land if you release it. As soon as you’ve dropped the page into its new location, the page numbers are updated to reflect this new order. To move several pages at once, hold the SHIFT key while clicking the pages, then drag and drop them into their new location.
Solution: Freelance’s Save And Go feature lets you save a compressed copy of your presentation to removable media such as Zip disks, CDs, or floppy diskettes (if the presentation is small enough) so others can view the presentation on their computers. To access this feature, choose Save And Go from the File menu. The Save And Go Wizard will walk you through this three-step process. If you want, you can include the Mobile Screen Show Player with your presentation file. This will let users who don’t have the Freelance pro gram on their computer view your presentation. 10. Problem: I have a shape with text in it and I want to resize the shape, but the text doesn’t resize at the same time. How do I keep the text and shape proportional when resizing? Solution: The Shapes With Text option gives you an easy way to place a text label on a specific shape within your presentation. (To use this tool, click the Drawing & Text icon in the Current Page view and then drag and drop a shape from the Shapes With Text section onto your presentation page. Now you can add text by clicking within the shape, typing the text, and clicking OK.) As you’ve noticed, when you go to resize the shape by selecting it and then dragging at a corner or side with your mouse pointer, the text stays the same size. To keep the text and shape in proportion with each other, hold down the SHIFT key while resizing them. 11. Problem: I won’t always be giving my presentation from a place where I can manually run the show. How do I run a screen show automatically? Solution: To run a screen show automatically instead of manually (where you must personally click through to each new page), open the Presentation menu, select Set Up Screen Show, and click the Page Effects tab. Under the Display Next Page section, choose whether you want to display each new page with a click or a key press. If you want the ultimate in automatic, choose to have Freelance display each page after a certain time interval. This is a great way to run a presentation at a conference or trade show, and you can couple this with a Freelance feature that runs the screen show in a continuous loop. Do so by clicking the Options tab and placing a check mark in the Run Screen Show In A Continuous Loop checkbox.
Solution: Freelance has a feature called Speaker Notes that will help you do just that. You can use the notes as prompts when you’re giving presentations or as quick sources for facts, figures, and other data that don’t necessarily fit within a presentation but are useful to enhance it nonetheless. This is also very valuable if the person delivering the presentation is not the same person who created it. You can create one Speaker Note per page, and the amount of text you can use is unlimited (although there are limits if you’re going to print out notes). To create Speaker Notes from any of the three views, open the Create menu and choose the Speaker Note option. You can also just click the note card icon on the SmartIcon bar or on the left side of the Current Page view. Yet another way to access the Speaker Note feature is by right-clicking a page and selecting Create Speaker Note from the pop-up menu. In the Speaker Note window, you can change many of the text attributes by selecting Text Properties from the Text menu. Use the tools on the right side of the window to zoom in or out on the card and browse through other cards you’ve created.
Solution: While the Current Page view lets you work with all aspects of a given page and Page Sorter gives you a better way to work with the positioning of all pages in a presentation, the Outliner view is specially set up to give you access to the text in your presentation. After clicking the Outliner tab, you’ll see a series of icons on the left side of the page. These icons give you a sense of page layout, and you can toggle them on and off by clicking the first in a row of buttons under the view tabs. Here you can do such things as add, edit, and move text. You can also promote or demote text to change its level. For example, promoting a Level 1 heading turns it into a page title. To change text in this way, place your cursor next to the text you want to change and then click either the left or right arrow under the view tabs to increase or decrease the text’s level. 14. Problem: I turned my presentation into a series of Web pages, but now I want to change some of the information. Can I do this from within Freelance? Solution: The easiest way to change or edit a presentation you have saved in .HTM format is to wade back into the original presentation, make the changes you want to make, and then resave it in the .HTM format. When the system asks if you want to overwrite the original version of the file, confirm that you do, and the updated version will take the place of the outdated version in the folder.  Presenting In Style.
These solutions should solve your presentation problems, giving
you plenty of free time to perfect your “audience in its underwear”
mantra.  by Rich Gray
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