As the 16:9 HDTVs and LCD monitors become more and more popular in our life, how to play the 4:3 PPT presentations in full screen mode on these new babies without distortion is a big problem to many people. It seems impossible to make it on the face, but there is always a way to make things possible. Please follow me, I will show you step by step.
Assume we have a 16:9 wide screen, and try to imagine a rectangular of which the width is 16 inches and the height is 9 inches. The rectangular comprises two rectangle regions, one is the gray on the left, and the other is the white on the right. The white part represents the original presentation, while the gray part stands for the blank part of the screen. Be sure, if we play a presentation on a HDTV it will not be displayed like this, but two black (or gray) bars (known as letterbox bar ) on the left and right sides of the screen. Here, we just consider the layout. What we should do now is to add something to replace the gray part. Until I use some PPT to flash conversion tools, I have no idea what is appropriate for the little gray.
Articulate Presenter, Wondershare PPT2Flash Professional, and Pointecast Publisher are powerful tools to convert PPT presentations to flash-based ones. Here, take PPT2Flash Professional for example to show how to use this kind of tools to solve the problem.
After installed PPT2Flash Professional (the version I installed is 3.5.0, the lastest version is 4.0.1), open the presentation in PowerPoint, we can find PPT2Flash on the menu bar, click the cascade menu, choose Player Templates, in Player we could see the frame of player. In the full style mode, there is a panel on the left of the slide. It is exactly what we need. With this panel a 4:3 presentation becomes a 16:9 presentation (maybe not exactly 16:9, but much better).
Then, let us have a look at what we have on this panel, Company logo; Author Info, which includes E-mail, Bio, Name, Photo; Toolbar, including Flash Title, Attachments, Notes; Control Bar. Users can manually set which items should be displayed. After personalized the player template, and published the presentation, we get a flash presentation with 16:9 aspect ratio.
Now we can play the presentation on 16:9 wide-screens by setting the display's aspect-ratio control to Stretch or Full.
Wondershare PPT2Flash Pro, http://www.sameshow.com/powerpoint-to-flash-pro.php?sid=6
Articulate Presenter: http://www.articulate.com/products/presenter.php
