Master Slides Disappear in Print Preview

[Chris]

Hi Folks

This is more to confirm what I think is happening for a few people. They
are creating powerpoint slides and not realising they are in Master Slide
mode.

They have 6 or 7 slides done and then go into print preview. When they do
this and select mulitple slide view, only one slide appears!!!!

My guess is that they may click on some message confirming which master
slide they want and all the others are discarded - one person had undo
highlighted initially but then once they were back to normal view, it was no
longer available.

The other part of this is that it didn't matter wether the work was saved or
not.

Any thoughts?

Chris

 

[Bill Dilworth]

PowerPoint XP & 2003:
Slide Masters that have no slide attached to them are discarded unless you
direct PowerPoint not to (Push Pin icon). It is difficult to get some users
to use Masters at all, so I don't know how common it would be for them to
accidentally find their way there and mistake it for normal view, but I
concede your point. It could happen, but they would have to ignore several
indicators that they were editing masters, rather than slides.

What additional indicators would you recommend?


--
Bill Dilworth
A proud member of the Microsoft PPT MVP Team
Users helping fellow users.
billdilworth.mvps.org
-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
yahoo2@ Please read the PowerPoint
yahoo. FAQ pages. They answer most
com of our questions.
www.pptfaq.com
..
..

 

[Chris]

Hi Bill

The people doing this are high school students, so it may just need to be
part of their "learning". But perhaps an informative error that states "You
can only have one master slide! Do you want the other slides to be normal
slides?" or some such.

As I said, it may not be worth the extra coding. I think the other
possibility may be that when they create another slide in master view (title
or slide), that they get an option to discard the first slide or turn it into
a normal slide.

Cheers

Chris

 

[Bill Dilworth]

Oh no!!

Don't even joke about limiting us to just one master slide. Please look at:
http://www.echosvoice.com/multipletemplates.htm

Multiple Masters cures a number of presentation difficulties, and is well
worth the extra step in learning about them.

Bill D.

 

[Chris]

Oooooh, a raw nerve!

Sorry Bill. Been away from Powerpoint too long it seems. Leads me to think
that somewhere in the training of the kiddies, they need to be told how to
make sure their slides don't disappear.

I suppose it comes back to how in the world they are actually able to make
these slides "disappear" just by going into print preview from their master
slides.

I'll pass the web page link on to the teachers for their info. Two poor
kids lost 70 minutes work in test conditions.

Chris