Compress Pictures:
Presentation blues? You must have had those when your presentation became too heavy with images. Now there’s a way to make your presentation light while retaining all the images. Save the pictures that you have to insert as JPG’s GIFs, or in any other smaller format. Power point XP provides an option by which you can compress the embedded images. Click on the images you want compress by holding down the [Ctrl] key or by selecting them all. Choose the picture toolbar from View >Toolbar>Picture. click on the compress picture button, and choose ‘Delete the cropped area’ of the picture to make the presentation lighter. Just remember that if you compress pictures by selecting the Web/Screen, Print, or ‘Delete cropped areas of picture’ option from the compress picture dialog box you won’t be able to restore images to their original resolution or size.
Customize animations:
You can now customize animations in PowerPoint XP. Start off by selecting your own track for the object to move on. This could either be straight line, a curve, or a scribble. Right-click the text or the image for which the animation is to be set, and choose Custom Animation. The task pane opens and gives you a list of animations that can be assigned to an object on the presentation. To choose your own animation style, click on Add Effect and choose Motion paths. From option, choose the Draw Custom path submenu. This provide you with options to draw Straight line,Curves or Scribble paths. You can choose any of these options and draw the path on the slide. The starting position would be denoted by green triangle and the trailing edge by red triangle. you can also resize and move the path. In this manner, you can even create short cartoon movies using PowerPoint XP.