Using Netscape for Presentations

This discussion touches on a handful of specific topics that arise when using Netscape instead of PowerPoint for presentations. It is intended to be useful also as a template file, so go to the file menu and pick "Save As...", choose the Format to be "Source" and give it a suitable name on your hard disk or floppy disk.

A. Configuring Netscape

1. Use the mouse to choose Preferences from the Options menu ("General Preferences" in Netscape Version 2). Then in the "Styles" section ("Appearance" in Version 2), near the top, click on "Show Toolbar as Text".

2. Select "Fonts" and choose 24-point for the proportional font and 18- or 20-point for the fixed font.

3. Click on "OK".

4. Use the mouse, holding the button down, to examine the Options menu. In the central section, "Show Toolbar" and "Show Location" should be checked, but "Show Directory Buttons" should not be checked. To change the state of any of those choices, slide the mouse down until that choice is highlighted, and then release the button.

5. Use the mouse to re-size the Netscape window so that it will fill the projection screen.
   • For the Macintosh, you will need to click on the "re-sizing handle" in the lower right corner of the window (as illustrated here), hold the button down, and drag that corner of the window all the way to the lower right corner of the screen.
     

   • For the Windows machines in Copeland 020 and 014, you will want to make the window adjustable (neither minimized nor maximized), then click on the title bar of the window and drag it to move the whole window to the upper left corner of the screen, and then move the mouse to the lower right corner of the window, where it will turn into a diagonal double-ended arrow, click and drag the lower right corner about three quarters of the way down and to the right.

   • For either machine, the graphic below should fit inside the display with about a quarter of an inch of free space all the way around if you scroll the Netscape display horizontally and vertically to center it:

B. Structure of Your Page

• There are two reasonable ways.
  1. For longer presentations, you would probably want to split the talk into several files, with links from one to the next.

  2. For short presentations (such as in our class), you would probably want to keep it all in one file.

• A single file for a longer talk takes a long time to load and to re-display (if you are going to follow links to other pages in the middle of the talk).

• A single file, once loaded, permits quicker transitions from one topic to the next. If you have multiple files on a floppy disk, the delay in getting from one to the next will be appreciable.

• If you have a single file, it would make sense to use multiple <BR> tags to provide white space between sections.

C. Creating and Revising Your Page

• You will use your favorite word processor, saving the file as a text file:
  • On the Macintosh, delete soft returns.

  • On Windows, choose a format of "ASCII [DOS] text".

  • Recent versions of Word and of WordPerfect have built-in HTML import and export abilities.

• You will probably choose header levels two or three for the slide titles and perhaps header level 4 or plain text for the main points.

D. Displaying Your Page

1. Save the file as just discussed. Close the file if your system requires it (depends on Windows or Macintosh, and which word processor).

2. Go to Netscape.

3. Select "Open File" from the "File" menu.

4. Choose your HTML file.

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Dick Piccard revised this page (http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~piccard/mis300/netscape.html) on August 31, 1998.

Please E-mail comments or suggestions to piccard@ohio.edu