That’s right, save up your Overtime (OT) hours. See below:

• Today’s Tip of the Day deals with taking Comp Time over Overtime. Take a look if you’ve had problems with having not enough leave time.
• There’s a new article on How to Use Slide Transitions in Microsoft PowerPoint. Although I’m not a huge fan of them, I know some people like to have some in their presentations.

Although I don’t use this functionality very much, I have seen other people use it for their presentations so I thought I’d write a quick tutorial on how to do it.

To begin, we have to define what a Slide Transition is. A Slide Transition can be defined as the way that one slide moves to the next slide during a Slide Show. For example, during your presentation, if you want to make Slide 1 “dissolve” to reveal Slide 2 when you advance from Slide 1 to Slide 2 during your show, you would use a Slide Transition.

To enable a transition on a slide, you must first access the Slide Transition Menu. The Slide Transition Menu should be shown on the right hand side of your screen by default when you start a new presentation (Note: this is for Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, it might be slightly different for later versions). This is shown below:

(This picture has been cropped so that the placement of the menu can be seen.)

The arrows at the top of the menu (1) allow you to switch between the Slide Transition Menu and the New Presentation Menu. If the Slide Transition Menu is not shown, use the arrows to navigate to it if the New Presentation Menu is shown. If neither is shown, you can open the Slide Transition Menu by performing the following steps:

1. Click on Slide Show on the top menu.
2. Click on Slide Transition…

Now that the menu is open, click on the slide you want the transition to occur on. The transition you put on a slide will happen when the slide is shown. For example, if you want Slide 1 to dissolve into Slide 2, you should select Slide 2 and enable the dissolve transition. In the case of Slide 1, any transition you enable on your first slide will occur when you first start your Slide Show.

The list shown in the above screenshot displays the types of transitions you can apply to your slides. There are a variety of transitions, play around with them to see which one suits your presentation. The rest of the Slide Transition Menu is shown in the screenshot below:

First, you have the Modify transition menu. It allows you to change the speed and sounds associated with the transition via the Speed and Sound drop downs. Setting the speed of the transition is pretty simple; see which one works best for you. The sound specified will play when the transition occurs. If enabled, the Loop until next sound check box will keep playing the specified sound until another sound is specified during another transition on another slide. This is an important point, because even if you have another transition in your Slide Show, if it doesn’t have a sound associated to it the previous sound will keep playing if that check box is enabled. If you want to stop this sound from playing but don’t want to have to specify a new sound to play, set the sound to Stop Previous Sound.

Next, the Advance slide menu allows you to specify how the transition will occur. If the On mouse click check box is enabled, the transition will occur when you manually advance to the next slide. If the Automatically after check box is enabled, the transition will occur after a certain amount of time has passed. The amount of time can be specified below the check box. For example, say on Slide 2 you specify to transition to Slide 3 after 5 seconds. Once your Slide Show gets to Slide 2, it will pause for 5 seconds and then move to Slide 3.

The last set of options are the buttons and a check box at the bottom of the menu. Their functions are as follows:

1. The Apply to All Slides button will apply your current settings to all the slides in your presentation.
2. The Play button show how your settings will work when the current slide is presented in the Slide Show.
3. The Slide Show button will launch a Slide Show of your presentation.
4. When enabled, the AutoPreview check box will do a quick preview of your slide each time you change the transition settings for that slide. This is similar to the Play button.

The above are the basic components to use when putting a Slide Transition into your presentation. One word of caution: be careful with how you use these in your presentations. Only use them when they are necessary, don’t throw a bunch of transitions in there just to have them in your presentation. Remember, you want the audience to focus on your content, not a ton of different flashy transitions.