How to Make Multimedia Greeting Cards Using PowerPoint

You would like to send a special greeting card—something a little different—for a special person at Valentine's Day, for Christmas, a birthday, an anniversary, or any other special occasion.  If you have a personal computer with Microsoft Office software, and the person you want to send the special card can receive e-mail, why not create a multimedia greeting card with PowerPoint? It would not be that hard to create such a greeting, and while you could use simple clip art, you could instead add videos, a movie, even sound.

One advantage of creating a multimedia greeting card is that you can save your card as a template. After saving your creation as a template, you can reuse the card many times. You can create many cards based on the original.

The first step to creating a multimedia card, after opening PowerPoint, is to prepare the slide show. First, from the File menu, click new. You will then be given the chance to use an existing template, a blank presentation, or to use the AutoContent Wizard. For our purposes, click blank presentation.

Then you can adjust the page size to whatever you desire. Click page setup on the File menu. You can adjust the size to anything you want, but for our purposes, change the width to 7.5 inches, the same as the height.

The next step is to set up the layout for the slide show. On the Format menu, click slide layout. You have a variety of templates to choose from, but for our purposes, choose the blank one.

The next step is to set up the slide show and the speed at which the slides will move from one to the other. Click slide show, then slide transition. In the advance slide section, click automatically after box. Change the delay time to 00:03, and close the slide transition pane.