Well, yes and no. And to clarify that -- you can, but if you do, why would
you want them to stay white?
The black bars are caused by PowerPoint's presentation aspect ratio. In
other words the show was built to show on a screen that has an aspect ratio
of 4:3 and the widescreen is probably 16:9. Therefore there are areas that
do not have any input from the show, so these areas appear black. It is
sort of like the letterbox effect when showing a Cinema movie made for a
wide screen on a normal TV.
The blackness of these boxes, to the best of my knowledge, is hard coded
into PowerPoint and can not be changed. But if the slide show runs in the
full width, you can place boxes of any color in this area.
If you build the show to use the correct aspect ratio for the display
screen, then these side bars do not exist and you can use the full width of
the screen. If you just change the display width from a 4:3 to a 16:9,
there will be horizontal stretching to fill the screen, usually this is
undesirable. This is why you need to build the slide to fit the screen
In a new presentation, change the Page Set-up to use 16" width and 9" height
(or any 16:9 ratio). Run this single blank slide on the wide screen and
you'll see that the slide fills the screen.
--
Bill Dilworth
A proud member of the Microsoft PPT MVP Team
Users helping fellow users.
http://billdilworth.mvps.org
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vestprog2@ Please read the PowerPoint FAQ pages.
yahoo. They answer most of our questions.
com
www.pptfaq.com
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