As the 16:9 HDTVs and LCD monitors become more and more popular in our life, how to play the 4:3 PPT presentations in full screen mode on these new babies without distortion is a big problem to many people. It seems impossible to make it on the face, but how about if we try to add something to fill the blank part of the screen. Please follow me, I’ll show you step by step.

Assume we have a 16:9 wide screen like the rectangular (the gray and the white) below.

The white part is the original presentation, and the gray part is the blank part of the screen. Be sure, if we display a presentation on a HDTV it won’t be showed like this, but two black (or gray) bars on the left and right sides of the screen. Here, we just consider the layout. What we should do now is to add something to replace the gray part. Until I use some PPT to flash conversion tools, I have no idea what is appropriate for the little gray.

Articulate Presentater, Wondershare PPT2Flash Professional, and Pointecast Publisher are powerful tools to convert PPT presentations to flash-based ones. Here, take PPT2Flash Professional for example to show how to use this kind of tools to solve our problem.

Firstly, after installed PPT2Flash Professional (the version I installed is 3.5.0), open the presentation in PowerPoint, we can find PPT2Flash on the menu bar, click the cascade menu, choose Player Templates, in Player we could see the player’s frame. In the full style mode, there is a panel at the left of our slide. It is exactly what we need. With this panel a 4:3 presentation becomes a 16:9 presentation (maybe not a perfect 16:9 proportion, but much better).

Then, let’s have a look at what we have on this panel, Company logo; Author Info, which includes E-mail, Bio, Name, Photo; Toolbar, including Flash Title, Attachments, Notes; Control Bar. Users can manually set which items should be displayed. After personalized the player template, and published the presentation, we get a flash presentation with 16:9 aspect ratio.

Now we can play the presentation on 16:9 wide screens by setting the aspect-ratio control to Stretch or Full.