Send e-mail Download Zipped Tutorial What’s a presentation without a chart or graph? To that end, let’s create a chart. Create a new blank page. Copy and paste the Heading and one List Item from the first page. Remember to cut and paste the buttons onto the MouseOff layer. Select the List Item and press Make New Step. Change the Heading and List Item text. While I have the Steps toolbar here let’s look at what these new icons do. Make a New Step places any selection on a new step. You could for example have several images on your page arranged in position. One by one, click each image in the order you want them to appear, and press Make New Step. Each time your visitor presses the right arrow button, a  new image will slide, fade, or just appear into place. You can also use steps to build an illustration in, what else, steps. The push pin icon Moves a selection to the Background, which is the MouseOff layer. The next icon, creates a Duplicate Step, such as the duplicate List Items. The icon with the red X Deletes a Step. You can select a stepped object and change its position in the step order by selecting a different step number from the drop down list. And finally, the last X icon lets you change the Step Transition Effect. This chart is a good example of the old expression, make the hard ones look easy and the easy ones look hard. When we are done you can tell me which case this is. From the Design Gallery, Presentations > Presentation Components, Chart Components, drag and center the grid onto the page. Change all the text to white. Change the title for the Legend to X-WIDGETS, and add a fourth  line of text (insert the Text Tool cursor after “Third Quarter” and press Return). Change the text to Fourth Quarter. Select the green square (Third Quarter) and copy it to the clipboard (Ctrl c). In the Page and Layout Gallery, press the S icon on the step layers until you find the Step that contains the legend. From the Edit > Paste  menu, select Paste in Place in Current Layer. Use the down arrow key on your keyboard to nudge the square down into place. And that is just the legend! Go back and select the MouseOff layer. Rather than use the slim bars in the Chart Components folder, we will create our own. Select the Rectangle Tool (m) and drag some rectangles to cover three months at a time. Change the colors to the legend colors. Select the Transparency Tool (press F6 or click the wineglass icon). Click once on a rectangle to select it, hold down the Ctrl key to constrain the direction, and click and drag from the top to the bottom of the rectangle to add what Xara calls an interactive Linear transparency. Finally, from left to right, select a rectangle, then press the New Step  icon. This will cause the quarters to appear with each click of the right arrow key. Change the transition effect for each rectangle to Slide in from Bottom. This makes the bars appear to grow upwards. Preview your chart page. OK That looks really good. But let’s add some more pizazz to our chart. One quarter at a time, select the quarter text in the Legend, and change the color to Dark Yellow. One by one, select each of the X-WIDGETS quarter text with the Text Tool, and copy it to the clipboard. Click on the first quarter rectangle. The Step Order drop down list indicates Step 3, the layer upon which the blue rectangle exists. Select Step 3 in the Page and Layout Gallery, then Edit > Paste > Paste in Place. Change the color to white. Repeat this for the other 3 quarters. And change the Transition Effect  back to Fade for each of the four steps. Each object placed on a Step layer will appear on that layer. Thus the white text fades on with the bars fade on. The original Legend text has a drop shadow which is missing. The reason I discovered was I selected the text with the Text Tool instead of Ctrl click selection (lesson learned). Select the four white text quarters, select the Shadow Tool (Ctrl F2). Apply a Wall Shadow with these settings: Shadow Blur: 3.5, Transparency: 70%, X Offest: 1.9, Y Offset: .9. Export and Preview the page. I think this adds more drama. Click here to see the presentation. There is an extra slide at the end. There is a link back to this page arrow at the end of the presentation. Enjoy the presentation. I’ll wait here for you to get back. I asked the folks at Xara is there was some way to create a self running Presentation. And you know what? There is! You can add a simple javascript to the Website Properties > Website > HTML Code (head)  box. <script type="text/javascript"> var pause = 2000; function autoPresenter(){ xr_next(); setTimeout("autoPresenter();", pause); } setTimeout("autoPresenter();", pause); </script> When you add the script to Website > HTML Code (head) it makes all pages run automatically. You can also just add it to certain pages in the Page > HTML Code (head) window. I find the 2000 pause a bit too fast. You can increase the figure to slow things down. I prefer 3000 or 3500. Experiment a little.