Slideshow Tips and Limitations

Avoid Caption Creep

If you add captions to your slideshow, keep in mind that the longer the caption, the more it will intrude into the space where the slide content is shown. As a workaround, you can add extra space to the bottom of your content. Also, you might want to make sure the most important information in the slide is seen in the upper portion of the slide.

Avoid Tall Content

It is a good idea to avoid really tall content in slideshows. Otherwise, content in other slides may look awkward if you do not have "Adaptive height" set. If you want to include images that are rather large, you can set those images to show as thumbnails so that they are not seen at their original size until the user clicks them. See Showing Images as Thumbnails in Output.

Bullets vs. Thumbnails for Navigation

As far as navigation at the bottom of a slideshow is concerned, you have the option to use bullets or thumbnail images. Bullets are probably best when the order of the slideshow is important. Thumbnails are best when the order is not that important; they allow users to easily click and find the exact slide they want to see.

Make Tables 100% Width for Responsive Effect

When you set a slideshow to be "responsive" in the Edit Slideshow dialog, this means that content such as images and tables within that slideshow will adjust automatically when the slideshow is resized. If you plan to include tables in your slideshows and you also set the slideshow to be responsive, the tables need to be set with a width of 100% using the "AutoFit to Window" field in the Table Properties dialog. You can also right-click on a table structure bar and set the width from the Table Size submenu. This ensures that the table, as well as any content within it, is responsive when the slideshow is resized. See Editing Table Properties.

Put Slide Content in Tables or Div Tags

There are different options in the Flare user interface to control the size of slides. However, you may want to consider using tables or div tags as an additional option. This helps to keep all of your slides uniformly sized and consistent looking with the captions and navigation controls at the same position.

1. When you create content for a slide, first insert a table with no border.

2. Right-click the table structure bar and select Table Size. Set the width to 100% (allowing the table and the content within it to be responsive, if you have that option set in the slideshow). If you want to control the width for slides, you can do so in the Edit Slideshow dialog.

   Set the height to fit the tallest content in your entire slideshow. In the following example, we set all of our invisible table heights to 400 pixels.

   

   An alternative is to open the Edit Slideshow dialog and disable the Adaptive height option. That's an easier option, but it also forces all of your content to be top aligned in the slide, so you might see lots of space below a particular slide if it's much shorter than the tallest content in the slideshow. But using tables lets you keep all of your slides at the same height, and it also lets you center align content in the invisible table, and thus the slide.

3. Type or insert your content within that table.
4. Open the Properties dialog for the table and set the table to be Center aligned.
5. Select the cell in the table (click the Table ribbon and select Select All Cells > Cell).
6. Open the Cell Properties dialog (CTRL+ALT+B).
7. Set the cell's vertical alignment to Middle.
8. You can also horizontally center any content within the table if you like.
9. When finished, you can copy the first completed table and then just paste it into other slides that you create, replacing the content as necessary.

Use Slide Content in Snippets

When you first insert a new slideshow, the content can be edited directly in the slideshow area in the XML Editor. It's perfectly acceptable to do that. However, you might find it more useful to create snippets for all of your slide content, inserting those snippets into slides as you need them. Snippets can make it easier to find and edit slide content, especially if you create a very long slideshow with dozens of slides. If you create snippets and keep them organized in the Resources/Snippets folder for your different slideshows, you'll be able to open and edit that content much quicker. Snippets also make it possible to use one piece of content in multiple slideshows.

You can open a snippet either from the Content Explorer or by right-clicking it within the slide and selecting Open Snippet File from the context menu.

Mobile Output

If you intend your slideshow to be seen on mobile output, keep in mind the width of your content. For example, if you have a table containing a lot of content and columns, it may not look great in mobile output because it's wider than a typical mobile device screen. But content than is narrow enough to fit on the mobile device screen should look fine in a slideshow.