The Problem

You want to show the entire length of a web page in your presentation. You don’t want to rely on the spotty internet connection, so you don’t link to the live site or embed the webpage into your slide. However the full screenshot is entirely too long to showcase on-slide.

Depending on how you’ll be speaking to the screenshot, there are a couple of ways you can solve this problem. We’ll also put it inside of a blank device screen so that it looks more refined and professional.

General Scrolling Overview

If you’re just speaking about the overall website and how much content is contained within without going into specifics, you can do one long scroll from beginning to end and back again. The end result will look something like this dramatically exaggerated example:

Before inserting your long screenshot onto your slide, go to File > Options > Advanced and make sure “do not compress images in file” is checked.

If this box isn’t checked, your screenshots will be so pixellated when you make them larger on-screen that you won’t be able to read them.

1. Insert website screenshot and a blank device on the slide. Make sure the blank device has a transparent window where the screen is.
2. Resize the screenshot so that its width matches the width of the hole in the device image
3. Push screenshot behind device.

Animating the Screenshot

1. Select the screenshot
2. Add a line motion path to it
3. Under “Effect Options,” make sure “up” is selected if it isn’t already
4. Select path
5. If your page is really long, you will have to zoom out to do this, select the end point and drag it upward until the end of the screenshot is in the device window. Depending on the length of your page, you might have to do it in stages.
6. Set the timing of the scroll
7. With this animation selected, click on “More Options” in the animation tab
8. Under “Effect” give the animation a smooth start and end (I chose 1 second for each) and check the box that says “Auto-reverse”
9. Test your animation

The only think left to do for this example is to mask the screenshot so that you can’t see it above and below the device you’re using. If your background is a solid color, you will only need to use two boxes filled with that same color between the device screen and the screenshot.

The more challenging part is when you have a gradient background.

For Gradient Backgrounds

1. Hide everything on the slide
2. Save slide as a png
3. Show everything on slide
4. Make a rectangle over top of the device window that is bigger than the window and smaller than the device.
5. Make a rectangle the size of the slide, push it backwards one time
6. Select the big rectangle first and the small one second
7. Under the Shape Format tab, choose “Subtract” from the “Merge Shapes” drop down
8. With the new shape selected, fill the shape with a picture. Choose the PNG you saved earlier of the blank slide
9. Send backwards one time. Done!

Pause to Highlight Sections

You can take this a step further by scrolling the screen in increments and pausing in between to highlight important areas of the screenshot. In this case you could:

1. Scroll down the webpage a small amount
2. Pause
3. Fade in details about a that section
4. Fade out those details and continue scrolling to the next area

It might look something like this:

Really, do I have to do all of that?

No, you don’t. Even if you chunked out parts of a web screen shot and showed those within the devices on-slide without all of the animation, you will achieve a much more professional look than if you just put the screen captures on the slide without any further effort. Adding this level of animation takes time, but the end result is well worth the reactions you get in the end.

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Resources:

Download free blank devices from The Presentation Workshop’s resources page!
Capture Full Website Screenshots with Fireshot, a Chrome addin
Take FULL webpage screenshots. Capture, edit and save them to PDF/JPEG/GIF/PNG, upload, print, send to OneNote, clipboard or email. More Information