Creating projects

CDR Presenter lets you create a multimedia presentation that combines one of its ready-made styles with your own text, pictures, video and animation. The program calls each separate presentation that you work on a 'project' be it a multimedia business card, product catalogue, brochure, report, sales presentation, diary, picture book or whatever.

The program stores all the files for a particular project in a folder on your PC. These include a 'runtime' or 'player' version of the software that actually shows your project on-screen, the files for the style such as backgrounds and button animations and your own text and pictures. When you've finsished creating a project, you can simply take the files in this folder and burn them onto a suitable CD-R, business card CD-R (or perhaps copy them to a ZIP disk or put them on your network for others to see).

Creating a new project

To start a new project...

Click the 'File' button on the Designer control (if it's not already selected)
Click 'Start a new project'
Enter a name for the new project

The project's name will be the folder name where the project is stored. You can use a descriptive 'long' filename such as 'Product Catalogue 2002' or 'J H Smith Business Card'.

Once you have named a new project, CDR Presenter creates a folder for it, chooses a default style for the pages and inserts some dummy pages. These pages are 'placeholders' to give you something to get started with... you can fill them in or change their titles or remove them as appropriate.

After creating a new project, we recommend that:

You choose a style for the project. You can change styles part way through a project if you need to but it is usually best to pick the one you want at the start.
You choose 'Project'... 'Target disc size' to set the size of CD you want eventually want to put your project onto, so that the Designer status display is correct.
You change section and page titles and add or remove pages to give you a good outline or plan for the project you want to create.

Saving projects

CDR Presenter saves your work as you go along. There is no need to 'save' your changes and you can exit from the designer program at any time.

Opening projects

The CDR Presenter designer program will re-open the last project you were working on, at the last page you were making changes to, when you next start it again. To open another project you've created:

Click the 'File' button on the Designer control (if it's not already selected)
Click 'Open existing project'
Choose a project from the listing provided

CDR Presenter normally keeps all your project folders together in one place, usually a folder called CDRPresenter\Projects on your PC's hard disk. If necessary, you can change to a different projects folder to load projects from another location, perhaps a CD-R or Zip disk from a colleague or from a server on an office network. To do this:

Click the 'File' button on the Designer control
Click 'Open existing project'
Click 'Choose Folder...'
Select the drive and folder you want to load projects from. This is usually a folder called 'Projects'. Note Be careful to choose the drive or folder that contains the project folder(s) you want, not to try to open or select the actual project folder itself. CDR Presenter looks in the folder you choose for folders that contain projects and then lists those projects it finds.

If you change the Projects folder, CDR Presenter will remember the new location. Use 'Choose folder...' again if you need to go back to your earlier projects.

Renaming a project

To change the name of a project:

Open the project with 'Open existing project'
Click the 'Project' button on the Designer control
Click 'Project name'
Enter a new name or amend the old one

CDR Presenter will rename the project folder with the new name.