Making a professional looking
Presentation Menu is not as
difficult as you may think.  -  by Loretta

• Center Picture- has a Border chosen with a Fancy Edge. The fancy edge chosen was Ellipse Blur. This caused it to blend into the background. I also rotated it slightly by ‘grabbing’ (left click and hold it down) the center yellow circle and dragging it clockwise. (See the illustration above for details.)
• Left Picture- I added a Special Effect: Glow +2, white color. I can change the color of the glow by clicking inside the box and choosing another color in the scale that appears, then clicking OK. Or... I can grab the dropper (by clicking and dragging the icon on the bottom toolbar) and drop it on a color within your Presentation Menu. It will pick up whatever color you drop it on. First highlight where you want the color to go. Then pick up the desired color within your menu like this: go to the dropper and click and hold your left mouse key down to pick up the dropper. Then drag it to the color that you want to ‘pick up’ and let go of the left mouse key to drop the dropper onto the color. The color will transfer to the highlighted item.
• Right Picture- has a Special Effect of a white glow +2. It has been rotated slightly also.

• Fill- Fade was chosen with the style of "Right Top". Two shades of green were chosen by clicking inside the boxes and choosing the shade of green. I could have also used the dropper to pick up a color from one of the pictures.
• Behind Front Page- gives me the option to choose a color that will blank out the surrounding desktop that may be visible when viewing the finished product. I chose a shade of green.
• Sound/Music- Background Music. To find this, make sure you have clicked on the background of your menu you are creating, then scroll down in the little scroll box next to the word 'Background' in the bottom toolbar. I chose music found in the library of Passage Express by clicking on the 'stack of books' icon which brought up the sound library and choosing a song from there. (Mouseover the other icons on the little sound player to see a description of the other options)

• I then clicked on the shape button on the left toolbar to choose a shape. I chose the one that looks like a heavy cross or plus-shape, then clicked on the edge and while holding the mouse button down, stretched it. Then I clicked on another edge and made it thinner. This is the shape into which I will add the date. I then added a fill color to match the green background using the dropper. To do this, I Made sure that the shape that I had placed on my menu was still selected. I then clicked on the dropper and dragged it to the color that I wanted on the background. I then let up on the mouse button. The color transferred into the shape. I put the shape underneath the left picture. (See above)
• I chose the same shape again and stretched it so thin that it made it look like two lines stretching across the width of the menu. I added color to the background of this shape and set it as background behind the first shape and the pictures. I used the 'Send Selected Item to the Back' button on the top toolbar to put it behind the pictures.

• I used the text button on the left toolbar to put text onto the menu. Start typing in the box provided at the bottom of the screen using the text tools available there such as font, size, color, etc. Move the text where you want it to go. For the title of the project, "Thomas and Heather", I chose an unusual font that was on my computer, BernhardFashionBT. I may have to consider the recipient's computer and choose a generic font that most computers will already have. Many nice fonts are a free download on the Internet. Just do an Internet search of the name. I used a font size of 20, Color white. Bold was selected.
It overlaps the picture a little bit so I made sure I selected it to be in the front using the Bring Selected Item to Front icon on the top menu bar.
• I also selected text to go inside of the little shape underneath the left picture, the date. The font style is the same but the font size is 14 in this case.

• I added a button by clicking on the button icon on the left tool bar and chose a shape for its appearance (See the bottom toolbar on the illustration above). Once I got the first button looking how I wanted, the others automatically looked the same way when I would select the button icon for the second and third time. For the fill color I chose white and dark gray with a circular style fade by making the appropriate choices on the bottom toolbar.