The Presentation Node
The main Presentation node () contains information about the formatting and defaults for the presentation.
If you have added a custom presentation, you can generate a presentation tree based on the available templates as specified in the Template section (described below) by clicking Generate (). If the presentation tree is not empty, you will be asked if you want to replace the current tree.
Any manual changes that you have made in the model tree, such as rearrangements of the section structure or settings adjustments will be lost if you confirm that you want to replace the current presentation tree.
Regenerating the presentation tree can be useful if you want to update the tree to reflect changes you have made in the model or if you want to change the presentation template without replacing the entire presentation.
Click the Preview Selected () or Preview All () button to show a preview of the presentation in the Preview window. Click the Write button () in the toolbar for the Settings window for Presentation, right-click the Presentation node, or press F8 to create a PowerPoint presentation. You can also click the downward arrow beside the Write button or right-click and choose Write To() to open the fullscreen Export window for writing the report to a database. The Write and Write To options are also available by right-clicking any node in the presentation tree. Selecting Write from any presentation node’s context menu generates the entire presentation.
Template
This section, which is collapsed by default, contains the setting for the level of detail in new nodes that are added to the presentation manually. It also determines which nodes are added as well as their level of detail if you click Generate () in the main Presentation node’s toolbar. The Template list takes its initial value from the template used to create the initial presentation contents. Alternatively, if you added an empty presentation, the default value is Standard. The options available for selection include the values Standard and Detailed as well as any custom presentation templates found in your user and installation presentation templates folders and in the current model (see Creating, Exporting, and Using Custom Presentation Templates).
File
In the Filename field, specify a filename and path for the presentation, or click Browse () to specify the file to save the presentation to. You can also click the downward arrow beside the Browse button and choose Browse From () to open the fullscreen Select File window. Click the downward arrow for the Location menu () to choose Copy Location () and (if you have copied a file location) Paste Location ().
Select the Always ask for filename check box (only available if you are not writing to a database) if the software should ask for a filename if needed.
The Open finished presentation check box is selected by default so that the presentation is opened when finished. Clear this check box if you do not want to see the presentation directly.
From the Microsoft PowerPoint template list, choose Default to use the template file specified in the Preferences dialog (see Edit the Default Presentation Settings) or the built-in template if no template has been specified. If you choose Custom you can specify another PowerPoint template (*.potx file) in the Microsoft PowerPoint template file field. Click Refresh to update the slide layouts in the model if the template file has changed. Note that this will reset all slide layout settings to the default values for the chosen template. Click Import to import the template file into the model; otherwise, COMSOL Multiphysics references it on your file system. When you have imported a template, the Imported template file field shows its filename. Click Export to save an imported template file on the file system at a location of your choice. The Microsoft PowerPoint template file field will be updated accordingly. Click Discard to remove an imported template file from the model. This will reset all slide layouts to the default values for the template.
From the Include section header slides to level list, choose a level to which you want to include section header slides: None, Level 1, Level 2 (the default), or Level 3.
In the Maximum number of table rows field, enter a value between 5 and 2000 to limit the number of rows per table (default: 50). This setting allows you to prevent generating presentations with possibly several hundred slides.
Images
From the Size list, you can select the default image size for the presentation, which determines the fraction of the content placeholder’s width that the image occupies on the title and content slide: Extra small (35%), Small (42.5%), Medium (50%), Large (57.5%), or Extra large (65%). The sizes of the generated image files are those for print-optimized output listed under Images in the The Report Node section.
With the default Orientation setting, Landscape, all images have an aspect ratio of 4:3. If you change Orientation to Portrait instead, width and height are interchanged, resulting in images with the aspect ratio 3:4.
From the Type list, select the image file type: PNG (the default) or JPEG.
For the best image quality, use PNG images.
From the Color theme list, specify which color theme to use for the presentation: Global theme (the default), Default from preferences, Basic, COMSOL, Dark, DarkSelection, Default, Light, LightSelection, or RYB.
From the Background list, choose which background to use for the presentation. Current, From theme, Color (the default), or Transparent. If you chose Color, then specify a color using the color palette that become available.
There are three options for controlling image generation:
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 Generate images (default) — Report images are generated in accordance with the settings for the individual report features each time you write the report.
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 Suppress image regeneration — Images are generated if they are not available. Use this option if you want to quickly rewrite the report to include changes that only affect the text.
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 Disable image generation — Images are not generated. This option can be useful, for example, when troubleshooting models with a very large number of nodes.
Use the Link information for PowerPoint add-in setting to control if images in the presentation will be possible to update from PowerPoint using the COMSOL add-in (see The COMSOL Add-Ins for PowerPoint and for Word for details):
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 From preferences (default) — Image linking is controlled by the Include image link information for the COMSOL add-in for PowerPoint check box on the Results>Presentations page in the Preferences dialog box.
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On — Link information will be included for all images whose source entities support linking.
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Off — No link information will be included.
Slide Layouts
The generated presentations use four different slide layouts, all based on standard PowerPoint slide layouts. For a layout in a template to be valid it must satisfy certain criteria, which depend on the layout type:
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 Title slide — Must contain one of either a centered title or a title placeholder and one of either a subtitle or a body placeholder.
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 Title and content — Must contain one of either a title or a centered title placeholder and one content placeholder.
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 Section header — Must contain one of either a title or a centered title placeholder and one body placeholder.
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 Two content — Must contain one of either a title or a centered title placeholder and, in addition, either
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two content placeholders or
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one content placeholder and either a picture placeholder or a body placeholder.
The placeholders used for text content must satisfy a minimum height requirement to be considered. Excluding placeholders not meeting this requirement, the slide layouts must not contain any placeholders other than those listed above, not counting date and time, header, footer, and slide number placeholders, which are ignored.
If you try to choose a template file that does not contain at least one valid layout for each of the four slide layout types, you will get an error message stating which criterion or criteria were not fulfilled. If this happens, choose a different template or try to adjust your template in PowerPoint.
In the Content with image layout list you can choose which layout to use for slides with an image:
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 Automatic — The current Two content layout is used with the following exception: The current Title and content layout is used for Plot Group nodes with no text and with Slide with image only set to Center image (see below).
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 Title and content — Always use the current Title and content layout.
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 Two content — Always use the current Two content layout.
Content slides without an image always use the current Title and content layout.
In the Slide with image only list you can choose how to handle title and content slides with an image on the right that contain no text except for the title and possibly a figure caption:
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 Center image (the default) — The image will be centered horizontally within the slide’s content placeholder. For plot groups, the image size will also be scaled up to extra large.
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 Add text box — An empty text box will be added to the left of the image. To locate this text box, hover below the title field near the left edge of the slide and click when a text cursor appears if you want to add text manually.
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 No action — The image will be shown on the slide’s right-hand side, while the left-hand side will be empty.
By default, text added in the Comments text area on the Properties page for a node reported on, will be shown on the left-hand side of the slide, each line generating a separate bullet. You can use this to make the presentations in your model self-contained and reduce the need for subsequent editing in PowerPoint.
The Title suffix for continuation slides setting controls how to handle the title when the contents generated for a presentation node with the layout Title and content or Two content does not fit on a single slide:
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 None — No suffix is added to the title on the continuation slides.
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 Default — The suffix “ (Continued)” (or the applicable translation) is appended to the title on the continuation slides.
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 Custom — Choose this option if you want to specify your own title suffix in the Suffix text field. Unless the text you enter starts with one of the characters (, [, {, -, –, —, or nonbreaking space, surrounding parentheses will be added automatically.
When a presentation section contains more than one child node, the node labels for the children are by default used as heading texts on the slides. You can suppress these headings by clearing the Use labels as headings check box.
Metadata
In this section, collapsed by default, you can specify information to include in text fields with the same names on the Info page in Microsoft PowerPoint, which you access via the File ribbon button. For the fields indicated by “(all)” below to be visible in Microsoft PowerPoint, you have to click Show All Properties in that program:
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 Tags
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 Comments (all): The text is shown in the Comments field on the Info page in Microsoft Word. If you leave the field empty, the text in the Comments field of the Report node’s Properties page will be used instead.
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 Status (all)
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 Categories
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 Subject (all)
Number Format
Using the controls in this section, you can customize how numbers are formatted in presentation table output. The available Format settings are:
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Default — Numbers in presentation tables are displayed in the same way as numbers are displayed by default in the Table window in the COMSOL Desktop. In particular, the precision is then controlled by the Display precision setting on the Results>Tables page in the Preferences dialog box.
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Custom — Choose this option if you want to customize number formatting for your presentation. You can then specify the Precision as an integer between 1 and 15 (the default is the current Output display precision preference setting); the Notation, with the alternatives
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Automatic (default) — display numbers in either scientific or decimal notation depending on their magnitude.
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Decimal — display numbers in decimal notation, for example 0.85.
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Engineering — display numbers in engineering notation, for example 850E-3.
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Scientific — display numbers in scientific notation, for example 8.5E-1.
and the Complex notation:
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Rectangular — display complex numbers in terms of real and imaginary parts, for example 1 + 2i.
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Polar — display complex number in terms of magnitude and argument, for example 2.2361∠63.435°.
For Scientific and Decimal notation, select the Display all significant digits if you want to keep trailing zeros within the chosen precision.
Select the Right align numeric columns check box to right align table columns with purely numeric data.
You can override the presentation-wide number format settings for individual presentation feature nodes that generate table data. The Settings window for such a presentation feature node contains a Number Format section where you can specify the Format as either From presentation (the default) or Custom. The former option gives the number formatting defined in the corresponding section of the parent Presentation node, whereas the latter allows you to specify dedicated settings.
Edit the Default Presentation Settings
Open The Preferences Dialog Box and click Reports and Presentations to control some properties for the presentation generator.
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If the Presentation directory refers to an existing directory, the default filename for a new presentation will be based on the model’s name. When the presentation directory is set in this way, a nonabsolute path in the Filename text field in the Format section of the Presentation Settings window will be interpreted as relative to this directory.
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In the Default Microsoft PowerPoint template file field, type the full path and filename to a Microsoft PowerPoint template (.potx-file) that you want to use as the default template for presentations. Click Browse to browse to the file’s location. You can also use a Microsoft PowerPoint document (.pptx-file) as your default template.
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In the Company field, type the name of a company associated with the presentation if desired.
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From the Default image size list, you can select the default size for presentation images; choose between Extra small, Small, Medium, Large, and Extra large. Similarly, use the Default image type list to specify the default type for the presentation images: PNG or JPEG.
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With the Include image link information for the COMSOL add-in for PowerPoint selected, it will by default be possible to update some presentation images in Microsoft PowerPoint provided that you have installed the COMSOL add-in. See the Images and The COMSOL Add-Ins for PowerPoint and for Word sections for further information.
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The Maximum number of slides setting helps to avoid generating excessively long presentations. The default value is 200. You can specify any value between 20 and 1000. If more slides than the specified maximum number are needed, an error message is shown. A truncated presentation is saved at the specified location but it does not open automatically even if Open finished presentation has been selected in the Presentation settings.