Microsoft® PowerPoint® 2010 Bible

Chapter 1. A First Look at PowerPoint

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Who uses PowerPoint and why?

• What's new in PowerPoint 2010?

• Learning your way around PowerPoint

• Changing the view

• Zooming in and out

• Displaying and hiding screen elements

• Working with window controls

• Using the help system and getting updates

PowerPoint 2010 is a member of the Microsoft Office 2010 suite of programs. A suite is a group of programs designed by a single manufacturer to work well together. Like its siblings — Word (the word processor), Excel (the spreadsheet), Outlook (the personal organizer and e-mail manager), and Access (the database) — PowerPoint has a well-defined role. It creates materials for presentations.

A presentation is any kind of interaction between a speaker and audience, but it usually involves one or more of the following visual aids: 35mm slides, overhead transparencies, computer-based slides (either local or at a Web site or other network location), hard-copy handouts, and speaker notes. PowerPoint can create all of these types of visual aids, plus many other types that you'll learn about as you go along.

Because PowerPoint is so tightly integrated with the other Microsoft Office 2010 components, you can easily share information among them. For example, if you have created a graph in Excel, you can use that graph on a PowerPoint slide. It goes the other way, too. You can, for example, take the outline from your PowerPoint presentation and copy it into Word, where you can dress it up with Word's powerful document ...