Office 2007: The Missing Manual

Chapter 17.  Creating a Basic Presentation

If you’ve never seen a PowerPoint presentation, you’re in a pretty select group. With legions of folks all over the world pounding out an estimated 30 million PowerPoint slides every day, PowerPoint’s the runaway leader in the field of presentation programs, leaving competitors like Corel Presentations and Apple’s Keynote in the dust. PowerPoint has become so ubiquitous that it’s even managed to work its way into the English language: powerpointless, as many audience members can attest, describes a PowerPoint presentation that has bulleted text, graphics, animated slide transitions—everything except a good reason for existing.

So how do you improve a program that’s so wildly successful? If you’re Microsoft, you completely redesign it. As described in the introduction, PowerPoint 2007 looks completely different from its previous incarnation, PowerPoint 2003. The menus, wizards, and most of the toolbars and panes that a generation of PowerPointilists grew up with have been replaced by the ribbon (Figure 17-1). And that’s just the tip of the redesign iceberg.

This chapter will familiarize you with the major changes by walking you through the creation of a basic bullets-and-background slideshow presentation. You’ll learn how to create a new slideshow, choose a look and feel, add text and slides, print speaker notes and handouts, and finally, how to unveil your masterpiece.

The good news is you can still do the same things in PowerPoint 2007 that ...