Office 2010: The Missing Manual

Chapter 20. Creating a Presentation

Since it first came on the scene in the late 1980s, PowerPoint has forever transformed the way we conduct meetings. Its slick slides can illustrate your points so much more clearly and efficiently than stacks of printed handouts or scrawls on a dusty chalkboard. PowerPoint presentations can contain images, charts, tables, videos—all of which are ready to come to life thanks to a slew of built-in animations and transition effects. PowerPoint also gives you flexibility in your delivery options: Give your slideshow in person or remotely over the Internet, set it up to run continuously (in a trade-show kiosk, for example), or put it on a website for people to find and view at their own pace.

Meetings have come a long way—and so has PowerPoint. PowerPoint 2010 features the same enhanced, customizable ribbon you find throughout Office 2010, as well as an improved Animations ribbon, new slide transitions, the ability to divide your presentation into sections, and better photo and video editing options. And that’s just for starters. The next several chapters show you what PowerPoint 2010 can do to make your presentations more exciting. This chapter gets you up to speed, covering the basics of creating, saving, viewing, and printing a presentation.

Creating a New Presentation

When you first open the program from the Windows Start menu, PowerPoint has already created a new, blank presentation for you, as shown in Figure 20-1. Center stage is the working area ...