Power Point® All?in?One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 1. Introducing PowerPoint

In This Chapter

• Taking a peak at PowerPoint

• Understanding PowerPoint jargon

• Communicating by way of PowerPoint presentations

• Taking a quick tour of the program

In this short chapter, I take you to the end of a pier, briefly explain what swimming is, and push you in the water. As you thrash about, I tell you what a PowerPoint presentation is and explain some PowerPoint jargon. Then I fish you out of the water and take you on a whirlwind tour of PowerPoint. By the time you finish reading this chapter, you will know what creating a PowerPoint presentation entails.

PowerPoint Slides

Figure 1-1 (top) shows the PowerPoint window. That thing in the middle is a slide, PowerPoint's word for an image that you show your audience. Surrounding the slide are many tools for entering text and decorating slides. When the time comes to show your slides, you dispense with the tools and make the slide fill the screen, as shown in Figure 1-1 (bottom). Throughout this book, you will find instructions for making slides and for constructing a presentation, the PowerPoint word that describes all the slides, from first to last, that you show to your audience.

Some PowerPoint Jargon

To make PowerPoint do your bidding, you need to know a little jargon:

• Presentation: All the slides, from start to finish, that you show your audience. Sometimes presentations are called “slide shows.” Presentations are saved in presentation files (.pptx files).

• Slides: The images you create with PowerPoint. ...