PowerPoint 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual

Introduction

• What You Can Do with PowerPoint 200

• What's New in PowerPoint 2007

• The Very Basics

• About This Book

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 wildly successful? If you're Microsoft, you completely redesign it. That's right: PowerPoint 2007 looks completely different from its previous incarnation, PowerPoint 2003. Gone are the menus, wizards, and most of the toolbars and panes that a generation of PowerPointilists grew up with. As you see in Figure I-1, Microsoft has replaced all of that with the ribbon. And that's just the tip of the redesign iceberg.

Figure I-1. If you're a PowerPoint 2003 aficionado, expect to be a little shocked when you fire up PowerPoint 2007 for the first time. This version's the biggest wholesale change to the PowerPoint look in nearly a decade, and there's no fallback "classic" mode, either.

The good news is you can still do the same things in PowerPoint 2007 that you could do in earlier versions—and a few more, besides. You can still design beautiful slideshows that contain bulleted lists, pictures, and sound clips. You can still deliver your slideshows in person, on CD, or on an unattended kiosk.

What's new in PowerPoint 2007 is how you do all of these things.

Fortunately, you're holding the book that Microsoft should have included in the PowerPoint 2007 box—but didn't. If you're familiar with PowerPoint 2003 or an earlier version of the program, this book will help you make the transition from the old, familiar way of doing things to the new, improved way. (You'll even see tips and tricks that were buried so deep inside menus and toolbars in PowerPoint 2003 that you probably didn't know they were there.)

On the other hand, if you're brand new to PowerPoint—or even to presentation programs in general—then you're in luck, because this book shows you how to build basic to bowl-'em-over presentations for work, school, or whatever you're involved in.

FROM THE FIELD: Presentation vs. Slideshow

Microsoft's help files, as well as most PowerPoint books, use the terms presentation and slideshow interchangeably. But a very important distinction exists between the two.

A slideshow is a collection of slides but a presentation is everything that goes into delivering the slideshow to your audience. A presentation includes not just the slideshow, but speaker notes, printed handouts, and—most important of all—you, the presenter.

In other words, no matter how cool your slides are, they aren't your presentation. Your slides are nothing more than tools you use to deliver your message. If you keep this distinction in mind, you'll keep your focus on the message—where it belongs—and off the tricky stuff you can do with PowerPoint. For your audience's sake, avoid bringing yet another powerpointless presentation into the world!

What You Can Do with PowerPoint 2007

PowerPoint was originally designed to help business professionals create and deliver electronic slideshows (sales presentations, mostly). But over the years, as Microsoft piled on the options, folks began discovering new ways to use the program.

Here's a short list of what you can create using PowerPoint 2007:

• Multimedia presentations. Use PowerPoint to create slideshows that you—the presenter—can run in front of an audience on a computer screen (for small groups) or a digital projector (for a packed conference hall). The kinds of presentations that fit into this group include business and sales presentations, workshop and conference sessions, academic lectures, in-class reports, courtroom summations, and church choir programs. The sky's the limit. Anytime you need to stand in front of a group and present information, you can use a PowerPoint slideshow to get your point across.

• Kiosk presentations. Presentations that run unattended, are perfect for trade shows, department store product demonstrations—even (believe it or not) weddings and funerals.

• Printed documents. It's not a full-fledged page-layout program like Quark XPress, but PowerPoint 2007 comes with templates for popular printables (like certificates of achievement and calendars). It also gives you more control over layout than earlier versions of the program.