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 ...