Introduction

Only a few years ago, PowerPoint was a novelty. All of a sudden, speakers started giving PowerPoint presentations at conferences and seminars. Audiences welcomed PowerPoint. The slides made presentations more interesting and lively. You could gaze at the slides while you listened to the speaker. Speakers — especially speakers who weren’t comfortable talking before an audience — liked PowerPoint, too. PowerPoint took away some of the burdens of public speaking. The program made it easier to speak in front of strangers.

PowerPoint became a staple of conferences, seminars, and corporate boardrooms. Then the novelty wore off, and audiences started grumbling. The presentations were too much alike. You saw bulleted list after bulleted list. Presentations followed the same tired formula — introductory slides followed by “key point” slides following by a tidy conclusion. Writing in the New Yorker, Ian Parker declared that PowerPoint is “a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.” Edward Tufte, professor of information design at Yale University, lamented the program’s “charjunk” and “PowerPointPhluff.” In a Wired essay called “PowerPoint Is Evil,” he wrote, “PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content.”

Despite these complaints, speakers have not abandoned PowerPoint, and audiences still welcome it. But expectations have risen. Audiences expect the presenter to use PowerPoint skillfully and creatively. The audience knows when a presenter is just going through the motions and when a presenter is using PowerPoint to explore a subject and show it in a new light.

This book was written with the goal of showing you how to use the PowerPoint software, but also how to use it with skill and imagination. I tell you which buttons to click to complete tasks, but I also show you how PowerPoint can be a means of communicating and connecting with your audience. I show you how to build a persuasive presentation, one that brings the audience around to your side. No matter how much experience you have with PowerPoint, this book will make you a better, more proficient, more confident user of the program.

What’s in This Book, Anyway?

This book is jam-packed with how-to’s, advice, shortcuts, and tips for getting the most out of PowerPoint. Here’s a bare outline of the seven parts of this book:

bullet Book I: Getting Started in PowerPoint: Explains the PowerPoint interface and how to get around on-screen, as well as basic tasks such as how to create presentations and view presentations in different ways. You can also find advice for formulating and designing presentations.

bullet Book II: Building Your Presentation: Shows how to create, manipulate, and format slides, as well as how to handle the master slides and master styles that make it possible to format many slides simultaneously. You discover how to design the look of your presentation and enter lists, text, and text boxes.

bullet Book III: Communicating with Tables, Charts, and Diagrams: Explores the many techniques for creating, designing, and formatting tables, charts, and diagrams.

bullet Book IV: Embellishing Your Slides with Graphics and Shapes: Demonstrates how to create lines, shapes, text-box shapes, and WordArt images. You also find out how to adorn a presentation with photographs, graphics, and clip-art images.

bullet Book V: Flash and Dash: Shows how to take advantage of transitions and animations, as well as make video and sound a part of a presentation.

bullet Book VI: Giving a Presentation: Explores all the different ways to deliver a presentation — in person, as a self-running presentation, and as a user-run presentation. You find out how to write slide notes and print presentations, as well as deliver them over the Internet and on CDs.

bullet Book VII: PowerPoint for Power Users: Looks into customizing PowerPoint, designing templates, collaborating with others, linking and embedding, and understanding macros.

What Makes This Book Special

You are holding in your hands a computer book designed to make learning PowerPoint as easy and comfortable as possible. Besides the fact that this book is easy to read, it’s different from other books about PowerPoint.

Easy-to-look-up information

This book is a reference, and that means that readers have to be able to find out how to do something quickly. To that end, I have taken great pains to make sure that the material in this book is well organized and easy to find. The descriptive headings help you find information quickly. The bulleted and numbered lists make accomplishing a task simpler. The tables make options easier to understand.

I want you to be able to look down the page and see in a heading or list the name of the topic that concerns you. I want you to be able to find what you need quickly. Compare the table of contents in this book to the book next to it on the bookstore shelf. This book is better organized than the others.

A task-oriented approach

Most computer books describe what the software is, but this book shows you how to use the software. I assume that you came to this book because you want to know how to do something — animate a slide, create a chart, design a look for your presentation. You came to the right place. This book shows you how to make PowerPoint work for you.

Meaningful screen shots

The screen shots in this book show only the part of the screen that illustrates what is being explained in the text. When an explanation refers to one part of the screen, only that part of the screen is shown. I took great care to make sure that the screen shots serve to help you understand the PowerPoint features and how they work.

Foolish Assumptions

Please forgive me, but I made some foolish assumptions about you, the reader of this book. I assumed that:

bullet You own a copy of PowerPoint 2007, the latest version of PowerPoint, and you have installed it on your computer.

bullet You use the Windows operating system. Even if yours is an old version of Windows, all the methods in this book apply.

bullet You are kind to foreign tourists and small animals.

Conventions Used in This Book

I want you to understand all the instructions in this book, and in that spirit, I’ve adopted a few conventions.

Where you see boldface letters or numbers in this book, it means to type the letters or numbers. For example, “Enter 25 in the Percentage text box” means to do exactly that: Enter the number 25.

Sometimes two tabs on the Ribbon have the same name. To distinguish tabs with the same name from one another, I sometimes include one tab’s “Tools” heading in parentheses if there could be any confusion about which tab I’m referring to. For example, when you see the words “(Table Tools) Design tab,” I’m referring to the Design tab for creating tables, not the Design tab for changing a slide’s appearance. (Book I, Chapter 3 describes the Ribbon and the tabs in detail.)

To show you how to step through command sequences, I use the ⇒ symbol. For example, you can click the Office button and choose Publish⇒Package for CD to copy a presentation to a CD. The ⇒ symbol is just a shorthand method of saying “Choose Publish and then Package for CD.”

To give most commands, you can press combinations of keys. For example, pressing Ctrl+S saves the file you’re working on. In other words, you can hold down the Ctrl key and press the S key to save a file. Where you see Ctrl+, Alt+, or Shift+ and a key name or key names, press the keys simultaneously.

Yet another way to give a command is to click a button. When I tell you to click a button, you see a small illustration of the button in the margin of this book (unless the button is too large to fit in the margin). The button shown here is the Save button, the one you can click to save a file.

Icons Used in This Book

To help you get the most out of this book, I’ve placed icons here and there. Here’s what the icons mean:

Next to the Tip icon, you can find shortcuts and tricks of the trade to make your visit to PowerPoint Land more enjoyable.

Where you see the Warning icon, tread softly and carefully. It means that you are about to do something that you may regret later.

When I explain a juicy fact that bears remembering, I mark it with a Remember icon. When you see this icon, prick up your ears. You will discover something that you need to remember throughout your adventures with PowerPoint.

When I am forced to describe high-tech stuff, a Technical Stuff icon appears in the margin. You don’t have to read what’s beside the Technical Stuff icons if you don’t want to, although these technical descriptions often help you understand how a software feature works.

Good Luck, Reader!

If you have a comment about this book, a question, or a shortcut you would like to share with me, address an e-mail message to me at this address: weverka@sbcglobal.net. Be advised that I usually can’t answer e-mail right away because I’m too darned busy. I do appreciate comments and questions, however, because they help me pass my dreary days in captivity.