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CCTR An Overview of PowerPoint

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Welcome to PowerPoint, the best-selling presentation graphics software
package in the world. PowerPoint's innovative tools and easy approach can help
you make professional-looking presentations quickly and easily. By using some
of PowerPoint's new content-development, preparation, and rehearsal features,
you can be more effective in getting your point across. Whether you need quick
overheads for a team briefing, slides for a sales meeting, or dazzling effects
for an on-screen presentation, PowerPoint has it all. Prompts, tips, and Cue
Cards help you learn the product quickly; wizards, templates, and AutoLayouts
help you get right to work; and a complete set of easy-to-use tools assures you
have everything you need to get your point across and share information with
others.

With PowerPoint you can:

All the tools and components you need are at your command and in your control.

What You'll Make with PowerPoint

 PowerPoint is a complete presentation graphics package. It gives you
everything you need to produce a professional-looking presentation ¾ text
handling, outlining, drawing, graphing, clip art, and so on. It also offers
rich speaker support and aids to help you create truly effective presentations.
PowerPoint makes you, the presenter, an independent producer of your own
high-quality presentations. Now you can work on your own timetable.

Don't worry about consistency in design and color. PowerPoint can help
you. If you don't consider yourself a designer, just apply one of the
PowerPoint templates to your presentation. And choose from among the thousands
of color schemes available. Whether you're making black-and-white overheads or
putting together an electronic slide show, PowerPoint is easy to use.

Here’s what you'll be making in PowerPoint:

Terms That Apply to Presentations Template

 A presentation whose format and color scheme you apply to another
presentation. More than 100 professionally designed templates come with
PowerPoint, but you can use any presentation as a template anytime.

PowerPoint default presentation

 PowerPoint comes with a default presentation, complete with color
scheme, type styles, and so on. This is the presentation format you are working
with when you choose Blank Presentation in the New Presentation dialog box. You
can make any presentation the default by saving it as DEFAULT.PPT (Windows) or
Default Presentation (Macintosh). Your presentation will overwrite the
PowerPoint default presentation and will be stored in the PowerPoint directory
(Windows) or folder (Macintosh). Then, each time you open a blank presentation,
the defaults will be the ones you set.

Masters

 In PowerPoint, you have a master for each of the key components in your
presentation ¾ one for slides, one for your outline, one for speaker's notes,
and one for audience handouts. Pictures and text you include on the masters
will appear on every slide and notes page. The Slide Master and Notes Master
are particularly flexible. You can move objects around (including the title and
text placeholders), add art, add headings or labels, change colors, change
fonts, and so on.


About Creating Presentations and Slides

 In PowerPoint, your entire presentation is in one file ¾ everything is
"under one roof." That includes all the slides, the outline, the speaker's
notes, and the handouts, as well as the formatting information you build into
your presentation.
Using a slide layout is an easy way to begin building a presentation.
You choose a slide layout by selecting New Slide from the Insert menu and then
selecting the layout you want in the New Slide dialog box. There is a variety
of slide layouts, some with placeholders in which you type text, and some with
placeholders set up to make it easy to add graphs, charts, clip art, or other
objects.With PowerPoint, you can change the look of your presentation ¾ the
format of it, the colors in it, or the kind of output you want ¾ anytime. You
can always apply a new template or change the color scheme .PowerPoint comes
with more than 100 templates ¾ they're in the PowerPoint Template directory
(Windows) or folder (Macintosh). Each template has its own color scheme, a
specially designed Slide Master, and styled fonts that work with the overall
design of the presentation. In addition, any presentation can be used as a
template. So, if you create a special look for a presentation and want to use
the same look for other presentations, you can save it as a template.
In addition to saving a presentation as a PowerPoint file, you can save
it as Windows metafiles or as a Scrapbook file on the Macintosh. Or you can
save it as an outline. You also have the option of saving your presentation in
PowerPoint 3.0 file format. Your choices appear in the Save File As Type box
in the Save As dialog box.

Note: You can open presentations created by other presentation packages
directly in PowerPoint if you've installed the appropriate program translator.
The PowerPoint Setup program gives you the option of installing translators for
some popular applications.


Quick steps for creating a Presentation

Creating Presentations and Slides

 The heart of your work in PowerPoint involves creating presentations.
To create presentations, you write and design slides. Here you'll find out
about making new presentations and saving the work you do. You'll learn about
AutoLayouts and the placeholders that make it easy to add text, objects, and
graphics. For overall presentation design, you'll find out how to use the
professionally designed PowerPoint templates. You can apply one to a
presentation at any time ¾ when you begin, as you work, or after you've typed
your content. The PowerPoint Slide Master ¾ the slide that holds the format for
your titles, text, and any background items you want to appear on your slides ¾
is explained, along with how to choose and work with color schemes.

If you're new to presentation graphics, you can jump right into
PowerPoint and make a quick presentation.

Step 1: Start PowerPoint

 Once you've installed PowerPoint, it's a simple matter to get up and
running. All you need to do is double-click the PowerPoint icon in the Program
Manager (Windows) or on the Desktop (Macintosh).

Step 2: Use the AutoContent Wizard to Create a Presentation

 When PowerPoint opens, you see the PowerPoint startup dialog box.
Select the AutoContent Wizard option button.The AutoContent wizard prompts you
to make a title slide and then leads you through choosing a presentation
category. You will get an outline that reflects the category you have chosen.
Type your own ideas over the sample text in the outline. Switch to Slide view
to see your slides.

Step 3: Refine Your Presentation

 Once you finish the first draft of a presentation, you'll probably want
to go back and touch it up. That might include editing the text, changing
colors, changing the order of the slides, or changing the look.To change your
presentation's look, you can apply a template or use the Pick a Look wizard.

Edit Your Text in Outline View

 Use Outline view to move the text around on your slides or to edit it.

Edit Color and Artwork

You have lots of options:

Change the template (there are more than 100) of your presentation by
clicking the Pick A Look Wizard button on the Standard toolbar and following
the on-screen instructions.
Customize your presentation by adding clip art and by drawing shapes on
the slides with the PowerPoint drawing tools. Use the Drawing toolbars to draw
shapes, and then add color and patterns to the shapes. You can insert clip art
by using the Insert Clip Art button. Or, you can use art from other
applications, using the Picture command on the Insert menu.

Add Special Effects to Your Electronic Presentation

 You can have the bullet points on the slides appear one at a time,
using special effects (called creating build slides). And you can use special
transitions to move to each slide in a slide show (called adding transitions).
To create a build slide, go to Slide Sorter view, choose the Build command from
the Tools menu, and then select the s pecial effects you want. To add
transitions, choose the Transition command from the Tools menu, and then select
a transition.

Step 4: Preview Your Presentation On-Screen

 Preview your show by clicking the Slide Show button at the bottom of
the PowerPoint window. Click the mouse button to advance the slides manually.

Step 5: Save and Print Your Presentation

 Before printing your presentation, it's a good idea to save it using
the Save command on the File menu.When you use the Pick a Look wizard,
PowerPoint sets the output format for you. All you need to do is choose the
Print command from the File menu. In the Print dialog box, choose what you want
to print ¾ choose Slides, for instance, to print a hard copy of your slides.
When you finish working on your presentation and are ready to quit PowerPoint,
from the File menu, choose the Exit command (Windows) or the Quit command
(Macintosh).

PowerPoint Wizards

 Wizards are PowerPoint's way of making it easy for you to quickly and
efficiently create professional-looking presentations. Even if you know very
little about PowerPoint, the wizards can help you develop your ideas and design
your presentation.
A wizard is a guided approach to creating a presentation. All you do is
answer the questions that appear on-screen.

Here are the wizards available to you in PowerPoint:
Auto Content wizard
Pick a Look wizard

Creating a new slide

 PowerPoint offers you a variety of AutoLayouts every time you create a
new slide.

To create a new slide

1. From the Insert menu, choose New Slide.
- or -
Click the New Slide button on the status bar.
- or -
Press CTRL+M (Windows) or COMMAND+M (Macintosh).

The New Slide dialog box appears. Use the scroll bar to see more layouts.

2. Select the layout you want, and then choose OK.

The new slide with placeholders for title and/or text and/or objects appears on
your screen. Notice how the placeholders correspond to the layout you selected.


Changing a layout for a slide

 As you create a presentation or as you edit an existing presentation,
you may want to change the layout of a slide. You don't lose any text or
graphics when a slide adopts a new layout. You can resize the text or graphics
boxes to conform to the new layout.

To change a slide's layout

 1. While in Slide view, from the Format menu, choose Slide Layout.
- or -
Click the Layout button on the status bar.

The Slide Layout dialog box appears with the current layout highlighted.

2. Click the new slide layout you want, and then choose Apply.


About Working with Slides and Layouts

 When you create a new presentation in PowerPoint, you begin with one
slide. As you build the presentation, you'll be adding more slides ¾ some with
text, some with artwork, and some with charts. You can add a slide or slides to
your presentation anytime you want by choosing New Slide from the Insert menu
or by clicking the New Slide button on the status bar. It doesn't matter which
of the PowerPoint views you're in ¾ PowerPoint adds the slide following your
current, or active, slide. However, if you are working in one of the masters,
the new slide becomes the first slide in your presentation. You choose the
layout of a new slide by picking the AutoLayout you want to use in the New
Slide dialog box. You'll see placeholders for various objects on the Auto
Layouts ¾ some for titles and text, and some for clip art, graphs, or
organizational charts. The placeholders give you quick access to many
PowerPoint visuals. You just double-click inside a placeholder to immediately
add the kind of object specified in the placeholder. Or single-click to add
text to any placeholder.

How You'll Learn About PowerPoint

 As a user of Microsoft PowerPoint, chances are you're also a user of
Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. If so, you'll find lots of similarities
among the three applications. We've worked for consistency in menus, commands,
and dialog boxes. We've standardized toolbars so you don't have to rethink what
the icons mean and how toolbars work whenever you switch between Microsoft
applications. You can create something in PowerPoint and bring it into a
Microsoft Word document. Or you can make a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel and
paste it into a PowerPoint presentation.

Here are the ways you can learn about PowerPoint:

? Quick Preview
? The User's Guide
? Online Help
? Cue Cards
Þ ToolTips and the Status Bar
Þ Balloon Help
Þ Tip of the Day

WebMaster@umkc.edu

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University of Missouri Kansas City