Who Uses PowerPoint

Presentations can also be categorized by who is creating them and for whom they are being created. Presentation creators and their audiences include:

Business users, including managers, salespeople and others who need to communicate with clients or other employees
Trainers , including those creating presentations primarily to help adults learn processes, procedures or other new information
Teachers , including anyone creating presentations to teach children or adults in a formal education situation
Students who need to present information for a class project or assignment
Home users who want to share information with others in a non-business environment

Business Uses

PowerPoint users in the business world need to communicate ideas to people within their company and outside of their company. These users tend to be both the most formal and the most imaginative users of PowerPoint.

A common presentation might document the need for additional resources for a project or to request the creation of a new project. PowerPoint allows users to target the information to the audience. In Chapters 2 and 3, we meet Jane who has been tasked with creating, publicizing and implementing a new project for her non-profit organization. In Chapter 5, we meet George, who needed to inform his corporation's management of a new business opportunity.

Many companies have created interactive company reports to communicate both internally and externally. Creating a single PowerPoint presentation and distributing it to all employees ensures a consistent message is presented and all employees see and hear the same words. In Chapter 9, we meet Sam, who needs to create a series of presentations to introduce a new benefits package to the members of her company.

Business users who need to share information with clients without a representative in attendance create kiosks of product, store or site information. Creating the kiosks with PowerPoint allows re-use of existing hardware and skills, while still reaching a large audience. Sam will take advantage of these ideas while creating her benefits presentations.

Corporate users create presentations to share sales data with employees and clients. The ease of data exchange between PowerPoint and the other Microsoft Office applications, along with the visuals provided by charts and graphs, can help create powerful presentations that express exactly what you want the audience to hear. In Chapter 10, we meet Lydia and learn how to integrate sales information into your presentations in the best possible manner.

By the same token, creating a single presentation about a new product and distributing it to all clients and potential clients allows for a more timely and consistent preview of the product. In addition, the presentation can be easily adapted for use as a background to a trade show booth or announcement page. In Chapter 11, we meet Bryan, who is creating a mini-CD catalog of his company's new products for employees at the branch offices. In Chapters 13 and 18, we meet Curt, who runs a consulting company. He needs to create a multi-use presentation to share his consulting services with clients around the world.

PowerPoint's template creation allows business users to develop a corporate identity that helps clients identify their products and services at a glance. In Chapter 12, we meet Rachel, who needs to integrate a corporate color scheme into her printed materials. Rachel also joins us in Chapter 16, when she takes the corporate identity one-step further and develops a series of standard templates for company employees.

Training And Teaching Uses

Because PowerPoint allows the creation of both student and teacher/trainer materials in a single file, it lends itself perfectly to the creation of speaker-led training materials.

Each slide has a notes section for additional presenter information, while the slides present information to focus student attention upon the most important points. Once class materials are created, handouts can be printed using either PowerPoint or Word. Slides, notes or outlines can also can be sent to Word for formatting and distribution.

Tip 2: CBT Examples

Looking for a great PowerPoint template for creating Computer Based Training slides? Check out this example from PowerPoint MVP Bill Foley's website: http://www.pttinc.com/power_point.htm#Microsoft%20PowerPoint

Some teachers have learned to use PowerPoint's animation features to create slides in which elements move and/or change. The changing slides hold the student's interest. In Chapter 6, we meet Alicia and learn with her how to keep her students' attention and improve her classroom dynamics by adding animation to her slides.

In addition, PowerPoint's multimedia capabilities allow teachers and trainers to reach all learning styles. Information can be presented using text, sound, animations and movies. Teachers and trainers have even started taking the learning one step further and assigned students to create their own presentations to reinforce the learning from the classroom. In Chapter 7, we meet members of Daniel's classroom and help them incorporate multimedia into their biology reports.

One of the other uses for PowerPoint in the classroom is to ensure the information presented is retained. Many users have developed PowerPoint games for this use. " Games ?" you ask "Why on earth would people want to use PowerPoint for game development?" Well, it is an easy way to begin interactive programming. It is a non- threatening way to verify the content presented has been learned. What's more, it is fun for both the user and the presentation developer.

Samples of games available currently on the web:

Jeopardy “ Samples available at either
http://www.echosvoice.com/jeopardy.htm
http://www.pttinc.com/customized_software.htm
Quiz Shows “ Sample and code available at
http://www.mvps.org/skp/ppt00031.htm
Family Feud “ Sample available at
http://www.pttinc.com/customized_software.htm
Tic-Tac-Toe “ Sample available for download at
http://www.mvps.org/skp/download.htm
Mystery games “ Template available at
http://www.d124.s-cook.k12.il.us/pp_templates/PP_templates.htm

If you are looking for even more ideas, check out PowerPak for PowerPoint from FTC Publishing “ a series of PowerPoint templates that turn lesson plans into games. While aimed at the education world, they are adaptable to business uses as well.

Home Use

The third group of PowerPoint users create their presentations outside of the business world. While we do not meet as many of these users, I thought you might like to know some of the more imaginative uses for PowerPoint at home.

Websites

PowerPoint's Save as Web Page option (called Save as HTML in PowerPoint 97) is not intended to be a web site creation tool. However, there are places where people have found it very useful to save PowerPoint presentations as web pages.

Saving presentations as web pages creates a reproducible, distributable presentation that runs on multiple platforms. PowerPoint itself runs only on Macs and PCs. Presentations that have been converted to HTML can be viewed on almost any machine available.

Photo Albums

Do you have a series of pictures from an event or trip? Do you want to share those old family photographs sitting in storage? PowerPoint is a great way to collect these photographs together, organize them and share them with others.

Once the pictures have been scanned into a folder, they can quickly and easily be inserted into PowerPoint either individually or together. Add some animation, some entrance and exit effects, captions describing who or what is in the picture, some background music or narration, and you have an interactive, electronic photograph album. Save the presentation to a CD and it can even be set up to run automatically on any machine.

Lip Syncing / Karaoke / Church Uses

Volunteers across the world are discovering the animations available within PowerPoint can be used to display the words to songs for large groups to follow. Churches are moving to PowerPoint to display music during services.

Tip 3: Churches That Use PowerPoint

With more and more churches going to PowerPoint to present sermon notes, music, announcements, and other church information, an entire industry has sprouted to meet the needs of churches.

Several organizations sell software to make it easier to present and track church music, and inspirational backgrounds and templates for presentations. Many of these products are priced with church budgets and volunteer efforts in mind.

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People working with children are using PowerPoint to teach songs using the bouncing ball methodology. While the timing problems inherent in PowerPoint need to be overcome , using PowerPoint to teach music is quite possible. In Chapter 8, we meet Wayne who creates presentations to teach his group new songs.

Resumes

As the population of computer users increases and the job market tightens, people have begun distributing electronic resumes. Many still stick to Word documents, but as the population base for PowerPoint increases , so does the number of people hoping to show off their creative skills by designing interactive, updatable resumes that are PowerPoint presentations.

Looking for work in the communications and computer markets? You can show off your PowerPoint skills by taking static brochures or flyers and translating them into interactive public relations pieces. These pieces show off not only what you have done, but also what you can do for the potential client.

You can also make a presentation that is a skeleton for an electronic portfolio. With the ability to link PowerPoint to other documents and applications, your resume becomes not just a static document, but a way to show off your wide range of skills and accomplishments.

With the distribution capabilities of PowerPoint 2003, the possibilities of PowerPoint-based resumes grow even further. CDs can show off the creative talents of the creator, with all of the information capable of being stored on a single CD for easy distribution.

VBA developers use PowerPoint resumes as a way to show their programming skills. Not only are they able to give examples of code they have written, they can show the code is clean and executable as well.