Making a Presentation

The point of creating a slide show is to show it! Although your initial creation may not win any awards for powerful communication, it will allow you to learn how to make a presentation.

Other chapters explore how to make effective presentations, but for now you simply need to learn how to start a show, how to advance slides, and how to end a show.

Starting and Ending a Slide Show

Starting and ending a slide show is quite simple. To start a slide show, you choose Slide Show, View Show or press the F5 key. PowerPoint jumps to the first slide in the show and displays it full screen, without menus or other distractions (refer to Figure 2.8.)

If you see icons in the lower-left corner of the screen, or if you see the mouse pointer, it's because you've moved the mouse. These icons do have a purpose, which we'll explore later, but if you let the mouse lie for a moment, these distractions disappear.

Remember that if you want to begin the slide show with the current slide, or if all you want to do is preview the current slide, from the current slide, you click the Slide Show button on the Views toolbar at the lower left of the screen.

To end a slide show immediately, press the Esc key. PowerPoint returns you to the editing view you had selected when you started playing the show.

You can also simply advance to the end of the show. By default, PowerPoint shows a blank, all-black screen after the last slide in a slide show. At that point, if you advance one more time, or press Esc, PowerPoint automatically returns you to the editing screen.

For details on playing a slide show, see p. 253.

Advancing Slides in a Slide Show

There are at least four basic and simple ways to advance a slide after you've started a slide show:

• Click the primary mouse button (usually the left button).

• Press the spacebar.

• Press the Page Down key.

• Press the down-arrow key or the right-arrow key.

Each time you perform one of these actions, PowerPoint immediately advances to the next slide. You can also change how the slides change by modifying slide transitions to include various visual and sound effects.

For details on adding transitions to slides, see p. 244.

You should also be aware that these actions advance a slide show to the next slide, unless the slide contains animations, in which case the show advances only to the next scheduled action.

For more information on animating slides, see p. 197.

Tip

Advancing slides is easy. But what happens if you accidentally go too far? The easiest way to back up is to press the Page Up key, the up-arrow key, or the left-arrow key.

The Absolute Minimum

In this chapter, you jumped right in and created a simple slide show, utilizing the basic functions you'll need for creating any presentation. You also did the following:

• You learned how to create and add slides.

• You found out how to view slides in various ways that help you develop a slide show.

• You discovered the basic building blocks of a PowerPoint slide: designs, layouts, and objects.

• You learned how to show a slide show.

In Chapter 3, "PowerPoint Basics," we'll step back and talk about the basics of the PowerPoint program itself how to understand the PowerPoint layout, how to use the various menus and toolbars, and how to save, retrieve, and print PowerPoint slides.