PowerPoint Primer

PowerPoint is essentially a business presentation program that allows you to enter content on slides such as bulleted lists of text, graphs, or graphic objects such as pictures or company logos.

Tip: Tapping your way through PowerPoint

Anything PowerPoint-related that you can do on a PC you can also do with Tablet PC. Thus, some PowerPoint tasks you used to do with a mouse click respond to the tap of your Tablet PC pen — such as applying design templates, layouts, animation schemes, and color schemes.

You build slides by entering content in an outline format or by entering it right on individual slides in placeholders (these are sort of like text boxes in Word; when you tap in them they open for you to enter text or insert objects).

You can choose a layout for each slide that determines what types of placeholders will appear (title, title and text, pictures, and so on). You can also apply slide designs; they are preset combinations of background colors, font styles, and graphic elements that make your slides look really nice without requiring you to get a degree in graphic design.

You can use a Slide Sorter view to reorganize slides in a presentation. You can also use features to add animations, slide transitions (special effects that occur when you move from one slide to another in a slide presentation), and even recorded sounds or a narration.

When you’ve built your slide show, you can play it using PowerPoint, and even annotate your slide content with a Pen tool (PowerPoint’s own, but you can also use your Tablet PC pen if you’re giving the presentation from a Tablet PC) or take meeting notes.

Got it? Okay, time to see what Tablet PC brings to the PowerPoint mix.