What's Covered in This Book? This book is not the ultimate reference to the complete works of the Microsoft PowerPoint development team. And it was a little difficult (okay, a lot difficult) to divide the myriad annoyances into logical chapters. But I tried. Still, the book is set up so you can jump in wherever the water looks good and get out easily whenever you're tired. Here's a general outline of what you'll find.
Chapter 1, Presenting Your Presentation -
Get a handle on setting up the equipment, troubleshooting projection issues, navigating during a presentation, and using custom shows.
Chapter 2, Dumb Defaults -
Learn how to deal with PowerPoint's dumb default settings: Fast Saves, AutoFit, moving objects, shortened menus, and the lack of default slide layouts and charts.
Chapter 3, Formatting and Editing -
Work with PowerPoint, not against it. Read about creating templates, using multiple masters, leveraging color schemes, working with slide numbers, and using bulleted text and tabs.
Chapter 4, Importing -
Wrap your head around importing a wide variety of materials into PowerPoint, including Word documents, Excel data, charts, pictures, clip art, and PDFs.
Chapter 5, Organization Charts, Diagrams, and Drawing Tools -
Organize organization charts, diddle with diagrams, and feel the power of connectors, edit points, and the alignment tools.
Chapter 6, Charts and Graphs -
Chart a new course through old, tired waters. Learn how to create combination charts, break an axis, add error bars to data points, and update links efficiently.
Chapter 7, Animations, Action Settings, and Hyperlinks -
Make your audience go "Wow" with your cool animations. Learn how to incorporate action settings and hyperlinks to increase the interactivity factor of your presentations.
Chapter 8, Sound and Video -
Stop tearing your hair out trying to get background music and other multimedia playing in your presentation.
Chapter 9, Printing and Distribution -
Deal with getting your presentation into someone else's hands, whether via notes pages, handouts, Flash, web pages, video, or an Autorun CD. |
