Chapter 1: A First Look at PowerPoint


PowerPoint 2007 is a member of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite of programs. A suite is a group of programs designed by a single manufacturer to work well together. Like its siblings Word (the word processor), Excel (the spreadsheet), Outlook (the personal organizer and e-mail manager), and Access (the database), PowerPoint has a well-defined role. It creates materials for presentations.

A presentation is any kind of interaction between a speaker and audience, but it usually involves one or more of the following visual aids: 35mm slides, overhead transparencies, computer-based slides (either local or at a Web site or other network location), hard-copy handouts, and speaker notes. PowerPoint can create all of these types of visual aids, plus many other types that you learn about as we go along.

Because PowerPoint is so tightly integrated with the other Microsoft Office 2007 components, you can easily share information among them. For example, if you have created a graph in Excel, you can use that graph on a PowerPoint slide. It goes the other way, too. You can, for example, take the outline from your PowerPoint presentation and copy it into Word, where you can dress it up with Word's powerful document formatting commands. Virtually any piece of data in any Office program can be linked to any other Office program, so you never have to worry about your data being in the wrong format.

In this chapter you'll get a big-picture introduction to PowerPoint 2007, and then we'll fire up the program and poke around a bit to help you get familiar with the interface. You'll find out how to use the tabs and panes, and how to get help and updates from Microsoft.

Who Uses PowerPoint and Why?

PowerPoint is a popular tool for people who give presentations as part of their jobs, and also for their support staff. With PowerPoint, you can create visual aids that help get the message across to an audience, whatever that message may be and whatever format it may be presented in. Although the traditional kind of presentation is a live speech presented at a podium, advances in technology have made it possible to give several other kinds of presentations, and PowerPoint has kept pace nicely. The following list outlines the most common PowerPoint formats:

  • Podium: For live presentations, PowerPoint helps the lecturer emphasize key points through the use of overhead transparencies, 35mm slides, or computer-based shows.

  • Kiosk shows: These are self-running presentations that provide information in an unattended location. You have probably seen such presentations listing meeting times and rooms in hotel lobbies and giving sales presentations at trade show booths.

  • Internet formats: You can use PowerPoint to create a show that you can present live over a network or the Internet with a program such as Microsoft NetMeeting, while each participant watches from his or her own computer. You can even store a self-running or interactive presentation on a Web site and make it available for the public to download and run on the PC.

When you start your first PowerPoint presentation, you may not be sure which delivery method you will use. However, it's best to decide the presentation format before you invest too much work in your materials, because the audience's needs are different for each medium.

CROSS-REF 

You learn a lot more about planning your presentation in Chapter 2.

Most people associate PowerPoint with sales presentations, but PowerPoint is useful for people in many other lines of work as well. The following sections present a sampling of how real people just like you are using PowerPoint in their daily jobs.

Sales

More people use PowerPoint for selling goods and services than for any other reason. Armed with a laptop computer and a PowerPoint presentation, a salesperson can make a good impression on a client anywhere in the world. Figure 1-1 shows a slide from a sample sales presentation.

image from book
Figure 1.1: PowerPoint offers unparalleled flexibility for presenting information to potential customers.

Sales possibilities with PowerPoint include the following:

  • Live presentations in front of clients with the salesperson present and running the show. This is the traditional kind of sales pitch that most people are familiar with.

  • Self-running presentations that flip through the slides at specified intervals so that passersby can read them or ignore them as they wish. These types of presentations are great for grabbing people's attention at trade show booths.

  • User-interactive product information demos distributed on CD or disk that potential customers can view at their leisure on their own PCs. This method is very inexpensive, because you can create a single presentation and distribute it by mail to multiple customers.

CROSS-REF 

See Chapter 20 to learn about controlling a live presentation. You create a self-running presentation show in Chapter 21. You learn how to create a user-interactive show in Chapter 22.

Marketing

The distinction between sales and marketing can be rather blurred at times, but marketing generally refers to the positioning of a product in the media rather than its presentation to a particular company or individual. Marketing representatives are often called upon to write advertising copy, generate camera-ready layouts for print advertisements, design marketing flyers and shelf displays, and produce other creative selling materials.

PowerPoint is not a drawing program per se, and it can't substitute for one except in a crude way. However, by combining the Office 2007 clip art collection and drawing tools with some well-chosen fonts and borders, a marketing person can come up with some very usable designs in PowerPoint. Figure 1-2 shows an example. You learn about clip art in Chapter 12.

image from book
Figure 1.2: PowerPoint can generate camera-ready marketing materials, although they can't substitute for the tools that professional advertising companies use.

Human Resources

Human resources personnel often find themselves giving presentations to new employees to explain the policies and benefits of the company. A well-designed, attractive presentation gives the new folks a positive impression of the company they have signed up with, starting them off on the right foot.

One of the most helpful features in PowerPoint for the human resources professional is the Organization Chart tool. With it, you can easily diagram the structure of the company and make changes whenever necessary with a few mouse clicks. Figure 1-3 shows an organization chart on a PowerPoint slide. You can also create a variety of other diagram types. Organization charts and other diagrams are covered in Chapter 11.

image from book
Figure 1.3: Microsoft's Organization Chart lets you easily create organizational diagrams from within PowerPoint.

Education and Training

Most training courses include a lecture section in which the instructor outlines the general procedures and policies. This part of the training is usually followed up with individual, hands-on instruction. PowerPoint can't help much with the latter, but it can help make the lecture portion of the class go smoothly.

Using a third-party scanning program, or the Scanner and Camera Wizard in Windows, you can scan in diagrams and drawings of the objects you are teaching the students to use. You can also use computer-generated images, such as screen captures, to teach people about software.

PowerPoint's interactive controls even let you create quizzes that each student can take on-screen to gauge his or her progress. Depending on the button the student clicks, you can set up the quiz to display a "Yes, you are correct!" or "Sorry, try again" slide. See Figure 1-4. I explain this procedure in more detail in Chapter 21 and in Lab 4 in the Project Labs section at the end of the book.

image from book
Figure 1.4: Test the student's knowledge with a user-interactive quiz in PowerPoint.

Hotel and Restaurant Management

Service organizations such as hotels and restaurants often need to inform their customers of various facts but need to do so unobtrusively so that the information will not be obvious except to those looking for it. For example, a convention center hotel might provide a list of the meetings taking place in its meeting rooms, or a restaurant might show pictures of the day's specials on a video screen in the waiting area.

In such unattended situations, a self-running (kiosk) presentation works best. Typically the computer box and keyboard are hidden from the passersby, and the monitor displays the information.

CROSS-REF 

You learn more about kiosk setups in Chapter 21.

Clubs and Organizations

Many nonprofit clubs and organizations, such as churches and youth centers, operate much the same way as for-profit businesses and need sales, marketing, and informational materials. But clubs and organizations often have special needs too, such as the need to recognize volunteers for a job well done. PowerPoint provides a Certificate template that's ideal for this purpose. Figure 1-5 shows a certificate generated in PowerPoint.

image from book
Figure 1.5: With PowerPoint, you can easily create certificates and awards.




Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Bible
Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 Bible
ISBN: 0470144939
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 268
Authors: Faithe Wempen

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