Program Recovery

Many PowerPoint users work with multiple PowerPoint files open at once, copying and pasting text, pulling in duplicate slides, or performing a variety of other tasks. Anyone who multitasks with several PowerPoint windows open knows that, occasionally, something goes wrong and the program stops responding. To avoid losing all your hard work when this happens, Microsoft has improved the ability of PowerPoint 2007 to save and recover the file you were working in, as well as to restore all your program windows to their status prior to the failure.

The AutoRecover option helps PowerPoint perform this feat. To turn on and adjust AutoRecover settings, follow these steps:

1. Click the Microsoft Office Button.

2. Click PowerPoint Options.

3. Click the Save category.

4. Verify that the Save AutoRecover Information Every X Minutes check box is selected.

5. In the Save AutoRecover Information Every box, type the number of minutes, or click the up and down arrows, to specify how often you want AutoRecover to preserve your document. Remember, if you do not manually save the file and instead rely only on AutoRecover, your file will be saved and restored only as often as you specify in this selection.

6. Click OK.

This chapter gave you an overview of how to begin using PowerPoint 2007 and how to customize it to meet your needs. Some features have changed from PowerPoint 2003, so this chapter also explored where you can now find commonly used commands and gave examples of the new steps for formatting content and creating tables.

New XML file formats are the key to the ability of PowerPoint 2007 to compress and recover documents. Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers PowerPoint 2007 users the ability to share and reuse presentations in Slide Libraries, while new features and tools, such as themes, Master views, and custom slide layouts, go a long way toward making PowerPoint 2007 an intuitive, useful way to share information.

In the other chapters in this part, you’ll learn how to work with specific aspects of PowerPoint 2007 to create dynamic and effective presentations.