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Microsoft PowerPoint Basics

In this chapter, we start you off by covering what Powerpoint is, what it is useful for and we show you how to start Powerpoint.

Introduction

Laura, a corporate trainer, has been invited by an automobile company to train their executives in effective work-life balance practices.

Laura has planned how she is going to conduct the workshop. But she would also like to have a dynamic and visually compelling presentation to help her during the training program. Unfortunately, she has no idea of how to create one. Luckily, her colleague Robert comes to her rescue.

Robert suggests that they use Microsoft PowerPoint to create a well designed presentation that would include elements such as custom graphics and animated text.

So, let’s begin our journey to becoming tech-savvy presentation pros.

What is PowerPoint?

When you are making a presentation, you want to capture the interest and attention of your audience. Microsoft PowerPoint is presentation graphics software that allows you to incorporate text, graphics, animations and sounds to enhance the information in your presentation. With PowerPoint, you can quickly and easily produce professional-looking presentations using features such as built-in templates, text and drawing tools, animation, and sound.

Activity: What is a presentation? List five situations in which you would like to make a presentation. Make a list of three advantages that computer presentations have over other types of presentations.

A presentation is a systematic display of information that is intended to inform or convince others. PowerPoint is a special program that helps you create and present information using multimedia components like text, graphics, sound, animation and video. Your presentation is displayed as a series of slides. Each slide contains one or more multimedia elements. These slides are displayed in a particular sequence. A series of slides on a particular topic are called a presentation.

You can present a PowerPoint presentation in a number of ways:

You can show it to others on your computer monitor.
You can connect your computer to a data projector and display the presentation on a wall-mounted screen.

Why use PowerPoint?

PowerPoint offers many advantages over traditional methods of information dissemination in terms of storage, the variety of sophisticated features it offers for creating your presentation, and the visual impact it can produce on your audience.

1. You can combine multimedia elements (text, graphics, animation, audio and video). These colorful and visual elements make your presentation more fun to give and more interesting to listen to.

2. You can reveal points one by one on a single slide without having to cover up points with a piece of paper.

3. You can highlight points with the pen function.

4. You can choose to run the slideshow manually or time it in advance.

5. If you are giving an on-screen presentation, you can use hyperlinks to the relevant web sites.

6. Visually stimulating tools such as animations and simulations make it easy for you to demonstrate difficult concepts and makes it easy for your audience to understand them.

7. You can print notes to help you remember salient points on each slide or can print handouts with two, three or six slides on a page for your audience, or print the outline of the presentation to show its main points.

8. The slides, the speaker’s notes, the outline and the handouts can all be stored in one file.

9. You can easily store the presentation on a disk.

10. You can easily modify and reuse it whenever required.