17 December 2004

THE FINE POINTS
AN INTRODUCTION TO POWERPOINT

Dianna Hrabovsky, Treasurer, MAST

PowerPoint is a powerful program for performing visual presentations with your computer. The program allows you to create and manipulate images called slides. They are called slides because what you are doing is creating a slide-show on the computer.

A basic PowerPoint presentation can be very simple. You need have nothing more than a background for a slide with some text on it, allowing you to emphasize a point you want to make. You can also display information that you do not have to read aloud; the audience can read it themselves.

Below are some examples of basic slides for a presentation. These slides are a PowerPoint presentation about creating a PowerPoint presentation.

When you open PowerPoint you get something that looks like this.

You can create the title by clicking in the box and typing.

You can add a subtitle if you want. Now that we have a name and a first slide, we can save our work.

This title slide is ready. We can change it later if desired. Now we can go to the next slide in the series by holding down the Control key (Ctrl) while pressing the M key.

Unless another format is chosen, the slide will look like this.

A black and white slide show can be very dull. By clicking on the large A with the line under it, you can change the color.

Here we see that we have changed the color of some of the text we have written.

We save this slide and move on. You can modify the fonts by going to the Format menu. Notice how each slide is displayed along the left-hand side.

Clicking on the font button gives you a dialog box.

We save this slide and move on to the next. This time we will look at slide formatting.

You can change the layout of the slide by passing the mouse over the format you want and clicking on the down arrow that appears when the cursor passes over a possible layout.

When you choose a format, the text in the slide will change to that format. In this case, a set of bullets is created. Each time the enter key is pressed a new bullet item appears.

There are other types of layouts, too.

Here we have what is called a Content Layout, allowing us to insert graphics.

Over the next few images we will look at some of the different types of layouts you can select.

Here we choose to insert a table.

A dialog box comes up to define the number of rows and columns.

And a table is created.

Each position within a table is called a cell. Text can be adjusted within a cell, and the size of the cells themselves can be adjusted.

Here we have changed the cell sizes.

Charts can be added the same way as tables.

Here is what the slide looks like after you enter the chart.

You can also add clip-art.

You can do some modification of images, too.

We can also add pictures.

And we can modify pictures, too.

Here we use technical diagrams and organizational charts.

We can add text to a diagram.

And we can add animations and movie clips.

When you are done, you can save your presentation. You can see what it looks like by clicking on Slide Show and then on View Show.

In subsequent features I will be exploring some more advanced features and capabilities of PowerPoint.