Homework: PowerPoint is a great program to use for certain types of homework projects, such as those big history reports that count for half your grade.
✔ Church: People use PowerPoint at churches to display song lyrics on big screens so everyone can sing or to display sermon outlines so everyone can take notes. If your church still uses hymnals or prints the outline in the bulletin, tell the minister to join the 21st century.
✔ Information stations: You can use PowerPoint to set up a computerized information kiosk that people can walk up to and use. For example, you can create a museum exhibit about the history of your town or set up a tradeshow presentation to provide information about your company and products.
✔ Internet presentations: PowerPoint can even help you to set up a presentation that you can broadcast over the Internet so people can join in on the fun without having to leave the comfort of their own homes or offices.
Introducing PowerPoint Presentations
PowerPoint is similar to a word processor such as Word, except that it’s geared toward creating presentations rather than documents. A presentation is kind of like those Kodak Carousel slide trays that your grandpa filled up with 35mm slides of the time he took the family to the Grand Canyon in 1965. The main difference is that with PowerPoint, you don’t have to worry about dumping all the slides out of the tray and figuring out how to get them back into the right order.
Word documents consist of one or more pages, and PowerPoint presentations consist of one or more slides. Each slide can contain text, graphics, animations, videos, and other information. You can easily rearrange the slides in a presentation, delete slides that you don’t need, add new slides, or modify the contents of existing slides.
You can use PowerPoint both to create your presentations and to actually present them.
You can use several different types of media to actually show your presentations:
✔ Computer screen: Your computer screen is a suitable way to display your presentation when you’re showing it to just one or two other people.
✔ Big-screen TV: If you have a big-screen TV that can accommodate computer input, it’s ideal for showing presentations to medium-sized audiences – say 10 to 12 people in a small conference room.
✔ Computer projector: A computer projector projects an image of your computer monitor onto a screen so large audiences can view it.
✔ Webcast: You can show your presentation over the Internet. That way, your audience doesn’t all have to be in the same place at the same time. Anyone with a web browser can sit in on your presentation.
✔ Printed pages: Printed pages enable you to distribute a printed copy of your entire presentation to each member of your audience. (When you print your presentation, you can print one slide per page, or you can print several slides on each page to save paper.)
✔ Overhead transparencies: Overhead transparencies can be used to show your presentation using an overhead projector. It’s a little old-school to be sure, but some people still do it this way.
Your presentations will be much more interesting if you show them using one of the first four methods (computer monitor, TV, projector, or webcast) because you can incorporate animations, videos, sounds, and other whiz-bang features in your presentation. Printed pages, overheads, and 35mm slides can show only static content.
A presentation is to PowerPoint what a document is to Word or a worksheet is to Excel. In other words, a presentation is a file that you create with PowerPoint. Each presentation that you create is saved on your computer’s hard drive as a separate file.
PowerPoint 2016 presentations have the special extension .pptx added to the end of their filenames. For example, Sales Conference.pptx and History Day.pptx are both valid PowerPoint filenames. When you type the filename for a new PowerPoint file, you don’t have to type the .pptx extension, because PowerPoint automatically adds the extension for you. Windows may hide the .pptx extension, in which case a presentation file named Conference.pptx often appears as just Conference.
.ppt instead of .pptx. The x at the end of the newer file extension denotes that the new file format is based on an open XML standard data format that makes it easier to exchange files among different programs. PowerPoint 2016 can still save files in the old .ppt format, but I recommend you do so only if you need to share presentations with people who haven’t yet upgraded to PowerPoint 2007 or later.
PowerPoint is set up initially to save your presentation files in the Documents folder, but you can store PowerPoint files in any folder of your choice on your hard drive or on any other drive. You can also save your presentation to online file storage, such as Microsoft’s OneDrive. And, if you wish, you can write a presentation to a USB flash drive or to cloud storage.
PowerPoint presentations comprise one or more slides. Each slide can contain text, graphics, and other elements. A number of PowerPoint features work together to help you easily format attractive slides:
✔ Slide layouts: Every slide has a slide layout that controls how information is arranged on the slide. A slide layout is simply a collection of one or more placeholders, which set aside an area of the slide to hold information. Depending on the layout that you choose for a slide, the placeholders can hold text, graphics, clip art, sound or video files, tables, charts, graphs, diagrams, or other types of content.
✔ Background: Every slide has a background, which provides a backdrop for the slide’s content. The background can be a solid color; a blend of two colors; a subtle texture, such as marble or parchment; a pattern, such as diagonal lines, bricks, or tiles; or an image file. Each slide can have a different background, but you usually want to use the same background for every slide in your presentation to provide a consistent look.
✔ Themes: Themes are combinations of design elements such as color schemes and fonts that make it easy to create attractive slides that don’t look ridiculous. You can stray from the themes if you want, but you should do so only if you have a better eye than the design gurus who work for Microsoft.
✔ Slide Masters: Slide Masters are special slides that control the basic design and formatting options for slides in your presentation. Slide Masters are closely related to layouts – in fact, each layout has its own Slide Master that determines the position and size of basic title and text placeholders; the background and color scheme used for the presentation; and font settings, such as typefaces, colors, and sizes. In addition, Slide Masters can contain graphic and text objects that you want to appear on every slide.
You can edit the Slide Masters to change the appearance of all the slides in your presentation at once. This helps to ensure
