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Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 QuickSteps

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2nd edition)

Creating a Presentation in Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 for Windows (Visual QuickProject Guide Series)

On with the show.

Got presentation jitters? You can rest assured knowing that Microsoft’s popular PowerPoint software is easier to use than ever before. Impress even the toughest audience by mastering the fundamentals of PowerPoint 2007, including how to:

Create PowerPoint presentations from scratch or with templates
Add photos, charts, videos, and sound to PowerPoint presentations
Design and deliver effective, compelling PowerPoint slideshows

The PowerPoint 2007 Interface

Microsoft PowerPoint® is the world’s most popular presentation software. A PowerPoint presentation consists of a series of slides, which together are called a slide show. PowerPoint slide shows are usually delivered as live presentations in which the slide show is projected onto a screen and distributed as a paper handout.

Along with the other programs in the Microsoft Office® suite, PowerPoint has been significantly revamped with the release of PowerPoint 2007. The most obvious change to PowerPoint is the complete overhaul of its user interface. The new PowerPoint interface has eight main components:

Office button
Ribbon
Quick Access Toolbar
Help button
Slide pane
Navigation pane
Notes pane
Status bar

The Office Button

The Office button is a round button with the Microsoft Office insignia on it. Clicking the button reveals commands such as Open, Print, and Save, which resided in the File menu in earlier versions of PowerPoint.

The Ribbon

The Ribbon is the heart of the new PowerPoint interface. It replaces the drop-down menus and toolbars of previous versions of PowerPoint and displays PowerPoint’s many functions and commands more effectively than the old menus or toolbars did. The greatest attribute of the Ribbon is that it makes it easy to see and execute all of the commands at your fingertips with just a click or two. The Ribbon is organized into tabs and groups.

Tabs

Tabs are the main organizational categories for PowerPoint functions. When you click on a tab, the functions within that tab appear on the Ribbon. PowerPoint 2007 has seven main tabs:

Home: The most commonly used PowerPoint commands
Insert: The commands used to add elements such as photos, artwork, tables, and charts to your presentations
Design: Commands for controlling the visual aspects of your presentation, such as fonts, colors, and themes
Animations: Commands for adding animated effects to presentations, such as animated graphs and transitions between slides
Slide Show: Commands for specifying the timing and the order in which your slides are presented
Review: Commands for proofing and adding comments to the contents of a presentation
View: Commands for changing the layout of a presentation on your screen, and for hiding or showing specific tools you may or may not want to use

Groups

The commands within each tab are subdivided into groups. For instance, the Home tab contains the groups Clipboard, Slides, Font, Paragraph, Drawing, and Editing. Some groups also have a little square at their bottom right, called a dialog box launcher. Clicking the launcher pops up a dialog box that provides more options in that particular category.

Quick Access Toolbar

This toolbar of the commands you use most often—such as Save, Undo, and Redo—is located in the top left corner of the PowerPoint window. It’s visible no matter what tab you’ve selected. You can customize the commands that appear on the toolbar by selecting a command from the menu that appears when you click on the down arrow

at the right side of the toolbar.

Help

You can access PowerPoint’s built-in help system through the Help button

or by pressing F1 on your keyboard.

The PowerPoint 2007 Work Area

PowerPoint 2007 has retained the basic look and function of its work area, or the space in which you create your presentation’s slides. The PowerPoint work area contains four main parts:

Slide pane: The central pane in which you enter the text and other contents of your slides.
Notes pane: A space below the slide pane in which you can add footnotes for each slide.
Navigation pane: A vertical list of thumbnails (small icons) of each slide in your presentation. Clicking on any of these thumbnails brings it up into full view on the slide pane. The slide you’re currently viewing will be highlighted in orange in the Navigation pane.
Status bar: The horizontal blue bar that runs across the bottom of the PowerPoint work area. The Status bar contains basic information about your presentation, such as the name and number of the slide you’re currently viewing, as well as several buttons that activate popular commands. At the far right corner of the Status bar is the zoom slider , which you can slide to adjust the viewing size of the slide you’re showing. To customize your Status bar, right-click on it and select the buttons you’d like from the menu that pops up.