MICROSOFT POWERPOINT

INTRODUCTION

Microsoft PowerPoint is an application package that is used for design and organization of slide shows.

FEATURES OF POWER POINT

The features of power point relate closely to those of ms word with the exception of the ruler bar and the electronic paper and the addition of other features which shall be treated in this course.

Another interesting feature worthy of note is that, all the editing and formatting tools in power point perform the same functions as those in ms word although some may have added functionalities such as word art in the text box.  

The features in ms power point include:

TITLE BAR

This is located at the top of the ms word window. It displays the name of the active document and the package name.

QUICK ACCESS TOOL BAR

It is located beside the office button by default. It is used for keeping frequently used commands for easier and quicker access.

OFFICE BUTTON

It is located at the top left corner of the ms word window. It shows recent documents and other commands such as print, save, save as, close etc.

MENU BAR

It is located below the title bar and houses menus that are used. The menu in turn houses the commands that are for preparing documents. The commands in the menu are displayed in the ribbon. It also contains the ms word help button.

RIBBON

This displays all the commands that are found under a particular menu. It is located below the menu bar.

SCROLL BAR

Ms Word has two scroll bars-the vertical and horizontal scroll bars. They are used to navigate vertically or horizontally through the document.

ZOOM BAR

It is located at the bottom-right corner of the ms word window. It is used for increasing or decreasing the size of the electronic paper.

STATUS BAR

This gives information on the current document such as the slide number of the active document and the number of slides in the document. It is located at the bottom-left corner of the document.

SLIDE PANE

This displays the arrangement of slides in a presentation

SLIDE SHOW/PRESENTATION

This refers to a collection of multiple slides

COMMENTS AREA

Abstracts of the document are typed in this area.  An abstract is a short summary of the contents of the slide.

HINTS TO CREATE A PRESENTATION IN MS POWERPOINT

To create a document in ms PowerPoint, certain factors need to be considered. Factors such as choice of color, content, transitions and animations should be carefully selected so as to have a presentable document. PowerPoint documents are not meant to the focal point if the presentation. They are only visual aids to enable the audience get the message and slides should be organized in such a way as to get the attention of the audience on the presenter and not the presentation. The slides should not be choked with contents but should be very simplistic. It should only reflect the basic points or messages in the presentation. Colors to be used in the different slides should be consistent. Using different colors may cause eye strain and make the audience loss interest in the presentation.

CREATING A NEW PRESENTATION

Two methods can be used to create a presentation. You can either create it from as a blank document (this enables you to format the slide according to your preferences) or by using pre-installed templates. The AutoContent Wizard is not available in Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007. Instead, you can create your presentation quickly and easily by using templates (template: A file or set of files that contains information about the theme, layout, and other elements of a finished presentation.). Office PowerPoint 2007 templates include different themes and layouts, including most of those that existed in the AutoContent Wizard. Templates give you a starting point and make it easier to complete your presentation quickly. You can modify a template's text and design, add a company logo, add your own images, or delete text or other content from the template.

Office PowerPoint 2007 includes built-in templates and you can download additional Office PowerPoint 2007 templates by going to Office Online Templates.

To create a new presentation from templates:

®     Click  NEW on the office button

®     Select INSTALLED TEMPLATES

®     Select a template of your choice

®     Select create.

To create a new presentation as blank document:

®     Click  NEW on the office button

®     Select BLANK AND RECENT

®     Select create

CRATING A NEW SLIDE

To create a new slide:

®     Click the NEW SLIDE command on home menu

®     Select the slide layout of your choice

®     A new slide will be created

HOW TO DELETE A SLIDE

To delete a slide:

®     Select the slide from the layout menu

®     Right-click the slide

®     Select delete from the options that appear

SLIDE BACKGROUNDS

Slide backgrounds refer to the color, gradient, texture or picture on which the contents of the slide appear.

Backgrounds can be determined from the themes that appear on the DESIGN MENU or can be custom designed by the  user.

SLIDE BACKGROUNDS USING THEMES

You can quickly and easily format an entire document to give it a professional and modern look by applying a document theme (theme: A set of unified design elements that provides a look for your document by using color, fonts, and graphics.). A document theme is a set of formatting choices that include a set of theme colors, a set of theme fonts (including heading and body text fonts), and a set of theme effects (including lines and fill effects).

Programs such as Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint provide several predefined document themes, but you can also create your own by customizing an existing document theme, and then by saving it as a custom document theme. Document themes are shared across Office programs so that all of your Office documents can have the same, uniform look.

NOTE: Themes apply a uniform background to all the slides in a presentation.

To use a theme:

®     Select the theme of your choice from the themes group on the design menu

You can define the theme background by selecting a background style from the background group on the DESIGN menu. The background style command also allows users to format the background to sooth their preferences. Colors, gradients, texture and even pictures could be used to create a background slide.

CREATING USER-DEFINED SLIDE BACKGROUNDS

To achieve this:

®     Select the slide you wish to apply background to

®     Right-click the slide the slide from the slide layout pane

®     Select FORMAT BACKGROUND

®     From the dialog box that appears, you can choose a solid color (one color for the whole background), a gradient (using different colors), a texture (pre-formatted background) or a picture as your slide background

®     You can choose to apply the background to the selected slide or to all the slides in the presentation

NOTE:

Background styles should be used with moderation. Slides in a presentation should as much as possible, be consistent in colors. Using many different colors may irritate the eyes and make your audience lose interest in the presentation.

CONTENT GENERATION

This refers to the process of adding content to your slides. Contents generally are inserted from the insert menu. It could be tables, pictures, smart art, clip art etc. All these objects work in the same way as they do in ms word.

To insert content in a slide:

®     Go to insert menu

®     Select the kind object you wish to insert

®     Select the object from the options that follow

NOTE also that all operations concerning text in PowerPoint are executed within text boxes. This means that to insert text, you must first of all insert a text box.

TEXT BOXES IN POWERPOINT

Text boxes in PowerPoint behave slightly differently from the conventional text boxes in ms word. The format menu of the text box in PowerPoint is divided into two sections: the shape section (textbox) and the word art section (text). Text in PowerPoint could either be represented with the regular font faces of ms word or with the word art styles. Note also that the size of the textbox is determined by the size of the text it contains. Aside this, all the other functions remain the same.

WORDART IN POWER POINT

WordArt is a very efficacious tool power point. This tool contains decorative fonts that could be used to beautify the document. Shadows, 3d effects, glow and other effects could be applied to word art to add their styling effects.

THE HEADER AND FOOTER

The header and footer is used to give information about the document. This information will appear at the top or bottom of each printed page. It could be the slide number, date/time and custom text.

THE MOVIE AND SOUND COMMAND

These tools are used in power point to embed video and audio clips in a slide.

TRANSITION AND ANIMATION

Transitions and animations are used in PowerPoint to set slides and objects in motion. They are the core aspects of PowerPoint that make it to stand out as a presentation package. Transitions make an entire slide to move in a particular way while animations are used to animate (give mobility) to the distinct objects that are contained in a slide. Transitions and animations can be applied to a slide from the ANIMATIONS menu.

To add transition to a slide:

®     Select the slide from the slide layout pane

®     Select the animations menu

®     Select any of the transitions that sooths you

The animations menu also gives room for users to determine the transition speed, what triggers the transition (mouse click or automatically) and the sound that accompanies the transition.

To add animations:

®     Select the object(s) you wish to animate

®     Select custom animation from the animations menu (the custom animation pane will appear at the right of the PowerPoint window)

®     Select ADD EFFECTS to determine the entrance, emphasis, exit and motion paths.

NOTE:

Adding too many animations in a slide will make your slide puerile. Apart from that, it will also bore the audience and make your presentation uninteresting.

ORGANIZING SLIDES

The slides in a presentation need to be organized in order to determine how the slide show would display. The SLIDE SHOW menu holds all the tools that are used in slide organization. The different ways slides could be organized include:

®     Beginning the slide show from the first slide

®     Beginning from a selected slide

®     Selecting particular slides to be displayed

®     Selecting the way the slides should be displayed.

SELECTING THE SLIDES TO BE DISPLAYED

The CUSTOM SLIDE SHOW command enables users to select particular slides within a presentation that should be displayed. This enables you to have different shows within the same slide, for instance, a 30 minutes show and a 60 minutes show.

To achieve this:

®     Select custom slide show from the slide show menu (a dialog box will appear)

®     Select NEW

®     Give the custom show a name

®     Select the slides you want to be displayed and click add

®     Click OK and CLOSE

NARRATIONS

Narrations are voice recordings that accompany the slides in a presentation.

This feature can be accessed from the SLIDE SHOW menu

REHEASED TIMINGS

This feature enables users to rehearse their presentations.

The amount of time the user spends on each slide is recorded and can be played automatically.

This feature can be accessed from the SLIDE SHOW menu

HAND OUTS

You can print your presentation in the form of handouts — with one, two, three, four, six, or nine slides on a page — that your audience can use to follow along as you give your presentation or keep for future reference.

The three-slides-per-page handout includes lined space for note taking by the audience.

This feature can be accessed from the VIEW menu.