MICROSOFT POWERPOINT

What is Microsoft Power Point?

Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program that is incorporated in Microsoft Office suite package. It offers word processing, outlining drawing, graphing and presentation management tools

Table of Contents

Starting a presentation with Microsoft PowerPoint

There are two ways of starting Microsoft PowerPoint

Click on start button, choose All Programs and click PowerPoint
Double click on the icon of PowerPoint document and PowerPoint opens with the document already loaded.

A PowerPoint presentation consists of slide that can contain text, graphic, charts and other data types. When you load PowerPoint, you can start with a blank presentation or you can begin from a template or use the Auto Content Wizard.

It is always advisable to start presentation with blank presentation because it is more flexible and enables one focus on the content first rather than the appearance. After choosing blank presentation
Select layout from slide dialog box you can choose any one from the following options.
Slide with titles and bullets
Titles only
Titles and clip Art etc.
Click OK

Saving a Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation

Microsoft PowerPoint has two save commands (a) Save (b) Save As (both commands are in file menu)

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When saving in PowerPoint, take the following cautions

Naming convention

Use short file name
8 letter words is preferred
The following characters cannot be used in naming a ppt file: @, $, =, ?, 1, etc.

Alphabets and numbers can be used

Saving format
Ppt (default format)
Pots
JPEG
Ppsx (slide show)
Ppsm

A presentation is normally saved as name .ppt file type. However PowerPoint show with the extension of name .pps is also a useful file type, so that your file can be able to run regardless of operating system. You can also create your own template and save it as pot file.

PowerPoint Views

PowerPoint has three major views

Normal View
Slide Sorter View
Slide Show View
Normal View: This consists of three panes such as slide pane, note pane and outline pane.
Slide sorter: This allows one to add slides, move and delete slides. It displays multiple slides and enable one quickly change their order in the presentation.
Slide Show: This is a full screen display of each page in a presentation. It is called the preview. The three buttons at down-right of the window can be used to change the slide view.

Insert Slide Content

When you open Microsoft PowerPoint, the first item presentation is a slide. It contains a title (large box) and subtile (small box) section.

Type “my first presentation” in the title and content section, type your name and class in the subtitle section. This is the first slide of the presentation.
Insert an additional slide with the “Title and Content” layout. As an example type definition of computer hardware in the title section, type the meaning of computer hardware in content section.
Insert a new slide with the title and content layout. In the title section, type “examples of computer hardware”. In the content section, hit the “Enter” key to ensure that each example has a bullet point.
Insert a new slide with title and content layout. In the title section type diagrams of computer hardware. Click in the content section and go to insert and clip art.

Double-click on any picture of computer hardware to insert it into the slide

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Press the F5 key to view the presentation press the down arrow key to advance to the down arrow key to advance to the next slide.

Animation Content

When you display your presentation electronically as a slide show, the slides take up the full screen. PowerPoint offers a number of features you can use when you run your slide show.

You can use special effects such as transition and builds to add variety of transitions
You can set automated timing for the slide

Editing and formatting a presentation

PowerPoint presentation can be formatted with the following method

Changing the slide background
Inserting clip arts and objects.
Defining slide transition and animation
Applying a template to a presentation
Editing slide master or individual slide

Changing Slide Background

Slide background is chosen from format menu to change a slide background colour or gradient. When you click on the colour rectangles near the bottom of the dialog box, you select more colours or full effect. One can also use picture file to change background of a slide.

Inserting clip Art and Object

PowerPoint has collection of Clip Art you can use in your presentation, select or choose picture, Clip Art and Object from the category of what you want.

Applying Template to a Presentation

A template defines how your text and slide background will look like. To apply template to presentation, choose slide design from the format menu. The available templates will appear in the task pane and PowerPoint applies any template you choose to all the slides.

Defining Slide Transition and animation

A transition refers to the way one slide moves off the screen and the next slide appears. When you set your transition, you can also set how long you want each slide to appear on the screen.

To set transition and timing, take the following steps.

Choose transition from the tool menu.
Choose the transition from the drop-menu list

Click how fast you want the transition to take place – slow, medium or fast.

Decide how you want to advance to the next slide and if need be, set the timing if you want the slide to advance how long the slide should appear on-screen before advancing to the next slide. There are two options of the advancing.

Only on mouse click. The slide advances manually with a mouse click.
Automatically after [N] seconds: type the number of seconds you want the slide on the screen. During the presentation, the slide advance automatically when the time is up.

Click OK/apply to All/Apply button.

Animation defines how you want your listed information to come in and out of the presentation.

editing the Slide Master or Individual Slides: The slide master in a template is a slide that controls the formatting, text and object that appears on every slide in the presentation foe e.g. if you want small logo or picture of the organisation to appear on every slide, place that picture or logo, on the slide master.

To display the slide master from the view menu, changes made on the slide in the presentation.

Printing Presentation

To print slide presentation, choose print. To print the file menu or click print button from the file menu or click print button on the tool bar. In the print dialog window several options of what to print are available in “print what” drop down e.g. slides, handout, notes pages, etc.

If you choose slide, it prints the entire slide on one page.

Handout: It prints 2,3,4,6 or 9 slides on one page. One can also choose horizontal (left – right) or vertical (up – down) layout.

Note pages: This prints a copy of the slides on the upper half of a page and type written notes on the lower half of the page.