Microsoft Office PowerPoint for Beginners

Microsoft Office PowerPoint is a popular way to make presentations.

Microsoft Office PowerPoint has been a staple in Microsoft's productivity software line since it was first released in 1992. PowerPoint's main function is to make presentations, whether for a business proposal, scientific research, or a simple speech. PowerPoint's main feature is a unit called a slide. These are pages that include any sort of data you may want to use to enhance your presentation---text, bullets, images, graphs, charts and more. You can then set up the slides to be navigated from a mouse or remote to have that data handy while giving your presentation.

Versions

Many versions of Office are available, from Office 92 all the way to Office 2010, the most current software package available as of June. Every version has Microsoft Office PowerPoint included as part of the standard set of productivity software. However, newer versions---2007 and 2010---have what has come to be known as a ribbon menu rather than the typical drop-down file menu that the others had. This ribbon menu organizes options differently and may be confusing to some users familiar with older versions of the Office productivity suite.

Making a Slide

When you first start Microsoft Office PowerPoint, an empty title slide will be shown with a box that says "Click to add title" and another under that one that says "Click to add subtitle." These are standard text boxes, which you can edit like any other text. Just as in Word and Excel, there are font options, paragraph options, and stylistic elements in the Home section of the ribbon menu (or on the floating menu present below the drop-down file menus in older versions).

Inserting New Slides

After adding a title and subtitle for your presentation, you'll need to insert your first slide. Click "New Slide" under the Home tab of the ribbon menu or from the drop-down menu in older versions. You should have a new slide that says, once again, "Click to add title," with some options in a larger box below. These options (in Office PowerPoint 2007 and 2010) are a table, a chart, a SmartArt graphic, a picture from your computer's hard drive, a clip art image from Office's database, or a media file, such as a video or audio clip.

Enhancements

If you want to get fancy, you can spruce up a presentation by changing its background design or by adding transitions between each slide. Transitions are animations that will play when you switch between slides. These enhancements can spice up your presentation and give it more flare, but be careful not to go overboard with them---they can detract from a presentation's intended message, as well.

Tips

It is best when presenters understand that the purpose of a slide show is to enhance a speech, not be a speech in and of itself. Viewers and listeners of your presentation should still be focused on you and your words, not on the screen and its information. Remember that PowerPoint is a supplement to a presentation rather than the presentation itself. Keep slides simple and avoid heavy data like large groups of numbers or statistics. Those sorts of things are best left to handouts given out after the presentation, something you may want to create in Microsoft Office Word.

References

• Home and Learn: Microsoft PowerPoint Tutorials
• Microsoft Office: Created Your First Presentation
• Microsoft: PowerPoint Tips