Introducing Presentations
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PowerPoint helps you design, edit, and show presentations. A presentation is a collection of screens that you will present on a computer, overhead viewer, slide projector or even on the internet.

When you first run PowerPoint, you see:

There are four choices from this dialog:

AutoContent Wizard	This presents another dialog of pre-designed presentations. The presentations are mainly company orientated. You can use the slides from the presentation and discard what you don't want or need. For research projects, you should probably use the Templates instead.
Template	This lets you choose a template for the slide show that you are going to put together.
Blank Presentation	Creates a new presentation without using the templates. Later, you can apply one of the templates to your presentation. The trouble with applying the templates later is that if you resize any of the boxes (text, clip art, object, etc.), the box will not be resize automatically to fit on the new template correctly. This means that you will have to manually go through each of the slides and adjust any that don't fit correctly on the slide.
Open an Existing Presentation	Brings up the Open File Dialog so that you can open a presentation that was previously created.

To start a new presentation, you should use the AutoContent Wizard or the Template option. Since the AutoContent Wizard is more business orientated, choose Template and click the OK button:

The templates determine how the presentation will be laid out and the background that will be displayed on each slide. When you click on one of the templates, a mini-view is displayed in the Preview window. The Preview is very small and you will have a very hard time telling how the template looks. Luckily, you can change the template later but you may have to move some of our information around on the slides. We recommend that you try to decide which template to use early on so that you don't have to waste time correcting your slides. Once you click on the OK button, you see:

The AutoLayouts are simply different types of slides:

Different Types of Slides
Title	Bulleted List	2 Column Text	Table
Text and Chart	Chart and Text	Organization	Chart
Text & Clip Art	Clip Art & Text	Title Only	Blank
Text & Object	Object & Text	Large Object	Object
Text & Media Clip	Media Clip & Text	Object over Text	Text Over Object
Text & 2 Objects	2 Objects & Text	2 Objects over Text	4 Objects

Here are the definitions of the terms used above:

• Bulleted List - a list of items (or thoughts). Each item in the list is preceded by a bullet ().
• Chart - A chart of data enter in PowerPoint.
• Clip Art - A place where you insert clip art. The clip art can be from PowerPoint's library or a file that you have saved on your hard drive.
• Media Clip - These are movies and and animated clip art.
• Object - Objects are mainly documents that have been created in other programs. You import the document into the object.
• Text - General text without bullets is entered in the text box.
• Title -The title of the slide is entered here. PowerPoint automatically uses a large Font size for the text so that it shows up better.
   

The Different Views of a Presentation

 

This menu is shown in the bottom left-hand corner of each window.
The menu will vary depending on which version of PowerPoint you are using.

Normal View (only in PowerPoint 2000 and XP). Divides the screen into two parts. The left side is the Outline View and the right side is Slide View.

Slide View. Shows the current slide just as it will appear during your presentation. Here you can change the layout (to Title, Bulleted List, Chart, Organizational Chart, Table, and many other choices), add graphics, add animation, and generally edit the slide.

Outline View. Shows the entire presentation as an outline. On the right side of the screen, The actual view of the slide is shown. This a great place to start your presentation and organize your thoughts. Each slide is numbered and designates it's current position in the presentation. You can add slides by simply by placing the cursor at the end of the previous slide and then pressing Enter. Also, you can break a slide into two slides.

Slide Sorter View. Shows miniature view of the slides and lets you move, add and delete slides. You can even copy slides from one presentation and paste then into another presentation.

Slide Show View. Shows the presentation starting at the currently selected slide.

 

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