7 books in 1—your key to PowerPoint success!
Your one-stop guide to perfect presentations with PowerPoint 2007
Everybody uses PowerPoint, right? How can you make your presentations pop? Check this handy reference with its easy-to-use minibooks! Once you get going with all the cool new stuff in PowerPoint 2007, you find out how to jazz up your presentations with charts, transitions, photos, animation, and even some ultra-cool power-user tricks.
Discover how to
- Plan and create a presentation
- Use speed techniques
- Handle master slides and master styles
- Customize slides with themes and templates
- Make diagrams and charts
- Create video slides
Only a few years ago, PowerPoint was a novelty. All of a sudden, speakers started giving PowerPoint presentations at conferences and seminars. Audiences welcomed PowerPoint. The slides made presentations more interesting and lively. You could gaze at the slides while you listened to the speaker. Speakers — especially speakers who weren’t comfortable talking before an audience — liked PowerPoint, too. PowerPoint took away some of the burdens of public speaking. The program made it easier to speak in front of strangers.
PowerPoint became a staple of conferences, seminars, and corporate boardrooms. Then the novelty wore off, and audiences started grumbling. The presentations were too much alike. You saw bulleted list after bulleted list. Presentations followed the same tired formula — introductory slides followed by “key point” slides following by a tidy conclusion. Writing in the New Yorker, Ian Parker declared that PowerPoint is “a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.” Edward Tufte, professor of information design at Yale University, lamented the program’s “charjunk” and “PowerPointPhluff.” In a Wired essay called “PowerPoint Is Evil,” he wrote, “PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content.”
Despite these complaints, speakers have not abandoned PowerPoint, and audiences still welcome it. But expectations have risen. Audiences expect the presenter to use PowerPoint skillfully and creatively. The audience knows when a presenter is just going through the motions and when a presenter is using PowerPoint to explore a subject and show it in a new light.
This book was written with the goal of showing you how to use the PowerPoint software, but also how to use it with skill and imagination. I tell you which buttons to click to complete tasks, but I also show you how PowerPoint can be a means of communicating and connecting with your audience. I show you how to build a persuasive presentation, one that brings the audience around to your side. No matter how much experience you have with PowerPoint, this book will make you a better, more proficient, more confident user of the program.
