What is PowerPoint, What Can It Do?

PowerPoint is a presentation graphics software program. With it you can quickly create presentations suitable for overheads, paper, 35mm slides, or onscreen presentations. You can augment you presentations with speaker’s notes, outline pages, and audience handouts. You can also import materials created with other programs (word processor, spreadsheet, etc.) and/or other tools (digital camera, scanned images, etc.).

Are There Other Programs Similar to PowerPoint?

• Astound (full-featured, linear but can be used for nonlinear presentations)
• AppleWorks Slide Show (basic, linear only)
• Corel Presentations (full-featured, linear but can be used for nonlinear presentations)
• Digital Chisel (hypertext, designed to be nonlinear)
• HyperStudio (hypertext, designed to be nonlinear)
• and there are others!

What Does a Complete Presentation Include?

A presentation is a collection of slides, handouts, speaker’s notes, and an outline, all in one file. Slides are required and represent the individual “pages” of the presentation. Slides can have titles, text, graphs, drawn objects, shapes, clip art, visuals created with other applications and more. Presentations can be printed in black-and-white or color on paper or on transparencies, or they can be “printed ” as 35mm slides using a film or service bureau

Outline (is required)

The outline consists of the title and main text of each slide. Any artwork, graphics, and the like placed on a slide are not included or shown in the outline (but these items are still there!). The outline can be printed to be used as a handout or for speaker support.

Handouts (are optional)

Handouts are used to support your presentation. These are smaller, printed versions of your slides with either two, three or six slides per page

Speaker’s Notes (are optional)

Speaker’s notes are used to help guide you as the presenter through your presentation. They consist of a small image of your slide (one per page) plus any notes you include on the notes page of the slide.

About Slides and Outlines

PowerPoint allows you to create your presentation in the outline mode or in the slide mode or in a combination of both. Text and titles created in the outline mode will automatically be placed in the appropriate place on the slide. The reverse is true as well. Although it is stated that the outline “is required ”, a presentation can be created fully in the slide mode only. The outline “is required ” only in the sense that text and titles are automatically carried over to the outline from the slide. Regardless of the method you use, it is best to “think outline”! See next section for more about this.

Copyright © 2003
last updated August 12, 2003