I’m a computer literate guy, but I’ve never used powerpoint. Now, I need to learn it by next week. What would be the easiest way for me to do so? Pick up a “Learn Powerpoint” software cd at an office supply store? Get a “For Dummies” book?
Won’t need to learn anything complex. Just have to make some training presentations
It’s very user-friendly. Inserting pictures, resizing them, adding captions & links is no biggie. I bet you can learn the basics without any difficulty.
I bet you can learn what you need from the Help files. Or try this free link to get started. It is for the 2007 version, if you have 2003 there is probably something similar.
I agree it should be really easy to pick up.
Lemme give you two tips, though, which will be important if you will be going between computers, or if you will be putting other people’s presentations onto a common computer.
The only fonts you can absolutely assume will be available on a Windows PC are Arial (a proportional sans-serif font, good for isolated lines like titles), and Times New Roman (a proportional serif font, good for lines that are grouped like a paragraph of text because the serifs create faint lines for your eye to follow), and Courier New (a nonproportional font that will not make a mess of tables and computer code and other formatted lists), and Symbol (which you need for Greek letters and math symbols if those are part of your content). Presentations that use other fonts will generally become corrupted if they are put on a computer that does not have the fonts used to create the file.
PowerPoint has a very confusing feature that lets you change all the colors used in a presentation by specifying a new “Color Scheme”, and whenever you choose a color, it offers you colors that are part of the “Color Scheme” first. When presentations move from machine to machine, or when they are spliced together, the competing “Color Schemes” will trip over one another and change the colors in some of the presentations. You can avoid this entire mess by using “Custom Colors” everyplace. This is generally done from the third-from-the-top selection area in any Color Chooser. If you mouse hover, you’ll get a tip saying “Custom Color” when you are in the right area.
I think these two things are major booby-traps, but otherwise PowerPoint is pretty easy to pick up. Mostly, you make a few guesses, and find whatever you wanted pretty quickly.
One last thing - if you don’t have any worthwhile content, and want to make that really clear to the audience, add special moving effects to your show.
There is also a Content Wizard, that creates organized presentations out of a bunch of stray words like a stream of consciousness. This was originally suggested as a joke and quickly caught on. You should be aware that you are heading into some very smelly territory indeed. If you need to cleanse your soul afterwards, find Edward Tufte’s “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” on the web.
I guess everyone has their own experiences and horror stories, but I think Napier’s point #2 is more than you need to worry about now. Use one of the standard designs, don’t mess with the colors PowerPoint chooses, and create the presentation from start to finish yourself on one computer. Pick a simple design because #1 that’s best anyway and #2 there is less to mess with. If your training presentations then need to be combined into some multimedia extravaganza, let someone with PowerPoint expertise futz with it. If you stick with the standard, you won’t break anything in a way they can’t fix.
On point #1, using Arial or Times New Roman is good advice, but if you need to deviate from that for some reason, you can embed the fonts in the presentation, just like you can embed fonts in a word processing document. Help can give you the exact commands.
I used PowerPoint for the first time when I needed to use it for a college oral communications class. It was a summer class - 3 weeks long - so I literally needed to learn how to use it overnight. No problem. It is very easy to use and graphics can be dragged and dropped into your presentation. I was making halfway decent presentations in no time.
My advice - don’t bother with the fancy transitions, they suck. Keep it as basic and simple as possible.
Very basic instructions:
Open a new PowerPoint document. Click where it tells you to click. If you want, go to “Design” and choose a background. Type text in the title boxes. On the Insert menu, choose “New Slide.” Continue. Save when done. While PowerPoint has its maddening moments, it is painfully easy to get started.
If you have a bullet point type format, cut copy and paste from your document.
Use more slides rather than making the font too small.
No matter how good your powerpoint is, do not ever just read the slide word for word during the presentation. :smack:
My library had a two-hour free PowerPoint class that taught me the absolute basics in a hurry. Check with your library and see if a class might be coming up.