Subtitles of the Movie

What is a corporate PowerPoint presentation without a chart or table, right? Well, I'm going to have to admit a dirty little secret to you; I hated, hated working with charts and tables in PowerPoint 2003. For me it was a nightmare and the quality of the charts and tables were just blechhh. Well, fortunately that's changed now with the new chart and table features that we have in PowerPoint 2007. They are so much easier to work with and that's in large part due to the ribbon. Let's go ahead and see how that works. Let me click our chart slide here and let's insert a chart into this slide. Let me make sure we're in our insert tab. I want to go over to chart and we have a variety of charts we can work with; column, line, pie, bar, so forth and so on. I have an affinity for the exploded 3-D pie chart, so I'm going to go ahead and click that, click OK and it's going to insert the chart and watch what's going to happen here. A couple of things; first, our chart is automatically inserted with some sample data and magically, Microsoft Excel is launched and that let's us start editing the data. Now, watch what happens. Let's say I'm going to change my first-quarter sales here to, let's pick a figure of 15.8, hit the enter key, watch. You'll notice that the values down here on the pie chart are automatically adjusted. Again, let me pick this small one here for fourth quarter. We'll make that 12.4 and hit the enter key and notice how the pie is once again adjusted. That is so cool. I love that. But, it gets even better. Let's go ahead and just say our values are good for now and I'll close out of Excel, get back to our full screen and you notice we have another tab, content tab has come up with a series of tabs called chart tools and let's take a look at chart styles. I can automatically start changing chart styles, oh, you got to love that. And just to see how the different colors, or lack of colors will work on your chart. Now, we'll get into working in charts with more detail later, but I just had to show you how cool that really is. Ok? Well, what about tables? Let's go over here to a slide I set up just for tables and this is just an ordinary slide. Here, let me get out of that. Here we go. Ok? Now, tables, we're going to work from the insert tab, once again, and we're going to click the table button and we're going to get a little dialog window. Now, you'll wonder what all these little boxes are. That gives you the ability to create the width or how many rows and columns you want in your table. Now, watch what happens as I do this. It's going to tell me I have a 4 x 1 table, which means I have a table of four columns and one row and if we look, well, let me do that again. Ah, if I had a finger, you could see my finger pointing, you'd see this on the screen, but look to the right. You'll see that this is automatically giving you a preview of what those cells are going to look like on my computer. So let's go ahead and just do one that's a 5 x 4 table, click that and it's going to insert the table. Now, if you look back at our ribbon, and we have to have another content tab showing for table tools. Again, this is going to show us table styles, same thing just like the charts. We can apply various table styles and shading, borders, etcetera, all kind of effects that we can use on our table style options. So again, with PowerPoint 2007, I don't think you're ever going to dread working with charts and tables again.