Subtitles of the Movie

Ok, so what is Microsoft PowerPoint 2007? Well, perhaps more important, what is PowerPoint not? But we'll get to that in a minute. PowerPoint is considered perhaps the ultimate presentation graphics application; well if not the ultimate. It's the dominant presentation graphics package out there that you can use with Windows. Now, PowerPoint provides you with just about everything you need to produce professional-looking presentations. PowerPoint has perhaps single-handedly killed the overhead transparency that most of us grew up with in the classroom. Now, this application's going to give you word processing capabilities, outlining, drawing, graphing, animation, multimedia and dozens of presentation management features. Now, rather than thinking of PowerPoint as a fancy, overhead transparency discombobulator, think of it as a slideshow. After all, each page you create is referred to as a slide. You might as well get started thinking of it that way. So again, if I'm looking to my panel on the left, these are not pages, these are actually considered slides. Now, before PowerPoint came on the scene, I remember way back when, we would try and achieve the same effects with a 35 millimeter camera, some rub-on type and a special camera stand that would allow us to shoot titles. Hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to put together a slideshow presentation. It would take weeks. Now, with PowerPoint, you can do a gazillion more things and a killer presentation can be put together in just a matter of hours, if not minutes. Now, PowerPoint also lets you easily adapt your slide so you can print outlines, speaker notes and audience handouts. Try doing that with a 35 millimeter slide. PowerPoint also lets you import content from other Microsoft applications like Word and Excel. Very handy, ay? Ok. So what is PowerPoint not? And we're going to have a little demonstration for that. PowerPoint is not a replacement for talent, although Microsoft has given you many creative tools and you're going to have them at your disposal, does not mean that you have to use every, single one of them in your presentation. For those of you who've worked in the corporate environment or perhaps have had a professor or teacher who's been a little PowerPoint crazy, you know what I mean. People can go a little, get a little too excited about doing that and let's take a look. I'll show you some of the more common examples here with a little demo I've set up. I'm going to go ahead and hit the F5 key to start the presentation or the slideshow. So what is PowerPoint? It's not flying text. This is one of the most egregious errors I see and flying text is what we see here and it can be used effectively from time to time, although you really just don't want to use it on every, single slide or every, single line. Again, your purpose with PowerPoint is to tell a story and if people are marveling about the effects you're using, they're not paying attention to your story. Now, the other thing that people like to do is overkill their transitions. There are some very neat transition effects that you can use. You go from slide to slide and sometimes they just, like that one, will kind of take you off your seat. Or like this. And the other common error that many people have is trying to cram too much information on one slide. You can't read it. Now, we'll get into this in a little more detail later on in the tutorial. After all, these are all presentation killers. Use them with caution.