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This article is aimed at people new to PowerPoint, and possibly new to creating professional presentations. If you are already familiar with PowerPoint, it might give you a few good tips to sharpen the presentations you create.

This will be a number of articles stringed together because of the size of the topic.

What is PowerPoint?

Let’s start with square one: What is PowerPoint? In short, PowerPoint (formally known as Microsoft Powerpoint), is a part of the Microsoft Office suite of software that allows the user to create a presentation.  It has rapidly become the staple by which many professionals perform presentations for all different varieties of topics and fields. 

The Basics 

Now that you have some inkling of what PowerPoint does, I’ll introduce the basics.  To start, you can recognize a PowerPoint presentation on your computer by the symbol below:

 

 

Also, all PowerPoint files have a “.ppt” extension.  Once you have Microsoft Office installed, you should be able to launch PowerPoint from either Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft PowerPoint or from a shortcut on your desktop (depending on your install). Once it’s launched, your ready to begin.

A New Presentation

Upon launch, your PowerPoint will look something like this (this may vary slightly depending on your version):

This is a blank presentation.  You have your basic top level office tool bar on the top (if you are not familiar with other office applications, this is your main tool bar where you can save files, change setttings, etc.)

Before the main section can be explained, the structure of a PowerPoint presentation should be discussed.  Basically, PowerPoint presentations are made up of “Slides”.  Each slide contains a seperate piece of information for your presentation.  When presenting, you run a “Slide Show”.  This basically shows the slides, fullscreen, in the order that they appear in the left hand slide bar. 

The left hand slide bar can be seen as a way to navigate between slides, as well as order your slides.  As stated above, the order of the slides here is the order in which they will be shown during the “Slide Show”.  You can drag the slides around in here to change their order.  You can also insert a new slide from this tool bar by using the right click menu and selecting New Slide.  Alternatively, you can use the Insert -> New Slide to accomplish this from your main top level tool bar.  Also, this view shows a small preview of each slide.

The main section displays the contents of the slide that is highlighted in the left hand slide bar.  This is where you can edit individual slides.  You can insert pictures, text, charts, etc. into this area.

The right hand menu on the screenshot is a basic Microsoft Office navigation and creation tool that is found in newer versions of Microsoft Office.  It’s functions will not be discussed here.

 This concludes Part 1, an introduction to PowerPoint and the basic user GUI (Graphical User Interface).  In Part 2, we will delve into the basics of creating a presentation and some of the more common editing tools.