Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Course

Welcome to VTC's PowerPoint 2007. I'm John Coleman, your host, instructor and yes, tour guide. Throughout this tutorial, we're going to explore just about everything there is to know about PowerPoint and how you can use this powerful application to unleash your creativity, whether it's in the board room, the classroom or just simply to impress your friends and loved ones. Now, I've been working with various incarnations of PowerPoint for about 12 years and I think it's pretty safe to say that PowerPoint 2007 just might be the best of the bunch. With this new version, you're going to have an incredible set of graphics and other visually-rich tools at your disposal. In fact, you're going to have so many opportunities to let your creative juices flow that you're going to stand a good chance of drowning your message. After all, PowerPoint is simply a computer application that helps you better tell your story. Now, you need to keep that in mind as we move throughout this tutorial. Now, with all of PowerPoint's features at your fingertips, you're going to be tempted to use them all in one presentation; however, I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. We're going to cover presentation tips in another section. For now, let's just cover some ground rules. First, I'm going to hit the escape key and take us out of presentation mode. Here you see the slide that was recently displayed and tada; here we have the new PowerPoint 2007. Now, I want to cover just a few basics before we get started. If you're new to PowerPoint, everything looks new to you. If you've been using PowerPoint 2003, you're going to see a somewhat new-looking interface. This area that I'm circling here is collectively known as the ribbon. Now, the ribbon is common in all of the Microsoft Office 2007 application, such as Outlook, Word, Access, Excel, and yes, PowerPoint. Now, what the ribbon is is simply a collection of commands that used to be buried in menus. Now, previous to 2007, you would go over this area up here in the toolbar and you would see menus drop down. In this case, those menus have been brought forward in this graphical interface, here known as the ribbon. Now, we're going to cover that in more detail later, but I'd just like you to know, as a graphics person by trade, I like to think of the ribbon as a palette of tools that we can quickly have at our disposal. And I'm very happy to see that Microsoft is finally getting out of the old DOS command line mentality and is moving to the 21st century with a more graphics-rich user interface. I mean, after all, we do think visually, at least most of us. I think these kind of tools and this kind of thinking is going to help us create better presentations. Let me go ahead and minimize PowerPoint so we can see something else. This is my desktop and you'll notice that this funky-looking background indicates that I'm working with Microsoft Windows Vista as my operating system. Now, this is the default background. If you're new to Vista, you'll typically see this unless you've changed it. Now, some of you may still be working with Windows XP and that's fine. PowerPoint 2007 will work with Windows XP. I just wanted to show you what Windows Vista does look like so you're not caught by surprise. I do have my system tray down here and that will just hide as I take the mouse off of it and one of the other things is I've created a shortcut here to Microsoft PowerPoint. You just click that throughout the tutorial and go back and get PowerPoint back on. Now, working with Windows Vista is not going to affect anything in this tutorial. I just wanted you to be aware if something looks a little different to you, that's why. Now, throughout this tutorial, we're going to cover the fundamentals of PowerPoint for those new to the software. If you're an old hand, I would still encourage you to review these earlier sections as you may learn something new. We're also going to roll up our sleeves and let our creativity soar with some of the more advanced techniques and tricks. In the end, we're going to put it all together to create a killer PowerPoint presentation step by step. Now, this tutorial is designed so you can skip around from section to section as you like; however, I would suggest you start from the beginning and you work your way through to the end. Well, enough jibber-jabber. Let's get started.  

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