Basic Use of Powerpoint
These Powerpoint materials are taken from presentations given by the IT Team in Lent 2010 and are intended to get you flying along with this application in no time. There are two separate sessions to help you work through the guides as quickly as possible. The first slides cover a beginners introduction to Powerpoint. Following on from this Gideon covers advanced issues including the use of video and audio in Powerpoint presentations. The slides are based on Powerpoint 2008 running on a Mac. If there is sufficient interest we can run the training sessions again, so please email mml-computing@lists.cam.ac.uk to add your name to the participants list for the next time.
To help you get started we've created a Faculty Powerpoint template that you can download here.
The first gallery contains the slides that cover why you might chose to use Powerpoint
To help you get started we've created a Faculty Powerpoint template that you can download here.
The following video demonstrates Powerpoint's menu system - it's very similar to that of a word processor with some extra features, so shouldn't be too daunting.
Choosing a theme using the 'Slide Themes' tab makes selecting a professional theme for your presentation very easy.
Choosing a default layout to select which elements (e.g. images, text, films) you'd like to include by default is equally straightforward. You don't have to use every element in every slide.
Some users choose to work with a blank template and manually insert individual elements as needed using the menu system.
Dragging and dropping works equally well.
Working with text elements is very similar to working with text in a word processor.
The format text functions should also be very familiar.
It's easy to create new slides and to rearrange them and to combine everything to make a basic presentation.
One of the best features in Powerpoint is its ability to very easily create lecture handouts from your presentation. It's possible to create handouts with the graphics of the slides with multiple slides per page to save paper, or to include lecture notes, or just the text from the slides without any graphics.
Caveat Emptor: The newer versions of Powerpoint save their documents in .pptx format. This format isn't compatible with earlier versions of the application. If you're taking your presentation to another machine it's best to make sure you use the 'File', 'Save As' function to save it as a .ppt presentation instead.
Caveat Emptor II: ALWAYS create a new folder for a Powerpoint presentation and save any images you're going to use in there so that you're sure you'll have them if/when you move machines. This will ensure you don't get bitten by the missing image gotcha.
Caveat Emptor III: If, as is very likely in MML, you're going to use a non-standard font in your Powerpoint presentation - i.e. one that you can't be sure will be installed on another computer - it's best not to assume that the other computer and Powerpoint will be able to cope. The safest workaround is to compose the text on your own computer and then save that text as an image by using a screen grab utility. On a Mac this can easily be achieved using the Grab application in Applications/Utilities that comes with the operating system. On the PC the SnagIt application is generally considered to be an excellent choice.
There are, of course, alternatives to Powerpoint! Within the Faculty we support Apple's Keynote application and Open Office.org's Impress. Keynote is available as part of Apple's iWork package (discounted for education) and Impress is freely downloadable as part of Open Office.org's productivity suite. There are other options too, just google for 'free presentation software' - but we're only familiar with the packages listed here.
--> For Advanced Powerpoint Videos Click Here <--
