PowerPoint 2019 For Dummies

Doug Lowe

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119514220
• eBook ISBN: 9781119514176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Desktop Applications
• Index: Computer Science

Get up and running fast with the PowerPoint 2019

PowerPoint continues to be the go-to tool for business presentations. The software helps anyone who needs to communicate clearly by creating powerful and effective slideshow presentations featuring data in the form of charts, clip art, sound, and video. You can even use it to create presentations for the Web.

In PowerPoint 2019 For Dummies, expert Doug Lowe shows you how to use this popular tool to make show-stopping presentations that will get your message across — and your audience excited.

• Create a slide presentation with special effects
• Work with master slides and templates
• Collaborate with other users in the cloud
• Add charts, clip art, sound, and video

Want to learn to use PowerPoint quickly and efficiently? Look no further!

Part 1

Getting Started with PowerPoint 2019

IN THIS PART …

Get a bird’s-eye view of PowerPoint 2019 and what you can do with it.

Find out how to edit the content on PowerPoint slides, from the text itself to text objects to other types of objects, such as clip art pictures or drawn shapes.

Understand how to work in Outline View so you can focus on your presentation’s main points and subpoints without worrying about appearance.

Learn to proof your presentation with PowerPoint and avoid embarrassing mistakes.

Discover how to create speaker notes to help you get through your presentation.

Know how to finish the final preparations by printing copies of your slides, notes, and handouts, as well as how to set up a projector and actually deliver your presentation.

Chapter 1

Welcome to PowerPoint 2019

IN THIS CHAPTER

Discovering PowerPoint

Firing up PowerPoint

Making sense of the PowerPoint screen and the Ribbon

Visiting backstage

Creating a presentation

Viewing presentation outlines

Saving and closing your work

Retrieving a presentation from the hard drive

Getting help

Getting out of PowerPoint

This chapter is a grand and gala welcoming ceremony for PowerPoint 2019, Microsoft’s popular slide-presentation program.

This chapter is sort of like the opening ceremony of the Olympics, in which all the athletes parade around the stadium and people make speeches in French. In much the same way, this chapter marches PowerPoint 2019 around the stadium so you can get a bird’s-eye view of what the program is and what you can do with it. I might make a few speeches, but not in French (unless, of course, you’re reading the French edition of this book).

What in Sam Hill Is PowerPoint?

PowerPoint is a program that comes with Microsoft Office. There are three ways to get a copy of PowerPoint:

• Subscribe to Microsoft’s Office 365. Office 365 is a cloud-based subscription service that lets you use various products that are a part of the Microsoft Office Suite. The main advantages of subscribing to Office 365 are that you pay a low monthly or yearly cost (as low as $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year) and you always get the latest updates for free.
• Purchase a copy of Office 2019. You can buy Office 2019 for about two and a half times the annual subscription price. The advantage is that you own the software outright; the disadvantage is that you don’t get free upgrades.
• Purchase PowerPoint 2019 separately from the entire Office Suite. Few people choose this option, because most people who want to use PowerPoint also want to use other products in the Office Suite, including Word, Excel, and Outlook.

You know what Word is — it’s the world’s most loved and most hated word processor, and it’s perfect for concocting letters, term papers, and great American novels. I’m thinking of writing one as soon as I finish this book. Excel is a spreadsheet program used by bean counters the world over. Outlook is that program you use to read your email. But what the heck is PowerPoint? Does anybody know or care? (And as long as I’m asking questions, who in Sam Hill was Sam Hill?)

PowerPoint is a presentation program, and it’s one of the coolest programs I know. It’s designed to work with a projector to display presentations that will bedazzle your audience members and instantly sway them to your point of view, even if you’re selling real estate on Mars, season tickets for the Oakland Raiders, or a new tax increase to a congressman in an election year. If you’ve ever flipped a flip chart, you’re going to love PowerPoint.

Here are some of the many uses of PowerPoint:

• Business presentations: PowerPoint is a great timesaver for anyone who makes business presentations, whether you’ve been asked to speak in front of hundreds of people at a shareholders’ convention, a group of sales reps at a sales conference, or your own staff or co-workers at a business meeting.
• Sales presentations: If you’re an insurance salesperson, you can use PowerPoint to create a presentation about the perils of not owning life insurance and then use your laptop or tablet computer to show it to hapless clients.
• Lectures: PowerPoint is useful for teachers or conference speakers who want to reinforce the key points in their lectures with slides.
• Homework: PowerPoint is a great program to use for certain types of homework projects, such as those big history reports that count for half your grade.
• Church: People use PowerPoint at churches to display song lyrics on big screens so everyone can sing or to display sermon outlines so everyone can take notes. If your church still uses hymnals or prints the outline in the bulletin, tell the minister to join the 21st century.
• Information stations: You can use PowerPoint to set up a computerized information kiosk that people can walk up to and use. For example, you can create a museum exhibit about the history of your town or set up a tradeshow presentation to provide information about your company and products.
• Internet presentations: PowerPoint can even help you to set up a presentation that you can broadcast over the Internet so people can join in on the fun without having to leave the comfort of their own homes or offices.

Introducing PowerPoint Presentations

PowerPoint is similar to a word processor such as Word, except that it’s geared toward creating presentations rather than documents. A presentation is kind of like those Kodak Carousel slide trays that your grandpa filled up with 35mm slides of the time he took the family to the Grand Canyon in 1965. The main difference is that with PowerPoint, you don’t have to worry about dumping all the slides out of the tray and figuring out how to get them back into the right order.

Word documents consist of one or more pages, and PowerPoint presentations consist of one or more slides. Each slide can contain text, graphics, animations, videos, and other information. You can easily rearrange the slides in a presentation, delete slides that you don’t need, add new slides, or modify the contents of existing slides.

You can use PowerPoint both to create your presentations and to actually pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Getting Started with PowerPoint 2019
• Part 2: Creating Great-Looking Slides
• Part 3: Embellishing Your Slides
• Part 4: Working with Others
• Part 5: The Part of Tens
• Index
• About the Author
• Advertisement Page
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement