Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Chapter 16. Building a PowerPoint Presentation

Slideshows derive their power from their simplicity. By displaying a single static image at a time, slide shows can present information simply and clearly—and often with more impact than you could achieve with a moving picture—whether you’re teaching geography to a class of third-graders or pitching an ad campaign to a Fortune 500 CEO.

PowerPoint gives you the ability to create very basic, simple slides—for example, just words on a plain background or a single picture—or a complex blend of photographs, animation, movies, and sound, to create dazzling presentations that grab and hold your audience’s attention.

Whether you opt for simple or fancy, you start by picking a PowerPoint theme—a pre-designed template that gives your slide show a cohesive style or look. You then use layouts to create the individual slides and arrange them in the proper order.

PowerPoint 2008 introduces 50 new slide themes—coordinated templates containing fonts, colors, and visual effects designed to give your presentation a unified look. As you build each slide, the new layouts keep your designs consistent from slide to slide, keeping your text and objects aligned from slide to slide. In addition, you can create your own custom layouts with text and image placeholders, backgrounds graphics, and so on. You’ll find Slide Themes and Slide Layouts tabs in the Elements Gallery, where you can quickly preview them and apply them to your slideshow.