Microsoft PowerPoint 2010
Microsoft PowerPoint is a powerful presentation software developed by Microsoft. It is a standard component of the company’s Microsoft Office suite software, and is bundled together with Word, Excel and other office productivity tools. The program uses slides to convey information rich in multimedia. The term slide refers to the old slide projector, which this software effectively replaces.
PowerPoint was first developed by Dennis Austin and Thomas Rudkin at Forethought Inc. It was supposed to be named Presenter, but the name was not adapted due to trademark issues. It was renamed as PowerPoint in 1987 as suggested by Robert Gaskins. In August of 1987, Microsoft bought Forethought for $14 million and turned it into its graphics business unit, where the company continued to develop the software. The first iteration was launched together with Windows 3.0 in 1990. It only allowed slide progression in one direction – forward – and the amount of customization was fairly limited.
PowerPoint experienced a very significant change in PowerPoint 97, which added predefined transition effects and allowed the user to time them appropriately so that slides would transition automatically. This allowed a presenter to follow a predefined progression and go on with the presentation without pausing to change or read the slides.
Reference: http://www.techopedia.com/definition/5457/microsoft-powerpoint
Tutorials
Beginner
Apply and change a theme
You created slides for your presentation, and now you’re thinking about slide design: the background design, font styles, colors, and layouts. You want the slides to have a bit more visual pop. How do you get that? With themes. Themes provide a complete slide design for your presentation.
Apply transitions between slides
Slide transitions are the effects that occur when you move from one slide to the next during an on-screen presentation. Here’s how to work with them.
Create your first PowerPoint 2013 presentation
Watch these videos to learn how to use PowerPoint 2013. Get started with the new version to see how to do everyday tasks.
Highlight text and change fonts
Highlight text, user your mouse as a laser pointer when presenting, and change fonts in part or all of your PowerPoint 2013 presentation.
Print slides, notes, or handouts
You’ve finished creating your presentation, and now you want to print handouts for your audience. PowerPoint gives you several choices: you can print full page slides, multiple slides per page, or slides with your presenter notes or room for the audience to take notes next to the slides. If you want richer formatting, you can use Word to edit content, apply styles, and then print.
Use Presenter view
Watch these videos to learn how to use Presenter view in PowerPoint 2013 to separate what you see from what your audience sees.
Intermediate
Backgrounds in PowerPoint
These videos show you how to add color, textures, pictures, or remove them from a PowerPoint slide or deck. We’ll show how to customize your colors and some design tips so the background doesn’t overwhelm your presentation. Also, a bit about Master Slides that may help your add or remove a watermark or logo.
Crop a picture to fit a shape
Use the crop tools in PowerPoint to trim and remove unwanted portions of pictures, or to crop a picture to fit a shape.
Make the switch to PowerPoint 2013
Watch these videos to make the switch to PowerPoint 2013. Get started with the new version to see how to do everyday tasks.
Working with watermarks
It’s known as a watermark — some sort of background image that can appear throughout a PowerPoint presentation. Like a company logo, for example. Use watermarks for identification or branding, for security or legal purposes, or simply as a design or decorative element.
Webinar: Paper handouts for PowerPoint
Do you print your PowerPoint slides to hand out afterward? We’ll show you how to do it, and our guest, author and presentation expert Rick Altman, explains how you can avoid “handout hell,” where neither the slides nor the handouts are effective.
Work with handout masters
When you want to print handouts in PowerPoint, you can choose most of the handout settings in Print view. But for a few handout settings, you need to change the handout master, a page that contains the master layout and properties for handouts.
Webinar: Using video in PowerPoint
We show you how to embed and play videos in your PowerPoint presentations and in the free PowerPoint Online.
Webinar: 5 steps to a better PowerPoint
Do you know the best way to begin with PowerPoint? Do you think about where to sit in a meeting room? We’ll show these are other simple steps to make your next presentation do more with less sweat in this webinar.
Webinar: Ways to avoid rebuilding PowerPoints over and over
You’ve got a meeting coming up where several team members will be presenting. So how do you jumble and juggle multiple PowerPoint presentations without reinventing wheels, losing pieces or looking unprofessional? We’ll look at a few ways to make a new presentation out of slides you already have, and see how you can take the same slide deck to several meetings and give customized, unique presentations at each one.
Advanced
Add a sound effect to a transition
Add sound effects to transitions (visual effects when moving between slides) in your presentation. Set them to start and stop when you want them to, and more.
Add bullets to text
Format your text as bullets; change font size, line spacing, and indentation; and change list formatting on the slide master to change all of your slides at once.
Add headers and footers to a presentation
When we talk about headers and footers in a presentation, we mean the small details near the top or bottom of your slides. Like the slide number, a text footer, and the date. Headers and footers appear in various positions, depending on the theme and slide layout. You choose which headers and footers to show and what the text footer says. Take this course to learn how to add and customize them.
Add sound effects to an animation
Add sound effects to your presentation in Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2013. Set them to start and stop when you want them to, and add multiple sounds to animations.
Animate pictures, clip art, text, and other objects
You can animate just about anything in PowerPoint 2013. It’s easy to do. Animate text, pictures, charts, shapes, and more. And you can create some pretty amazing presentations with lots of motion path animations.
Webinar: Using animation in PowerPoint (without being dorky)
Animations can help drive a point home, but if you’re not careful, they also can seem so silly your audience will feel like 6-year-olds. Learn how to use animations and do it smartly in this webinar.
Create a flow chart
Create a flow chart in PowerPoint 2013 to illustrate sequential steps in a process, and choose from a variety of layouts and options. Take this short course to learn more.
Create an org chart
Add an org chart to your slide. Take this short course to learn how.
Create a template from a presentation
You want to use your presentation as a template, or master, that you and others can update and change as necessary. You’d keep the formatting and text you always want in the presentation, and where new content needs to be added, you could use placeholder text as a guideline for authors. You could include formatting, too, such as the frame style on a picture placeholder, to save other authors’ time and help ensure consistency. Just save your presentation as a template to do all this and more.
Design motion paths
A motion path is an animation effect that moves an item, like a picture, on a line that you specify in PowerPoint 2013. Take this course to learn how to create them.
Insert a bar chart
Quickly add a bar chart to your presentation, and see how to arrange the data to get the result you want. Customize chart elements, apply a chart style and colors, and insert a linked Excel chart.
Insert a line chart
Quickly add a line chart to your presentation, and see how to arrange the data to get the result you want. Customize chart elements, apply a chart style and colors, and insert a linked Excel chart.
Insert a pie chart
Quickly add a pie chart to your presentation, and see how to arrange the data to get the result you want. Customize chart elements, apply a chart style and colors, and insert a linked Excel chart.
Rehearse timings for a slide show
Use slide timing to record the time that you present each slide, then use the recorded times to advance the slides automatically when you present to your audience.
Trigger an animation effect
You can trigger an animation effect to begin playing at the start of, or sometime during, an audio or video clip. You can also trigger an animation effect to start when you click the shape or other object that has the animation applied.
Use slide masters to customize a presentation
Slide masters are designed to help you create great looking presentations in less time, without a lot of effort. When you want all your slides to contain the same fonts and images (such as logos), make those changes to the slide master.