Building the outline and creating individual slides in PowerPoint are obviously necessary to produce a great presentation. But PowerPoint’s real talent lies in its ability to pull those images together into a running slideshow. Although good taste sometimes suffers as a result, PowerPoint gives you the tools to enrich your slide presentations with transitions, builds, video, music, sound effects, and voice narration. You can then rehearse your PowerPoint shows to work out the split-second timing. You can even turn your masterpieces into printouts or a Web site for the benefit of those who missed the presentation, or save your slideshows as QuickTime movies, then edit them again later (back in PowerPoint).

This chapter shows you how to harness these potent PowerPoint features.