You can purchase PowerPoint 2007 as a standalone program, but usually it’s included as one of the applications when you purchase Microsoft Office 2007.

There are a number of different editions of Microsoft Office 2007, also known as Office suites. They include the following: Basic, Standard, Home and Student, Small Business, Professional, Professional Plus, Enterprise, and Ultimate. Each has a different combination of programs included as part of the Office suite.

PowerPoint is included in all Office suites except Basic, which is available only from certain computer manufacturers as an OEM version when you purchase a new computer. Thus, if you opt to have Office installed when you get a new system, make sure you’re not buying Office Basic or you won’t have PowerPoint!

Microsoft Office Home and Student is designed for home users and students, allowing them to install and activate the product on up to three computers. Although the applications included in it are not missing features, Office Home and Student should not be used to create commercial solutions. In other words, you’re not supposed to buy Home and Student to use in your business. In addition, you cannot upgrade this Office suite in a few years when the next version of Microsoft Office is released.

Microsoft Office Professional Plus and Enterprise are volume license editions that are designed for corporations. Most home and casual users will not have access to these Office suites. The volume license editions do have a few features that other versions of Office don’t have. In PowerPoint’s case, the most notable is the option to publish slides to a SharePoint Slide Library directly from within PowerPoint and get updates when slides in the Slide Library have been changed. Microsoft Office Ultimate also has this feature, and even individual users can purchase it. Therefore, if you need the Slide Library capability in PowerPoint, but you are not a corporation using one of the volume license editions of Microsoft Office, you will need to purchase Microsoft Office Ultimate to get that feature.

Visit Office Online at http://office.microsoft.com if you need more information about the specific applications or features in the various Microsoft Office suites.

Although you can choose to install just PowerPoint 2007 on your computer, we don’t recommend it. At the least, you’ll probably want to install Excel 2007 as well; otherwise, you won’t have access to all the new, cool charting features!

Usually, when you install one of the Microsoft Office suites, you insert the CD or DVD into your drive and follow the prompts to install. If you want to install only one or two of the applications (PowerPoint and Excel, for example), or if you want to see exactly what is being installed, you can choose the Customize option. You also would select the Customize option if you want to keep Office applications that are already installed on your computer (see Figure 11.1). Just be aware that Microsoft doesn’t support these side-by-side installations.

Figure 11.1. If you want to keep an existing Microsoft Office installation, choose the Customize option.

For example, if you have Microsoft Office 2003 on your computer and you want to keep it and also install Microsoft Office 2007, you would choose the Customize installation option (see Figure 11.1). If you wanted to remove Office 2003, simply choose Upgrade, and the 2007 installation procedure will remove the previous version for you.

In the customize installation window, you still can choose to remove all existing applications from previous versions of Office, or you can choose individual programs (see Figure 11.2).

Figure 11.2. The Installation Options tab lets you specify which Office 2007 applications and options you want to install. The File Location tab lets you change the location to which Office 2007 will be installed.

Choose the Installation Options tab to specify which 2007 applications and options you want to install (refer to Figure 11.2). You should also go to the File Location tab and choose to install Office 2007 to a different folder than the previous version of Office.

There’s no way to customize the Ribbon from within the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface, but there are a few utilities you can use:

We’ll add other utilities to our list at http://www.pptkit.com/utilities/ as they are available.

There are all kinds of PowerPoint resources available to help you. Let us introduce you to some!