This book is all about remaking your PowerPoint presentations so that they look better and you become more successful. Consider this question: Is this book old wine packaged in a new bottle? Read the question again: Old wine packaged in a new bottle.
Now choose one word that you consider to be the most important within the question, and tell us why you chose that particular word. Because we can’t personally ask all our readers this question, we did the next best thing: We asked our friends! In addition, to be absolutely sure that the results would not be overly influenced by our friends, we also asked this question in a private online forum populated by people whom we had never met.
Here’s our analysis of their responses:
If you chose old, you probably have tons of PowerPoint files from years and years of creating and delivering presentations. This book will help you make those presentations look more contemporary and stylish.
If you chose wine, you like the finer things in life—the bottles themselves don’t matter as much to you. Fine presentation design is an art form that will become familiar to you within the covers of this book.
If you chose new, you probably are a novice—or at least someone who loves to learn new things all the time. You will enjoy the tricks you will learn in this book.
If you chose bottle, you are open to options and are brave. Very few people admitted that their first choice of a word in this phrase was bottle. Brave people love to break rules, as you’ll learn in this book.
But what if you chose packaged, or why did you not choose that word? Well, the book you are holding in your hands is all about packaging. It doesn’t matter whether the wine is old or the bottle is new. What’s important is the packaging, because if the packaging doesn’t give you sufficient information in a way that’s pleasing to you, you might never even try the wine!
Yes, that was just an analogy; after all, one of the authors of this book doesn’t even drink wine!
The PowerPoint presentation that you create or make over is packaging. Packaging is very important; in fact, let us repeat this and say it again: It is the packaging that will attract the potential client, possible investor, or perceived respondent, and the makeovers in this book will help you create better packaging.
If someone tells you that packaging is not important, ask him to compare a Cadillac to a Yugo. (After all, they both run, but which would you prefer to look at?) Or ask him if he’s ever noticed how the food in a five-star restaurant is presented, how light falls on a solitaire diamond in a jewelry store, how some television commercials are better than others, or how people all over the world decorate their homes on holidays. The world expects great packaging, and our world has moved so far forward in the last few years that anything not properly packaged is hardly given a second glance. That might not be a great state of affairs, but then, we are not out to change the world; we just want to make your PowerPoint presentations look better!
We wrote this book because we wanted to share what we have learned over the years. We wanted to use those ideas to bring alive countless presentations all over the world so that the perception of “dead PowerPoint” dies.
There probably are 30 million PowerPoint users out there who can choose from a gazillion PowerPoint books that attempt to be replacements for manuals or to go a little further and show users how they can use the tons of features PowerPoint provides. Those books are more like reference books that can be pulled off the bookshelf when required. This book is not a replacement for those books, although you might not need them when using this one!
This book looks at a very few options in PowerPoint that can make a huge difference. It’s like that famous 20:80 concept: 20 percent of the options can make 80 percent of the difference. So we’ll fully cover that 20 percent to help you create better presentations in very little time.
A large number of pages cover the eight makeover chapters that are the raison d’être of this book. All these makeover chapters were written as do-it-yourself tutorials that are entirely self-contained. Peppered with visuals, each makeover can be finished at one sitting or whenever you have the time.
Each makeover is divided into individual steps, and you don’t even have to start at the first step because we include a copy of the makeover presentation at the end of each step; you’ll find it on the CD. Just choose which step you want to start with and get started. Thus, whether you have five minutes or five hours, there’s something for everyone.
We also kept the makeovers independent of other programs, so we won’t ask you to open Photoshop or some other program that you don’t have and do something with it. Everything you learn to do within the covers of this book is possible using PowerPoint 2007.
This book is divided into three parts.
Part I looks at how PowerPoint 2007 differs from earlier versions and gives a quick walkthrough of the interface and its elements.
Part II is the heart of the book.
Chapter 2, “Makeover 1: A Corporate Presentation,” is a typical corporate presentation that explains a new policy. Replacing clip art with photographs gives it a more sophisticated look.
Chapter 3, “Makeover 2: Medical Speaker Training,” has lots of information on using charts and improving them with graphics and color.
Chapter 4 “Makeover 3: School Project,” uses a “kid-friendly” look and shows you how a very simple presentation can be made to look elegant in little time.
Chapter 5, “Makeover 4: A Quick Team Presentation,” explains how you can take slides from disparate sources and create a cohesive look with these seemingly different slides.
Chapter 6, “Makeover 5: Halloween Scrapbook,” is a picture scrapbook presentation that gets “spooked out” with scary graphics and is set to eerie music.
Chapter 7, “Makeover 6: Kiosk Presentation,” is in a kiosk in the entryway of the local high school. It lets the user view a map of the school, see a calendar of upcoming events, and get information about those events. This one gets jazzed up with some improvements to graphics and the addition of animation to the calendar.
Chapter 8, “Makeover 7: No Bullets Presentation,” is an advertising tale: plenty of visuals and just the right amount of text. It’s based on an award-winning presentation from Ethos3 Communications that takes a boring bulleted presentation to visual heaven.
Chapter 9, “Makeover 8: Trade Show Loop Presentation,” uses high-impact animation to grab the viewers’ attention. It’s based on a makeover by Julie Terberg, the technical editor for this book.
Part III includes additional resources.
Chapter 10, “The Gallery,” shows sample design layouts and inspiration.
Chapter 11, “Everything Else We Wanted to Squeeze In!”: The title says it all! You will find this on the CD or at www.informit.com/title/9780789736819.
“On the CD,” has specific information about what you’ll find on the accompanying CD.
Almost anyone with a basic understanding of Microsoft Windows and Office can use this book. We won’t show you how you can open and save a file, but we will show you how to do everything else.
Beginners, intermediate users, and advanced users can benefit from this book and the concepts it introduces.