Creating a Presentation
When PowerPoint starts, it presents you with a variety of options for creating or opening presentations (see Figure 28.3).
Figure 28.3. PowerPoint lets you choose whether you want to open an existing presentation, create a new presentation with or without content, or pull in a template.
Creating a Blank Presentation
When you create a new, blank presentation—by choosing Blank Presentation in the New Presentation pane (refer to Figure 28.3); by choosing File, New; or by clicking the New icon on the Standard toolbar—PowerPoint generates a new presentation and places you in the Slide Layout pane (see Figure 28.4).
Figure 28.4. Whenever you have a new, blank slide, PowerPoint prompts you to pick a slide layout and to determine which placeholders will go on a slide and where they will sit.
Like the Design Template approach mentioned in the preceding section, PowerPoint starts with a single slide. You have to choose what kind of slide you want by using the choices in the Slide Layout pane.
→ For tips on negotiating the layout maze, see "Picking the Best Slide Layout".
Unlike the Design Template approach—which leaves you with something resembling a respectable slide—this blank PowerPoint presentation starts with a white background, Arial 44- and 32-point (for titles and body text, respectively), and standard, dull, round bullets.
To apply a new design to any presentation, click the Design icon on the Formatting toolbar, and the Slide Design pane (see Figure 28.5) appears.
Figure 28.5. Creating a new presentation from a Design Template leaves you with a single slide, but all new slides will take on the same design.
Tip from 
PowerPoint doesn't install all of its Design Templates unless you specifically ask for them. To pull all the templates off the Office installation CD, go into the Slide Design pane, scroll all the way to the bottom of the Apply a Design Template box, and click Install More Templates. Have your Office CD handy.
If your company has certain standards for all presentations—logo in a specific location, identification of title slides, and so on—you might want to change PowerPoint's "blank" presentation so it reflects your standards.
To replace the PowerPoint default blank presentation with one of your own design, follow these steps:
Create the presentation you want to use as the "blank" presentation.
Choose File, Save As. In the Save as Type box, click Design Template.
Type Blank in the File Name box and click Save.
Tip from 
To make this change for all the users in your organization, you must create a Blank Presentation design template file for each user and place it in the correct custom template folder.
→ For details on organizing files, see "Creating New Files".
With a Blank Presentation file in the correct location, all "blank" presentations—whether created via the New Presentation pane or the New icon on the Standard toolbar—will be based on that file.
Starting PowerPoint with a Design Template
If you choose Design Template from the PowerPoint New Presentation pane, PowerPoint transports you to the Slide Design pane, and lets you pick a design for the presentation (see Figure 28.5).
Note
A design, in this case, includes a background, font specifications for the title slide and other slides in the presentation, default bullets, and a handful of lesser settings—title locations, footers, slide numbering, and the like.
If you choose Apply to All Slides, PowerPoint sets things up so the single slide in your new presentation, which you can see in the large window, has the desired design, as well as any new slides you might add.
Tip from 
Several design templates were lost in the transition from PowerPoint 97 to PowerPoint 2002. If you can't find your favorite "classic" template in PowerPoint 2002's current lineup, check the Office update Web site, officeupdate.microsoft.com, for links to all the old designs.
Adding Your Own Presentations to the AutoContent Wizard
PowerPoint ships with dozens of prefabricated presentations, many of which combine decent visual effects with reasonable suggestions for presenting your own content. The AutoContent Wizard guides you through creating presentations conforming to the built-in templates.
Although PowerPoint ships with great templates (providing they cover the topic you want), most advanced PowerPoint users will find that their own custom presentations provide a better starting point.
You can add your own presentations to the AutoContent Wizard by following these steps:
Create and save a presentation that you want to put in the AutoContent Wizard. (In particular, you can start with one of PowerPoint's built-in presentations, available by choosing File, New, and selecting from the files listed on the Presentations tab.) You can save it in either Presentation format (*.ppt) or Design Template format (*.pot).
Start the AutoContent Wizard by clicking From AutoContent Wizard on the New Presentation pane (refer to Figure 28.3).
Click Next to jump to the second step, Presentation type.
Choose the category most appropriate to your presentation. General, Corporate, Projects, and Sales/Marketing work; All and Carnegie Coach do not—no doubt because "All" includes all presentations present, and the Carnegie presentations are under license. Click Add (see Figure 28.6).
Figure 28.6. Add your own presentations to the AutoContent Wizard using the Add button here.
Select your presentation or design template file, and click OK. When you return to the wizard, click Cancel.
Presentations added in this manner work just like the built-in templates, except the full filename, including the .ppt or .pot filename extension, appears in the wizard's second pane.
Retrieving Classic Microsoft Templates
Experienced PowerPoint 2000 users might discover that not all the templates they've seen in previous versions ship with 2002. That's by design—Microsoft is constantly picking and pruning the template collection, shipping only the ones felt to be most popular.
Additional templates, including many of the "classic" templates you might remember from earlier versions of PowerPoint, are on the Microsoft Web site. To get there, choose Help, Office on the Web, and follow the links to the PowerPoint templates.
Copying the Design of an Existing Presentation
Frequently, you'll find an existing presentation with just the right design elements, even if the content is completely different from what you need.
PowerPoint makes it easy to recycle the design of an existing presentation, providing you have the original presentation file, and you can "borrow" the design without changing the content of your presentation in any way.
Just choose Format, Apply Design Template. In the Files of Type box, scroll down to Presentations and Shows. Choose the presentation you like, and click Apply.
The design of the chosen presentation is applied automatically to your current presentation.
Importing from a Word Outline
How many times have you been asked to give a presentation based on an existing report or other document? If you can import the document into Word and convert its headings to Word's default "Heading 1" style, the rest is a snap.
Outlines in Word can be imported directly into PowerPoint in either of two ways. From inside Word, choose File, Send To, Microsoft PowerPoint. From inside PowerPoint, choose File, Open, and in the Files of Type box choose All Outlines, as shown in Figure 28.7.
Figure 28.7. Import outlines from other documents in the Open dialog box.
When you import a Word document, Level 1 headings (formatted "Heading 1" in Word) turn into the titles of new slides. Level 2 headings turn into top-level bullet points. Level 3 headings become second-level bullet points, and so on. In essence, the outline that you see in Word's Outline view is translated into a PowerPoint outline.
Each time PowerPoint encounters a level 1 heading in Word, it starts a new slide and uses the level 1 heading text for the slide's title.
Note
In other words, your presentation will include exactly one slide for each level 1 heading in the Word document.
You can insert an outline into the middle of an existing presentation. Select the slide you want the outline to follow, and then choose Insert, Slides from Outline. PowerPoint offers to insert an outline (refer to Figure 28.7), and the inserted outline appears as slides after the selected slide.