Presentation Basics: Some Tips
Before you start diving into the multimedia presentation building in the rest of the book, you'll need some basic presentation-building skills. I'm assuming that many of you already came to this book with those, and I hope that this chapter has helped the rest of you come up to speed.
Following is some related info I haven't touched on here that might be useful to a beginner:
You're not completely alone in this presentation-building thing. PowerPoint comes with lots of templates that give you a jumpstart on a presentation; see Chapter 2 to learn more about them.
For almost every type of content, you have a choice of using a layout with a placeholder or inserting the object manually. It's usually best to use the placeholder. See Chapter 3 for more information about layouts.
If you find yourself making the same changes to every slide in the presentation, save yourself some time-use the Slide Master. Anything you do to the Slide Master automatically trickles down to every slide in the presentation. Chapter 3 explains the Slide Master.
PowerPoint may not be your favorite program for text editing, and it need not be. You can create the presentation text in some other program, like Word, and then import it into a presentation. See Chapter 4 to learn how to do that.
Slide content exists in frames that float over the top of the slide. There are text frames, graphics frames, and so on. Every framed object can be moved (drag it by its middle, or by its border but not on a selection handle), resized (drag it by a selection handle), or deleted (select the frame and press Delete). Chapter 7 explains manipulating graphics, and the information there applies to most other types of objects as well.