Chapter 20. A First Look at PowerPoint 2010

PowerPoint 2010 is a member of the Microsoft Office 2010 suite of programs. A suite is a group of programs designed by a single manufacturer to work well together. Like its siblings—Word (the word processor), Excel (the spreadsheet), Outlook (the personal organizer and e-mail manager), and Access (the database)—PowerPoint has a well-defined role. It creates materials for presentations.

A presentation is any kind of interaction between a speaker and an audience, but it usually involves one or more of the following visual aids: 35mm slides, overhead transparencies, computer-based slides (either local or at a website or other network location), hard-copy handouts, and speaker notes. PowerPoint can create all of these types of visual aids, plus many other types that you'll learn about as you go along.

Because PowerPoint is so tightly integrated with the other Microsoft Office 2010 components, you can easily share information among them. For example, if you have created a graph in Excel, you can use that graph on a PowerPoint slide. It goes the other way, too. You can, for example, take the outline from your PowerPoint presentation and copy it into Word, where you can dress it up with Word's powerful document formatting commands. Virtually any piece of data in any Office program can be linked to any other Office program, so you ...

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