12. Learn your Software

It’s not possible to design your slides appropriately if you don’t know how to use the software. Yes, you can put the text and the graphics on the slides and move them around, but you need to know how to control things to really get the look you want.

There are many books that teach you how to use your chosen application, but there are several features that are so important to the design of your slides that I want to make sure you know them right now.

I can’t provide tutorials for all the different software and all the different versions. In this chapter, I provide specific directions for the versions that are current as I write this book: PowerPoint 2007 on the PC, PowerPoint 2008 on a Mac, and Keynote ’09 on ...

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