PowerPoint 2003

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Microsoft's PowerPoint is an application in the Office Suite that allows you to create slide presentations. A slide presentation might be one that you would present to one or a few people, or possibly to a large audience in a lecture hall or auditorium. When you open PowerPoint, similar to the other Microsoft Office applications, the opening screen looks like the one you see here. Typically on the right-hand side is the task pane, which may be closed if you're not interested in seeing the task pane, and from time to time it has a mind of its own and opens depending on the type of instruction you've asked PowerPoint to do for you. If you want the task pane to open, you can always go to the menu item called View, and under View you can select the option to view the task pane. If you uncheck that option or click the X in the top right-hand corner of the task pane, you'll get more real estate on the screen. The opening PowerPoint screen essentially contains three sections. The main and largest section is the view of each of your individual slides. On the left is a slide sorter that you will see as we develop the slides, they will begin to show up on the left-hand side in little thumbnails, and this gives you the opportunity to immediately go to a different slide or to rearrange the order of the slides. The third section is the section at the bottom below the body of the slide, which is a note area. This is a section where you would type notes for you as the speaker, as the presenter, so that when you are talking to your audience you can have these on your lectern, and you don't have to turn around and look at the screen all of the time, and turn your back to your audience. If you would like a little more room for either the slide sorter, you can put the mouse on the divider bar and drag the size of the column to be larger or smaller. In a similar fashion, if you put the mouse on the divider bar where the notes section appears, you can drag that up and give yourself a little more room in the notes section. Down on the status bar it tells us that we are looking at slide one of one, since we have just begun, and there are a few other controls over on the left that we will eventually get to. And typically at the top there is a title bar, which in this case shows us that we are in Microsoft PowerPoint, and the default opening presentation is called Presentation 1, until we save it with a more meaningful name. Then of course there is the menu bar, and then one or more toolbars, depending on whether you would like to see them vertically or horizontally, you can put them on your screen in any one of a number of ways similar to what you would do in any of the other office applications.