Welcome to Introduction to PowerPoint 2002. This tutorial is designed for people who are new to PowerPoint. We will cover the basics of using PowerPoint, including how to display your presentation on the World Wide Web. We will also give you some tips for making more effective presentations, and at the end of this tutorial, we will provide a list of additional resources you can use to learn more.

PowerPoint is a software application designed by Microsoft Corporation. Its purpose is to create and modify presentations. These presentations can be displayed in classrooms or in other group environments, and they can also be posted onto the World Wide Web, where they can be available to a much larger audience.

Let’s get started with some basic definitions. A presentation is the primary type of file PowerPoint is used to create. Presentations typically have the file extension .ppt. However, you can also save PowerPoint presentations as Adobe Acrobat documents with the file extension .pdf. Finally, you can save your presentation as a web page, with the file extension .html or .htm.

Slides are individual parts of a presentation. They are similar to the specific pages in a print document. This is a slide.

The layout is the specific arrangement of text and images on a slide. Layouts can be very simple, as in this example, with a header followed by text, or they can be more complex, as in this example, with a header followed by two columns of text. You can also arrange text alongside images in your layout, as in this example, and it’s possible to have nothing but an image on an individual slide, as in this example. You can include animation, sounds, and other multimedia objects in your layout, and we’ll provide some additional resources later on that show you how to do this.

A design template is the specific “look” of a slide or group of slides. A design template can be very basic, with black text on a white background as in this example, or it can be very colorful and complex, as in these examples. Typically, PowerPoint presentations have the same design template for all slides, although it is possible to select a different design template for each slide. Later, I’ll show you how to select different design templates.

Finally, a slide show is the way a presentation appears when you are presenting it. When you display your slides in a slide show, the slides typically take up the whole screen, and they appear in sequence. We’ll introduce some other terms later in this presentation.