PowerPoint
From TSG Library of Knowledge
Microsoft Office PowerPoint is a presentation program; a sort of digital SlideShow. The program is versatile and may be used for many things from electronic greetings cards to business proposals. It can both edit and show PowerPoint presentation Files. (*.ppt)
Presentation
A PowerPoint presentation is made up of a number of slides, which will fill the screen one at a time when the presentation is played. Slides, once designed, are normally shown sequentially at mouseclick or after a given period of time. To show a PowerPoint presentation (either on their screen or if available on the secondary monitor or Data Projector.) the operator presses F5 or clicks View Show in the Slide show menu. If a presentation is saved as a PowerPoint Show (*.pps) it will load and display imediately on being opened without going through the design screen.
Design
Each slide is built by marking out rectangular areas for text boxes, simple graphics, graphs, tables or even frames for picture or movie files. Further formatting may be applied to text; including the changing of font, size or colour, as well as properties such as alignment, italics, underline, and bold. Other elements can also be formatted to change their colour or size, and even the slide itself may be given a background colour or image.
PowerPoint has the capacity for far more elaborate slides when features such as animations or slide transitions are added. The transition defines how PowerPoint moves from one slide to the next. It might be set as a clean jump; one of many different blends, twists, moving slides; or a random selection from the list of available transitions. The animation is what defines how one of the PowerPoint elements acts during the slideshow. Very often a company logo is the object of an animation (or several), appearing and disappearing with a flourish as it falls onto or off the slide, spins in from one side, or uses another of the many available options. Elements can also be set to perform tasks (such as playing animations or sound effects) at the prompting of a mouse click or timer.
