Tips and tricks for using PowerPoint

Well, okay, I don't have THAT many tips and tricks, but I had to let you know about the ones I did find out about that helped me a lot with presentations.

First of all, I didn't know how to allow each bullet point to appear one by one rather than all at once on a slide. What you have to do is animate the bulleted text. Look for the little flying star button in the Formatting toolbar to try out a bunch of Animation Effects. To get each bullet to appear separately, click on the Animate Slide Text button under the Animate Effects toolbar. Click on the star at the bottom of the Animation Effects toolbar to preview the effect. The other effects are pretty fun... but many of them can be pretty distracting.

If you want to add images or sound to the slideshow, great! Just make sure that whatever image or sound files you use, that you have them wherever you play the show. It's best to play the show on the same computer you created it, so you know all the images and sounds are going to be in the same locations you instructed the show to find them in the first place. If you put the show on a flash/thumb drive, you might find that the little touches you added aren't there. You can also create the show online and upload all the files to the server so they're all in one place.

Adding sound is a fun thing to do in PowerPoint, and there are lots of options to consider when doing so. Once you add a sound to a slide, a little megaphone will appear on the page, and you can make it so you can click that megaphone for the sound to start, or have it start to play automatically. You can choose to hide the megaphone as well. You can start a sound from the middle, make it fade in or out, or have a sound play over a range of slides (you choose which ones). You should try finding clips online, which you can do by going to Insert->Movies and Sounds->Sounds from Gallery, then going to Clips Online at the top of the pop-up box.

The rest of PowerPoint is a lot like Microsoft Word in how you put together the slides, just like separate Word documents.

If you go to the Formatting toolbar and click the button with the two "A"s separated by a slash, you can preview how the text will look in the slideshow with the formatting effects you select. The previewing text will be that text to the left, which is the same as the text that appears on the slides.

To start a slideshow from PowerPoint, there are several options:

• Click "Slide Show " at the bottom left of the program window (it looks like a pull-down screen).
• Slide Show->View Show.
• View->Slide Show.
• Press F5.

To exit the slideshow preview and go back to edit it, just press the "Escape" key.