Although PowerPoint is the world’s most popular presentation program, and most medical presenters use it, there are many who feel intimidated by the program and prefer to give presentations prepared for them by employees or trainees. If you are a complete PowerPoint novice, this chapter is for you. By the time you have read the chapter and completed the tutorials, you will be able to open the program, set up a presentation, choose a template, prepare the presentation and save it in a number of different ways. We will not deal with adding images and video, because there is a chapter specifically devoted to this.

So, to begin with let’s make it easy for you to open PowerPoint whenever you come to use it. We will assume that you are using Windows XP. If your PowerPoint icon is not easily found, you may want to place it on the Taskbar or in the Start Menu.

To place the icon in the Start Menu click Start>All Programs and look for but do not click on the name “Microsoft PowerPoint”.

Click and hold down the left mouse button and drag the icon and name of the program to the left until it lies just below the name given to your computer, up above the Start button. As you drag the icon to the correct position a black line will appear.

Release the mouse button when you are happy with the position of the icon and it will appear there

Alternatively, to place the icon on the Taskbar, again find the PowerPoint program icon and program name, and drag it to the Taskbar at the bottom left-hand corner of your desktop, immediately to the right of the Start button. Once again a dark line will appear, but this one is like a capital I.

Now you can start PowerPoint by clicking either of these icons. Click one now to open the program.

You will be presented with a blank PowerPoint slide.

You may see the Task Pane on the right side of your presentation. If not click View>Task Pane and it will appear. The Task Pane lists from top to bottom: presentations that you have opened recently, options for preparing a new presentation from a blank canvas, an existing template or from a wizard.

We would not recommend the wizard, but by all means try it out and form your own opinion. Below these are options to base a presentation on an existing presentation (in reality all this does is use the File>Open command). Last of the choices is the option to open a recently used template.

Of course if you have just installed PowerPoint you will not have any existing presentations or recent templates to work from, do these options will be empty.

Let’s look under New from template and then select General Templates in the choices listed above. You will note that the appearance of the Task Pane now changes to offer up all the design templates installed on your computer. The basic PowerPoint templates will have to do for now! When you read on in the book, we will teach you how to make your own template very easily.

Select any template and click on it. The template is now applied to your slide. In addition, the layout of your slide is automatically set to a title slide. Add a title - say “My PowerPoint presentation” - and add your name.

Now save the presentation; File>Save As and add a name that is easy to remember. [Hint: save all your PowerPoint presentations in one place on your computer. You may want to add a folder to your desktop called presentations and always save to this. That way they are easy to find] Note that this name is now displayed along the top of the PowerPoint window, rather than “Presentation 1”. Get into the habit of saving your files regularly – even as often as every slide that you add.

You may not particularly like the color scheme that is used in the template. You can easily change this. Click the small down arrow, beside the word “Slide layout” at the top right corner of the window. Choose the option Slide Design>Color Schemes. Click on each of the color schemes and choose the one you want. You will learn later how to choose a color combination that suits the room in which you are presenting. You can always go back to the templates by following the same step and selecting Slide Design>Slide Templates. This option lets you see a visual image of each template available on your computer.

You are ready to add more slides, but before you do there is one more important task. You have to determine how you will be presenting your slides.

Select File>Page Setup. You can choose to show your presentation on a multimedia projector or on your computer (On-screen Show), on various sizes of paper (say A4 for printing on to acetates / transparencies) or as 35mm slides, to be developed by a photographic department or shop. For now choose “On-screen Show”.

Now save again.

Now click on the down arrow beside “Slide Design” and choose “Slide Layout”.

To add a new slide you can use a number of methods. The easiest is to type Ctrl-M. You can use Insert>New Slide or you can use the button “New Slide”. In the new slide, click on the title area and add a title such as “My second slide”. Now click on the wording “Click to add text” and put some additional text as bullet points. Note that the bullet points are all towards the top of the slide. Don’t be tempted to move this yet - we will teach you the best way to change this later.

You may find that even if you use a lower case letter for the start of the first word on each line, PowerPoint changes this to upper case. Many people find it preferable to use lower case. If so you need to change the default settings. This is easy to do. Click on tools>autocorrect options. A dialogue box appears. Remove the tick from the option capitalize first letter of sentences. You may also want to remove the tick against the option capitalize first letter of table cells. Click “OK”. If you add new bullet points in lower case the first letter will not be capitalized now.

Note that a dotted line surrounds the text box. If you click outside this box it will disappear. If at any time you make a mistake, you can go back by typing Ctrl-Z or click the little back arrow on the top menu. In a later chapter you will learn how to choose the best font and font sizes and how to change these in the slide template, for now, just accept the defaults.

Save your slide. Get in the habit of doing this; we will not remind you again!

If you are a complete novice we hope that this whets your appetite! There are a further 14 illustrations and a lot of additional text in this chapter alone. These illustrations are very small. You can't really read them too well. In the book all images will be full size.