Microsoft PowerPoint 2003, Introduction to

A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have to be present when lessons are released. You will have access to all lessons until the course ends. However, the interactive discussion area that accompanies each lesson will automatically close two weeks after the lesson is released. As such, we strongly recommend that you complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

The final exam will be released on the same day as the last lesson. Once the final exam has been released, you will have two weeks to complete all of your course work, including the final exam.

Lesson 1
Come explore the basic features of Microsoft PowerPoint 2003, including how to plan a presentation and start the PowerPoint program. PowerPoint's Auto-Content Wizard makes it easy to create a professional looking presentation in a very short time. In our first lesson, we'll look at the menus and the many toolbars you have at your disposal with PowerPoint 2003. We'll also look at other basics, including working with different views, task panes, and tabs.

Lesson 2
Now that you know the basics of PowerPoint, you can create a presentation from scratch. We'll start by choosing a colored design template from the Slide Design task pane and choose a layout for your first few slides with the Slide Layout task pane. We'll discuss the two things you need to do to save a file so you know where to find it later. Then we'll go over the different ways to put on a slide show. We'll be covering a lot of important stuff in this lesson!

Lesson 3
You'll find that there's usually more than one way to perform a task. In this lesson, I'll show you multiple ways to open a presentation. Then, I'll teach you how to open a file and save it with a different name. Chances are you'll need to edit the text on your slides; so I'll teach you how to use the Outline tab to work with just the text on your slides. As the class progresses, you'll add new slides to your presentation and learn to work with different slide layouts. You'll also learn how to create and edit table slides and work with the Tables and Borders toolbar in this lesson.

Lesson 4
No program is complete without a Spell Checker. PowerPoint not only has a Spell Checker, but a Style Checker as well. The Style Checker helps maintain consistency throughout your presentation as it can check for the consistent use of punctuation and capital letters, among other things. Microsoft added the ability to do online research within PowerPoint 2003 with the Research task pane. I'm sure you'll be surprised to see how the Print dialog box in PowerPoint is different from other programs. You'll also learn all about the options in the Print dialog box in this lesson, including how to print slides, handouts, an outline, and notes.

Lesson 5
We're going to switch gears in this lesson and work with images instead of text. I'll show you how to embellish your slides with media clips, which could be a piece of clip art, a photograph, a movie, or a sound clip. You'll even learn how to download an image from a Web site and insert the image on a slide. We'll spend a lot of time talking about the Clip Art task pane, which is the tool you'll use to organize, search for, and insert media clips on your slides.

Lesson 6
Hope you like to draw, because that's what we'll be doing in this lesson! The good news is that you don't have to be an artist to use the WordArt and AutoShape tools on the Drawing toolbar to draw shapes on your slide. With the WordArt feature, you'll transform your text into an object that can be designed with color, texture, patterns, or just about anything you like. With the AutoShapes tool, you can draw all kinds of shapes including lines and connectors, a smiley face, a crescent moon, stars, banners, block arrows, flow chart symbols, callouts, and more! You can format these AutoShape objects with color and texture just like you can format your WordArt objects. After getting a few objects on a slide, I'll show you how you can group them into one object.

Lesson 7
In this lesson, you'll learn how to create and edit chart slides to illustrate statistical data. You'll find this lesson easy if you like working with math and numbers. If you're one of the many who don't like math, that's okay because I'll walk you through everything you need to do and know to create a chart slide. If you have used a spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft Excel, creating chart slides in PowerPoint will be a breeze. And while you're working with numbers and math, you can still be creative with your charts by changing the options such as font color and size, bar color, chart type, and so on.

Lesson 8
The topic of today's lesson is animation. You'll learn about Slide Transitions and Animation Schemes. A slide transition is an animation effect that plays during a slide show when a new slide appears. For example, a slide might fly in from the top or perhaps it pushes up from the bottom. After learning about slide transitions, you'll learn about animation schemes, which allow you to apply animation to the text and some objects on your presentation slides. You'll learn that some animations schemes contain more animation features than other schemes, and some even include a slide transition. I think you'll find the Animation Schemes feature fun and easy to use.

Lesson 9
Another animation feature, Custom Animation, is on our agenda for today. While slide transitions allow you to apply animation to your slides as they transition, and animation schemes allow you to apply animation to text on your slides, custom animation allows you to apply animation to text and objects on individual slides. The Custom Animation task pane allows you to customize the animation on any slide. I'll show you how to use the Custom Animation task pane to add and reorder animated text and objects on a slide and how to add sound effects and music to your presentation.

Lesson 10
In this lesson, you'll broaden your PowerPoint knowledge with two features. One is the ability to save your presentation as a Web page and view it online with a browser such as Internet Explorer. This feature seems to get better with every version of PowerPoint. The other feature we'll explore is the Package for CD command on PowerPoint's File menu. This is a new feature in PowerPoint 2003 and I think you'll really appreciate it. It allows you to save PowerPoint presentations on a CD if you use the Windows XP operating system and your computer has a CD burner. If you have a CD burner, but you're using Windows 2000, you can use the Package for CD feature to package your presentation and any supporting files to a folder.

Lesson 11
Today we'll take a look at ways to change a presentation's look with masters, color schemes, and backgrounds. Masters are used to make global changes to your slides, handouts, and notes. For example, if you want to increase or decrease the font size of the text on all the slides in a presentation, make the change on the slide master. Another global change you can make to a presentation is to modify the background color with a color scheme, or with the Background option on the Format menu. You'll get a chance to work with both of these options today.

Lesson 12
In this last lesson, we'll work with hyperlinks, including Action buttons. PowerPoint's hyperlink feature allows you to create links in a presentation that jump to a variety of locations. You really do have a lot of choices as you can create links from text or objects to other slides, other presentations, other documents, and to Web pages. PowerPoint has its own version of hyperlinks called Action buttons. Action buttons serve as hyperlinks to slides, other presentations, other documents, or Web sites. You draw an action button on a slide with your mouse then instruct PowerPoint where to link to. You can add interest to your action buttons by changing their color and making them three-dimensional. In addition, you can associate a sound or other action that initiates when you click an action button.