Microsoft

Narration can enhance Web-based or self-running presentations. You can also use narration to archive a meeting, so that presenters or absentees can review the presentation later and hear any comments made during the presentation.

Microsoft's Shellie Tucker reports in this Office Hours column, "Could we give a PowerPoint presentation and use NO BULLET POINTS? Could we divorce ourselves from the tried and true — and deadly boring? We decided to try."

Read this article to learn how you can adjust a picture's relative lightness (brightness), the difference between its darkest and lightest areas (contrast), and the transparency of one of its colors. After you edit the picture, you can undo any changes that you made or keep the changes but also save the original version of the picture.

You can change the action settings if a picture, clip art, or button shape has an action assigned to it (such as move to next slide, move to previous slide, go to the last slide of the show, or go to a Web page or other Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentation or file.)

This article now contains a new demo that shows you exactly how to change or delete a placeholder. Placeholders are boxes with dotted borders that hold content in its place on a slide layout. You can change a placeholder by resizing it, repositioning it, or changing the font, size, case, color, or spacing of text within it. You can also delete a placeholder.

This article now contains a new demo that shows you exactly how to create and reuse PowerPoint 2007 templates. A PowerPoint 2007 template is a pattern or blueprint of a slide or group of slides that you save as a .potx file. Templates can contain layouts, theme colors, theme fonts, theme effects, background styles, and even content.

A text box is an object that you can add to your 2007 Microsoft Office system document to emphasize or set off text. Check out the new demo at the bottom of the article to show you exactly how to delete a text box from your document.

This article now contains a new, minute-long demo at the bottom that shows you exactly how to add a new slide with a built-in layout to your presentation.

This article now contains a new, minute-and-a half-long demo at the bottom that shows you exactly how to apply a different layout to an existing slide in your presentation.

The key benefit to applying and using slide masters is that you can make universal style changes to every slide in your presentation.

When you add pictures, shapes, or other objects to your documents, they automatically stack in individual layers as you add them. This article tells you how to move individual pictures, shapes, or other objects or objects in a stack. For example, you can move objects up or down within a stack one layer at a time, or you can move them to the top or bottom of a stack in one move.

You can change the look of your shape by changing its fill or by adding effects, such as shadows, glows, reflections, soft edges, bevels, and three-dimensional (3-D) rotations to it. You can also change or remove the outline or border of the shape.

Use the tools in Publisher that help you to add borders, rotate images, add effects, change the colors of an image, and add more or less contrast.

Find out how to change the default colors that are used to display ordinary text, text that is a hyperlink, and text that is a followed hyperlink on your Web page.

Holiday greeting cards offer an excellent opportunity to reconnect with old friends and thank loyal customers.

Track where you left off reading in your book with a bookmark you create.

Find out the basics of working with text boxes.

Don't have Visio? Use Publisher to show relationships between roles in your organization.

Add a picture that has been cropped to a specific shape, such as a star or circle.

Create the right invitation in Publisher 2007 for encouraging attendance at your event.