Microsoft

Although visual elements should never overpower the contents of your PowerPoint 2007 presentation, some visual elements such as objects and shapes might help you convey your message in a “picture is worth a thousand words” way.

Check out the wide variety of new and revised templates that you can use with PowerPoint 2007

When you want to make a change to the look of all of the slides in your presentation, you don’t need to change each slide individually. You can make the change once on the slide master.

In a presentation that is associated with a newly customized slide master, you can add blank slides (and then add content later), move slides that contain content into your presentation from other presentations, or import slides from a Slide Library.

As you deliver your presentation, here is how to move from one slide to the next, move to a previous slide, or move to a specific slide.

You can insert a picture behind your entire slide as a background or behind part of your slide as a watermark.  You can also insert a color behind your slide as a background. By adding a picture as a background or watermark to one or all of your slides, you can make your Office PowerPoint 2007 presentation unique or clearly identify your presentation sponsor.

Follow these instructions to change the look of the outside border of a text box or shape, or remove the border.

This demo shows you ways to add animation and sound effects: by using the built-in animation effects in PowerPoint, by creating your own customized effects, and by adding sound.

For information about how to effectively customize your message for your audience, check out this exerpt from Robert Lane's book Relational Presentation: A Visually Interactive Approach.

PowerPoint allows you to easily create and distribute photo albums, and you can add action to your electronic photo albums through the use of panning and zooming effects.

What can you do to lessen the common fear of public speaking and make your presentation experiences more productive and fun?

Take this training course to learn how to change a slide background using a color or picture, customize the theme of your presentation, and save your customized theme for reuse in future presentations.

Digital signatures play a central role in software security. This article explains what a digital signature is, and how you can check to make sure that a digital signature is trustworthy.

Microsoft Office System MVP Stephanie Krieger talks about how to use the tools that PowerPoint provides to make your presentations far better than you might expect.

Microsoft Office System MVP Stephanie Krieger talks about how to use shapes, including WordArt and clip art, to make your work easier when you need custom graphics.

Geetesh Bajaj, Microsoft Office PowerPoint MVP and author of the Cutting Edge PowerPoint for Dummies books, gives a fun and comprehensive look at the benefits of using SmartArt graphics in your presentations.

When you draw, resize, or move a shape or an object, it will align or "snap to" the nearest intersection of lines in the grid, even if the grid is not visible, or snap to other shapes or objects. If your shape or object does not move where you want, you can turn off the snap-to options.

You can use gridlines to identify the center of your slide or document and position shapes and objects more precisely, and you can use drawing guides to position shapes and objects on slides.

If your presentation runs slowly while you deliver it to your audience, this article can help you improve it by adjusting the performance settings or changing how you use objects and animations.

You can share and reuse slide content by storing individual slide files in a centrally located Slide Library on a server running Office SharePoint Server 2007. You can publish slides to a Slide Library and add slides to your presentation from a Slide Library.