PowerPoint 2007

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.

You can enhance your picture by adding effects, such as shadows, glows, reflections, soft edges, bevels, and three-dimensional (3-D) rotations to it.

This article describes how to use your keyboard, rather than your mouse, to work with shapes, text boxes, and WordArt in PowerPoint 2007 and other Office 2007 release products.

In PowerPoint 2007, the maximum table size has increased to 75 rows by 75 columns, which makes it impossible to ungroup and animate parts of a table, as you could do in PowerPoint 2003. However, you can follow the steps in this article to mimic the effect of animating parts of a table.

An quick and easy answer to a very common customer question: How can I change the color of my hyperlink text in PowerPoint 2007?

To run a presentation on a computer on which Microsoft Office PowerPoint is not installed, or to distribute a self-contained presentation to an audience that might not have PowerPoint installed, use Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer.

This demo shows you how to add transition effects (such as fades and dissolves, wipes, and stripes and bars) to one or more slides, set the transition speed, add sounds, and remove the effects.

Watch this demo to see how themes in PowerPoint 2007 replace design templates in PowerPoint 2003 to bring a more professional look to your presentations.

Now that your presentation is finished, you're ready to get it out to your intended audience. The Package for CD feature in PowerPoint 2007 makes this task fast and easy for you. This demo steps you through the process and explains helpful options such as packaging for the PowerPoint version your viewers will use, adding linked files, and choosing type fonts. You can make one or more CD copies.

You can tap the collective wisdom of other PowerPoint users by posing questions in discussion groups, reading PowerPoint blogs, or using any of the other community resources mentioned in this article.

There's a fast way to put the commands and buttons you use most often within easy reach — put them on the Quick Access Toolbar. This row of buttons above the Ribbon already contains several buttons by default, but you can add new commands. The demo shows you two ways to do this, as well as how to remove them later if you want to.

You can display the current slide number and total number of slides on all of the slides in your presentation. For example, 1 of 12 slides, 12 of 15 slides, etc.

Follow the instructions in this article to add slide numbers, notes page numbers, handout page numbers, and the date and time to your presentation.

Want to add some punch to your presentation? This demo shows you how you can make your slides grab the audience's attention by adding a background to them.

PowerPoint 2007 contains several built-in themes, which include theme colors, theme fonts, and theme effects. Whether you use an existing built-in theme, create a new theme, or modify an existing built-in theme, follow this procedure to apply a theme to your presentation.