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4.5 Smileys - 1 Smiley Poor, 5 Smileys Excellent
Platforms: Mac OS
Forward Almost everyone cringes when they have to make a presentation. Not because it's difficult, but because they usually don't have a lot of practice. And so it turns into a struggle to learn the software. Microsoft's goal in making PowerPoint 2001 was to make it easier to use and learn so presentations can be made even in the face of a looming deadline. Some of the changes include different views, multiple masters, saving presentations as movies and websites, and much more. Did I find PowerPoint 2001 easier to use as compared to PowerPoint 98? You'll have to read on to find out.
A New Way of Looking At Things
The new view is one of the best improvements from PowerPoint 98 (in my opinion) because it combines the Slide, Outline, and Notes views into one. An example of this view, which is called Normal, is shown the screenshot to the right. You can also drag the separator to hide which view(s) you don't want to use anymore or make one view bigger or smaller. I like this view so much because it reduces the need to go back and forth between views as I had to do in PowerPoint 98. It also makes it much easier to go to exactly the slide that you need to work on because all you need to do is click on the slide in the Outline portion. While the old views remain in PowerPoint, you now have a greater flexibility in deciding how you want to work. The only negative is that you really need a bigger monitor and/or a higher resolution to see everything. I use 1024x768 and that has worked out really well for me. If you are still using 640x480, you should stick with using the individual views instead.
Multiple Masters What are masters? Masters are much like templates that keep track of the background, font styles, outline styles, headers, footers, etc. What's new is that you can have masters for each of the views (slide, title, handout, and notes). Unfortunately, the menu command to insert a new master is always dimmed and the help says that you can only have a different master for each of the designs that you use. I thought that you could have more than one slide master for the same design but it seems that you can't. Still, masters are very useful because it means that you don't have to keep formatting over and over again.
Showing the World
I've seen many presentations on the Internet but none as powerful and easy-to-use as the ones made by PowerPoint. The screenshot to the left shows a presentation that I made for my college speech class and has an outline, slide, notes (currently closed), and buttons to move to the next and previous slide. Just as in PowerPoint, you can choose to hide the outline and/or notes view if you want to and even make the presentation take up the whole screen. You don't need to worry whether the presentation can be viewed by everyone because you can choose which browsers the presentation will be made for, the size of the monitor, what kind of buttons are used and where they are placed, what colors are used, and more. This feature works great and if you want to show the world your presentation, I can't think of a better way to do it. Well, actually I can, because you can also save presentations as QuickTime movies. You might wonder why anyone would do this because aren't presentations just for speeches? I thought the same thing until I realized that with so many animation options, a person could use PowerPoint much as other people use iMovie. A person could use it to make a movie describing the latest product from their company complete with a background song and all of the transitions and animations that the presentation had. In addition, you can use transitions that were installed with QuickTime. The sizes of the movies are reasonable although longer slides probably won't be able to fit on someone's iDisk.
Being Flexible and Powerful
What I really hated about PowerPoint 98 was fitting all of the text on a slide. I'd sometimes spend more time cutting and pasting than on any other part of the presentation, and it was always so frustrating. While PowerPoint 2001 can't prevent you from being too wordy, it can help you fit all of the words on a slide. It does this by first changing the line spacing or the space between the lines, then the font size, and finally both until the text fits. This alone has saved me countless hours of formatting and reformatting and relieved me of much stress. Other features include having pictures as bullets, numbered bullets that automatically adjust their order, making tables without using Word or Excel, showing animating GIFs and QuickTime movies, previewing the transitions by using an Animation Preview window, and the ability to import graphics directly from a digital camera or scanner.
Conclusion I think the upgrade to PowerPoint 2001 was very beneficial and that Microsoft succeeded in making the task of creating presentations easier and faster. I remember making a presentation for my college Introduction to Rhetoric class which literally took hours of formatting in PowerPoint 98. My presentations for speech took a fraction of the time in PowerPoint 2001. If you have to make presentations, no matter how infrequently, I think you'll be quite pleased by the upgrade in that it actually saves you time. Something that we can all use more of in our busy lives.
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