Effective Executive's Guide to PowerPoint 2000: The Seven Steps to Creating High-Value, High-Impact PowerPoint Presentations

Written specifically for busy executives, managers, and other professionals, Effective Executive's Guide to PowerPoint 2000 walks you through the seven steps of creating high-value, high-impact presentations:
Step 1: Learn the Logic. Start here with an overview of what PowerPoint is and how it helps you make better presentations.
Step 2: Outline Your Content. Create a textual list, or outline, of the messages and points you want to share.
Step 3: Add Objects. Use tables, charts, and pictures to augment the information in your outline.
Step 4: Design Your Look. Move past the substance of your presentation and address its appearance and "look" to create a professional presentation.
Step 5: Add Special Effects. Use transitions, animation, sound, and video to enhance your presentation's impact.
Step 6: Prepare Your Presentation. Prepare by creating speaker's notes, rehearsing, producing any handouts, and tailoring your presentation's slides for the presentation method.
Step 7: Deliver Your Presentation. Deliver a successful, memorable presentation to your audience by comfortably using the appropriate PowerPoint tools.
More than just a book about Microsoft PowerPoint 2000, Effective Executive's Guide to PowerPoint 2000 explains how to make effective, compelling presentations that audiences understand and remember.\nAmazon.com Review\nMicrosoft PowerPoint is the standard tool for creating business and technical presentations, and familiarity with it can really bolster your ability to communicate effectively. But you can't rely on the software to organize information or do graphic design for you. Effective Executive's Guide to PowerPoint 2000 distinguishes itself from other PowerPoint tutorials by combining information on how to use the program with advice on structuring presentations and organizing information to meet business goals. The writing seems clunky at times, and sometimes it's hard to visually distinguish general presentation advice (about vocal inflection, for example) from PowerPoint-specific instructions (such as how to animate text), but the overall package of information is worth absorbing.
Authors Stephen Nelson and Michael Buschmohle, after running through some key concepts and terms, outline a complete methodology for creating PowerPoint presentations. It's pretty standard stuff--outline, followed by insertion of graphs and images, followed by special effects--but they back it up with advice on how to speak convincingly and remain poised before a crowd. Text is the primary means of communicating all of this to you, which works fairly well considering the graphic nature of most of the information. Some readers will wish for a more graphical treatment of visual phenomena like transitions, however. --David Wall
Topics covered: Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 for people tasked with communicating information to customers and coworkers. Specific instructions appear for using Outline view, inserting tables and pictures, and storing styles as templates for future use. Additional sections deal with presentation strategies.