Why Use PowerPoint?

I was talking to a new acquaintance recently at a party who had just discovered PowerPoint. As a graphic artist back in the 1980s for one of the "big three" TV networks, she had spent many years creating presentation graphics and overlays for commercials and TV shows. She was so excited about PowerPoint's capabilities! "With PowerPoint, I can do in 2 minutes by myself what it would take a staff of 20 people a whole week to do," she told me.

That's PowerPoint's appeal, in a nutshell. It does all these amazing graphical things that make presentation graphics really shine, and it does them so easily and quickly that it puts the power of creation in almost anyone's hands.

PowerPoint is a very popular tool among people who give presentations as part of their jobs, as well as for their support staff. With PowerPoint, you can create visual aids that will help get the message across to an audience, whatever that message may be and whatever format it may be presented in. The following are just a few of the types of presentations you can have:

• Speaker-led: The most traditional kind of presentation is a live speech presented at a podium. For live presentations, you can use PowerPoint to create overhead transparencies, 35 mm slides, or computer-based shows that can help the lecturer emphasize key points.
• Self-running: Over the last several years, advances in technology have made it possible to give several other kinds of presentations, and PowerPoint has kept pace nicely. You can use PowerPoint to create kiosk shows, for example, which are self-running presentations that provide information in an unattended location. You have probably seen such presentations listing meeting times and rooms in hotel lobbies and giving sales presentations at trade show booths.
• Internet: The Internet has also made several other presentation formats possible. You can use PowerPoint to create a show that you can store on a Web or intranet server so that people can watch it at their own leisure from anywhere in the world.

Can you create presentation support materials without PowerPoint? Certainly. You could make a Word document where each page was a "slide," or you could create a Web-based presentation with Web page creation software like Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver, for example. But it wouldn't be nearly as easy as it is with PowerPoint, and the results would probably not be as professional. PowerPoint is somewhat of a one-trick pony in the business software arena. It does one thing really well: make presentation materials.

Note

PowerPoint 2003 is a member of the Microsoft Office 2003 suite of programs. A suite is a group of programs designed by a single manufacturer to work well together. Like its siblings Word (the word processor), Excel (the spreadsheet), Outlook (the personal organizer and e-mail manager), and Access (the database), PowerPoint has a well-defined role in the family. Because PowerPoint is so tightly integrated with the other Microsoft Office 2003 components, you can easily share information among them. For example, if you have created a graph in Excel, you can use that graph on a PowerPoint slide. It goes the other way too. You can, for example, take the handouts from your PowerPoint presentation and export them to Word, where you can dress them up with Word's powerful document formatting commands. Virtually any piece of data in any Office program can be linked to any other Office program, so you never have to worry about your data being in the wrong format.