Customer Reviews

Microsoft® PowerPoint® 2000 Bible

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is good because it doesn't just tell you how to use the features of PowerPoint (although it does do that really well), it also explains things like good presentation design, public speaking skills, etc. to make your overall picture to the audience a success. It's like getting a really good computer book and bonus books on public speaking and graphic design all in one.

I am the Technology Training Coordinator at Huntington College, Indiana. I have read through the text and I am using it in my latest PP2000 class for facutly and staff becuase I think the book is clear, easy to understanding, detailed and has been extra tips, notes, and cautions that help one make great presentations. I have no relationship to the author or the publisher.

I do wish the CD came with some PP examples to use along with the text.

Robert

This book did not serve my purposes particularly well, which probably says as much about my differences from the core audience of the book and of PowerPoint as it does about this book itself.

I am in a scientific/technical field. To me, content comes before style. Show me too many whistles and bells (Word Art, animation, sound clips, etc.) and the BS shields go up. In that sense, my perspective is 180º opposite that of sales professionals, whom I gather are both Microsoft's core market for PowerPoint and Ms. Wempen's core audience for this book.

These differences in perspective show up in this books relatively scant treatment of importing images and other objects. For someone who uses a lot of PNG, JPG, or other image files in their presentations, there are questions about how much resolution (how large a file size) is helpful and how much is overkill. You won't find treatment of that subject in this book. Likewise, you're largely on your own with the subtleties and complexities of making relatively obscure scientific graphing software work with PowerPoint through the "wonderful magic" of OLE (or whatever they're now calling it).

Often the index is a very important component of a reference book. You can get software to compile an index for you, but depending on that is like depending entirely on your word processor's spelling and grammar checking functions, rather than having a human copy editor. This book seems to me to have let the machine do it. For instance, I was trying to determine how to omit a slide from a presentation rather than deleting it. I first looked up "omit" in Microsoft's online help. No luck (Microsoft, of course, depends third party authors like Ms. Wempen to provide adequate documentation of Office suite software, at no cost to Microsoft.) No luck in "the Bible" either. After kludging around a while in the menus, I found "hide" in the "Slide Show" menu. I then turned to "the Bible". There is no entry for "hide". There are two entries for "hiding". One, in the 30 pages "quick-start" pre-book, tells how to hide the very annoying Office Assistant that I long ago exorcised. The other refers to "backup slides" on page 90, which is a discussion of various types of audiences.

Create multimedia presentation for introducing your business, company or etc. using Microsoft Powerpoint. This book will help you create presentations using text, graphics, sound, videos, animation, charts and a lot more and publish them on the web or using them in the fairs and more. Step by step lessions will help you become a professional Powerpoint user. I highly recommend this book and all other books by Bible

I found this book to be very helpful in planning a presentation, including things like colors to use for different room situations and how to interface with AV equipment. Coverage of PowerPoint itself was very good also and thorough.