Customer Reviews

PowerPoint 2000 Professional Results

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

 

 

When I got this book, I had just moved from a Mac to a PC environment, had just acquired Office 2000, and had a deadline to create a medium sized Power Point presentation within a week. Using the advice in this book, I was able to pull it off with little frustration.

If you've never used Power Point before: the book has a great index, is well organized, and gives many useful tips both for putting the presentation together, and for giving it when you're done.

I used a lot of scanned graphics in my presentation. This section of the book was very helpful to me. Also, of course, the section on creating your first presentation.

Highly recommended.

Here's what I like about this book. The color photos really made the examples come alive. There are all this tips in boxes throughout the book. I learned excellent ideas I would never learn on my own. It is so easily organized that I could find what I needed very quickly. I understood her writing. She writes so I understood her explanations. Mostly I like that when I'm trying to figure out how to do something and feel frustrated I can find the answer in her book.

As a professional consultant in the area of presentation design and development, I've learned over the years how easy it is for even very large clients to create very bad presentations. Professional presentation design is an illusive goal for most companies. Finkelstein's book delivers a good balance of thorough, well-illustrated description, pages full of 4-color examples and contributions from professionals in the field, which add a real world perspective to the textbook instructions. It's my experience that most presentation designers only get a handle on a small fraction of PowerPoint's capability. Books like this one will propel you well beyond the basics. I would recommend it highly. (For those not finding a specific download, it's a bit like focusing on the handprints on the glass front door of the Smithsonian - you'll never discover the true value within if you can't get by the small things.)

I present and coach presentation design and development as well as delivery dynamics. This is THE book I tell my attendees to get open on there desktops. Here's why: What most authors of PowerPoint books forget is that PowerPoint is a tool for building a presentation that will be DELIVERED. Finkelstein takes the time to make that clear and presents her ideas and steps as though there will be an audience in your future. Thought is give to the prespective of the audience.

There is a lot to keep in mind when preparing and delivering your presentation. This book is a great guide to help most create and deliver a presentation that will shine. I found the coverage of PowerPoint comprehensive. Everything I wanted to do was there, plus suggestions and tips for better impact and saving time. The language is friendly and did not make me feel like a child or dummy. The detail is there when I need it. The use of headings, colour and cutouts let me jump quickly to the parts I need.

I must admit - I've always been a bit of a snob when it comes to Microsoft Office and "point and click" WYSIWYG-type interfaces. I've been a Unix programmer for many, many years, and when called upon to use "simpler" programs such as PowerPoint, I've scoffed at the documentation, assuming that as a professional programmer, I'm certainly smart enough to figure out how to use it on my own without any help.

Unfortunately, the end result showed - my PowerPoint presentations, while informative and workable enough, were dull and uninteresting. Furthermore, I always walked away from the experience terribly frustrated at how difficult the tool was to use.

Well, a few weeks ago, I finally broke down and decided to give the tool a chance and treat it like I would treat any other product or technology - I read the book. This was the book I chose, and I'm glad I did. The book is not just filled with little tips and hints on how to make your presentations look better and flow better, but also how to make working with PowerPoint itself easier. More than anything else, it explains the PowerPoint "way" - after having read the book cover to cover, I find myself falling into a rhythm with PowerPoint rather than fighting it all the time.

The book is specific to PowerPoint 2000, and I'm using PowerPoint 2003. For the most part, the tool didn't change much between the two revisions, so I found almost everything in this book applicable to my version. The biggest differences were in charts (PowerPoint 2003 has several additional charts that 2000 seems not to have had) and in custom animation - the interface to custom animation is quite a bit different between the two versions, but it's not too difficult to "mind-map" the explanations in the book to the interface presented by PowerPoint 2003.

I did think that the coverage of tables was a little sparse. It hit on all the high points, but wasn't as complete as the authors coverage of autoshapes or graphs (which were excellent). There's a very brief discussion about VBA that probably should have been removed altogether - VBA is a topic for an entirely different book. Rather than just saying "VBA exists, learn it if you need it", the author adds what amounts to space filler with about 10 pages of VBA examples that you won't be able to follow unless you already have a decent working background in VB.

All in all, this book is exactly what it promises to be - a thorough guide, beginning to end, to powerpoint. I can honestly say that I now know what every PowerPoint feature is, how it's used, when it's used, and how to find it. And - my boss was very impressed with my most recent presentation.

The book is fairly well presented considering the magnitude of the program, but there are numerous dense areas where descriptions are difficult to follow, and early on you are led to a download that doesn't exist.

It took an obscenely long time for Osborne/McGraw-Hill to answer numerous e-mails about this problem and when they finally did, after some BS about gee we just got your message, provided with a support(?)person who was vague, unresponsive and seemed to think that clever dialogue could make up for lack of service, knowledge and throwing files at a customer that at first didn't work and in fact caused some system problems.

This is a good book for presentations. However, I want to know how to transfer slide shows and such to video, CD's. This book does not even mention that it can be done. I know it can, I've seen it done. I'll keep looking until I find a book that tells how. Not everybody uses PowerPoint just for business.