PowerPoint 2007: The Missing Manual 1st Edition

This book might be adequate for those who have never used Powerpoint before. For those who have used it regularly and are looking to become power users (such as myself), it may be disappointing. Several aspects of the book irritated me:

1. The author often pretends to deal with a topic while not really addressing it at all. The poster child for this is Chapter 14 on Macros - which spends about 10 pages telling you absolutely nothing - most of it consists of screen shots that are 90% blank space. Macros are really about Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) - while VBA itself is a very small and easy-to-learn language, to be productive with it you have to understand the specific Object model of the package you're working with - eg., Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Access. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, removed Macro recording capability from Powerpoint in the 2007 and later versions without rhyme or reason, which makes a basic introduction to the Powerpoint object model even more important. While this information is available on-line (and also accessible to a limited extent using the Object Browser in the Visual Basic Editor), what you need is a bird's eye view of the important classes, followed by some commonly used methods.

Here the author's tutorial to Powerpoint VBA is a subroutine consisting of a single line containing a MsgBox statement. Not a word about the object model and the classes.
By contrast, Microsoft's freely available documentation, the Microsoft Office 97 Visual Basic Programmer's Guide (a help file that accompanied Office 07 - sadly pulled from subsequent versions) - contains 19 pages on the Powerpoint model that are loaded with information. If nothing else, the author could have summarized this information rather than pretend to knowledge that she all too clearly lacks.

2. Some parts are excessively (I am tempted to use the word "shamelessly") padded. The section on how to copy, paste, move, delete, spell check etc. - chapter 2- goes on and on for 26 pages, filled out with screen-shots that are largely unnecessary to explain these basic concepts. Perhaps some reader who has rarely used modern computers before might benefit, but such filling out is unacceptable when more important areas such as mentioned in point 1 above are unaddressed.

3. Some parts of the book read as though they were written by one of Microsoft's public-relations shills. Microsoft's decision to remove menus from MS Office was highly controversial - more than one reviewer compared Office 2007 with the infamous New Coke, a change that nobody asked for. The user-interface overhaul led many to abandon Office on the PC (Office for the Mac still has menus, supposedly due to the personal intervention of the late Steve Jobs). Other users protected their sanity by investing $30 in the excellent add-in package Classic Menus for Office - no advanced user wished to spend several weeks to months playing an adventure game with Office to rediscover how to do things that they already knew how to do in Office '03.

(Steve Sinofsky, the motivating force behind the Office '07 GUI overhaul, subsequently went a step further in similarly overhauling the Windows 8 desktop interface, giving Steve Ballmer an excuse to fire him after sales of Windows 8 tanked.)

I understand that the ribbon may be more intuitive for new users, or basic users who use less than 20% of Office's capability, and I would be content if the switch from menus to the ribbon was mentioned neutrally. The author, however, goes overboard in parroting the official Microsoft line - that menus are passe. ("Thank goodness Microsof5t did away with all that shape-shifting!" - pg. 393 - referring to another despised, but mercifully optional, feature of Office 2000-03- Personalized Menus - that most users preferred to turn off soon after installing Office.) Here, the author uses the (acknowledged) evils of Personalized Menus - where most menu items other than the most recently used ones stay hidden until the user hovers with the mouse for a couple of seconds - to claim that because Personalized Menus are bad, menus thenselves must be bad.

In summary, if you don't believe you will ever be more than a casual user and have a fondness for lame humor, this book might meet your needs. If you're a serious user, go elsewhere.

I've used Microsoft Office software for some time, but realized I am not able to use the program's features as well as I would like to. I didn't really want to take the time (or spend the money) to take a course on this program, so when I found this book on Amazon, I thought I would give it a try. So far I REALLY LIKE IT! It's set up so you can go directly to the section that shows you how to do a specific task and let me tell you it takes you step by step through the task with ease! Well written, easy to follow and great diagrams of what you see on the computer screen. If you want to unlock the features of PowerPoint 2007, you NEED this book! And they offer a book for most all of the Microsoft Office programs (I ordered one for Word and Excel as well, and love them all). Well worth the money and a great tool to have near your computer!

Generally, Missing Manual books are great software guides and this one does not fall short. I had already mastered the basics of PowerPoint before purchasing this product, but I was able to learn a few new tricks when reading through.

The only downside? It's easier to search online to find a quick solution than flip through a book. But, that has nothing to do with the quality of these manuals and you can't just sit down with an internet manual and browse.

great ref and cheap

I am finding this book adequate but that's about it. Were I to choose again, I would go with Faithe Wempen. This could be a personal style thing, but I am just not loving this book. I can't really put my finger on it. There are areas which are glossed over as too complicated, such as DIY Shape Fill Gradients. This is probably a good book for beginners but I need a bit more.

I need to learn powerpoint and this is a good book as my brother suggested. And the price is very good.

This is a good book on PowerPoint 2007, as are all the "Missing Manual" books. However, there is very little information on writing VBA code for PowerPoint in this book. Since the ability to record macros was removed from this version this strikes me as a fairly glaring omission. Other than that, highly recommended.

This is a terrific, exhaustive resource for people who have hands on experience with a previous version of Powerpoint and who want to take advantage of all the features the 2007 software has to offer. However, it fails as a How-To Manual for people who have little or no prior experience with Powerpoint.