Microsoft PowerPoint Training

Course Approach

These PowerPoint courses are focused on ensuring that we make you a faster and more confident PowerPoint user. Given how widely PowerPoint is used in business today we believe that being a capable MS PowerPoint user is a key career skill for everyone.

Whether you taking our beginners PowerPoint course or on our advanced course, our courses are deliberately very hands-on. We believe that skills are developed through guided practice which reinforces the classroom learning. It lets you practice applying what you are learning. Our exercises are carefully chosen to emphasise the key aspects of each lesson.

PowerPoint is extremely flexible. This is both it’s strength and also presents a challenge to new users. It gives you complete control over your presentation but in doing has to offer users a large number of options, which are often held in nested menus. By encouraging delegates to work independently in PowerPoint we allow them to become familiar with how menus are structured and where different options are accessed.

Uses Of PowerPoint

PowerPoint is used extensively in business to produce presentations. PowerPoint is unrivalled in it’s ability to present information very clearly and bring it to life by incorporating diagrams, pictures and videos. However, given that it gives a user complete control over the appearance of the pages in a presentation it is also used for producing posters and student worksheets.

As a part of the Microsoft Office suite it works particularly well with other MS programs like Access, Excel, Project and Word.

Background & Overview

PowerPoint is the presentation package contained within the Microsoft Office suite of products. It is available within both Microsoft Office for Windows and also Office for Mac. However it is worth noting that PowerPoint does not offer VBA functionality within Office for Mac 2008. It has been ubiquitous within the office environment since the late 90’s.

The recent most used versions of PowerPoint are:

PowerPoint 2003:

It was the last version of PowerPoint to not have the ribbon system. It is becoming increasingly rare to see PowerPoint 2003 these days.

This update to Powerpoint introduced new animations functionality and also allowed information to be saved and modified using the XML data format. This made PowerPoint 2003 far more compatible than previously as it made importing data from other sources far more simple.

PowerPoint 2007:

This version of PowerPoint introduced the ribbon. This was a major change to the appearance of PowerPoint and many users struggled with the changes initially. Other changes that were introduced were improvements to the SmartArt available for constructing diagrams.  It also gave users greater control over their documents, with the ability to mark a document as final and stop further edits to it.

PowerPoint 2010:

PowerPoint 2010 was a refinement of PowerPoint 2007. The changes were relatively material although less cosmetic than the changes between the 2003 and 2007 versions. From a navigation perspective the key improvement was that the options previously contained in the Office button in 2007 were now contained in the File tab in the ribbon. The ability to customise the Ribbon was also introduced. Other tools that were added in PowerPoint 2010 were the ability to save your presentation as a video and improved image handling and management. This version of PowerPoint also introduced Sections within presentations. This feature helps you organize your presentation by grouping all related slides under individual sections. In this way, you can easily find and edit related slides. Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 also included a feature called Screen Capturing. This allows you to create screenshots for use in your presentations. It is a piece-of-cake to capture the screenshot of any area of the screen.

PowerPoint 2013:

PowerPoint 2013 was a further useful improvement to PowerPoint. The landing page was refreshed. It now has a fresher look and it is less confusing to users, giving faster access to local and online templates. In addition some very useful improvements were made to the Presenter view. It now shows the current slide, along with a timer showing how long it has been displayed for and the current time, and also the next slide. This makes it far easier for presenters to smoothly move between one slide and the next slide. This version of PowerPoint is also the first version to automatically adjust for widescreen monitors.

Similar Courses

Delegates interested in PowerPoint training often are also interested in:

Further References 

Further information on PowerPoint can be found at the following websites:

Wikipedia:    PowerPoint Article

Microsoft:   PowerPoint Homepage