Books about Powerpoints from Amazon.com

Presentation designer and internationally acclaimed communications expert Garr Reynolds, creator of the most popular Web site on presentation design and delivery on the net -- presentationzen.com -- shares his experience in a provocative mix of illumination, inspiration, education, and guidance that will change the way you think about making presentations with PowerPoint or Keynote. Presentation Zen challenges the conventional wisdom of making "slide presentations" in today's world and encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations. Garr shares lessons and perspectives that draw upon practical advice from the fields of communication and business. Combining solid principles of design with the tenets of Zen simplicity, this book will help you along the path to simpler, more effective presentations. .
Price: $17.49 [Notify me when price goes down.]

No matter where you are on the organizational ladder, the odds are high that you've delivered a high-stakes presentation to your peers, your boss, your customers, or the general public. Presentation software is one of the few tools that requires professionals to think visually on an almost daily basis. But unlike verbal skills, effective visual expression is not easy, natural, or actively taught in schools or business training programs. slide:ology fills that void.

Written by Nancy Duarte, President and CEO of Duarte Design, the firm that created the presentation for Al Gore's Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, this book is full of practical approaches to visual story development that can be applied by anyone. The book combines conceptual thinking and inspirational design, with insightful case studies from the world's leading brands. With slide:ology you'll learn to:

• Connect with specific audiences
• Turn ideas into informative graphics
• Use sketching and diagramming techniques effectively
• Create graphics that enable audiences to process information easily
• Develop truly influential presentations
• Utilize presentation technology to your advantage

Millions of presentations and billions of slides have been produced -- and most of them miss the mark. slide:ology will challenge your traditional approach to creating slides by teaching you how to be a visual thinker. And it will help your career by creating momentum for your cause..
Price: $21.19 [Notify me when price goes down.]

• Revised and updated to cover changes to all of Office's applications and productivity tools
• Offers beyond-the-basics coverage of Office word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, e-mail, databases, and desktop publishing
• Covers Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, productivity tools such as Microsoft OneNote, and SharePoint
• Thoroughly updated to cover the new Office interface as well as new features in each application

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Price: $16.54 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Still the top-selling software suite for Mac users, Microsoft Office has been improved and enhanced to take advantage of the latest Mac OS X features You'll find lots of new features in Office 2008 for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage, but not a page of printed instructions to guide you through the changes. Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual gives you the friendly, thorough introduction you need, whether you're a beginner who can't do more than point and click, or a power user who's ready to tackle a few advanced techniques.

To cover Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage, this guide gives you four superb books in one -- a separate section each for program! You can manage your day and create professional-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in no time. Office 2008 has been redesigned so that the windows, toolbars, and icons blend in better with your other Mac applications. But there are still plenty of oddities. That's why this Missing Manual isn't shy about pointing out which features are gems in the rough -- and which are duds. With it, you'll learn how to:

• Navigate the new user interface with its bigger and more graphic toolbars
• Use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage separately or together
• Keep track of appointments and manage daily priorities with the My Day feature
• Create newsletters, flyers, brochures, and more with Word's Publishing Layout View
• Build financial documents like budgets and invoices with Excel's Ledger Sheets
• Get quick access to all document templates and graphics with the Elements Gallery
• Organize all of your Office projects using Entourage's Project Center
• Scan or import digital camera images directly into any of the programs
• Customize each program with power-user techniques

With Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual, you get objective and entertaining instruction to help you tap into all of the features of this powerful suite, so you can get more done in less time.

Why Should I Upgrade to Office 2008 for Macintosh?

Author Jim Elferdink talks about what’s new in Office 2008 for Macintosh. If you’re still using Office 2004, you’ll find some great reasons to upgrade. Jim also fills you in on some cool features that Office for Windows can’t match, and why you may not need to invest in iWork!

What are the best new features that will make folks want to upgrade to Office 2008?
Publishing Layout view. If you use Word to create formatted documents like letters and brochures, you’ll find it so much easier to do now in the new Publishing Layout view than in the old Page Layout view. Publishing Layout view is actually quite similar to Pages; both are very usable. It’s a huge boon for Word people—if you haven’t bought Pages, now you won’t have to!
MyDay. I really enjoy Entourage’s MyDay feature. Assuming you’re not working on a laptop that doesn’t have screen space to spare, I recommend keeping MyDay open in the corner of your screen. That’s what I do! It helps me keep track of my appointments and schedule. If you’ve got appointments every 20 minutes or just a lot going on in your day, it’s great to have it all at a glance. It also helps you remember to go pick up the kids. (And you can feel superior to your Windows friends. There’s nothing resembling MyDay in Office for Windows.) Project Center. Entourage’s Project Center has been streamlined and beautified for 2008, but it’s still very underutilized. It takes a little extra effort to learn, but once you’ve got it up and running, if you’re doing any kind of a project that involves Office documents or even files from other programs, it’s a great timesaver. It lets you keep shortcuts to all these documents, plus email related to the project, in one window. The Project Center makes it easy to categorize email, contacts, notes, and documents. Things don’t get lost, and you don’t have to worry about Mac OS X labels and other ways to categorize things. (Office for Windows also has nothing like the Project Center.)
Formula Builder. In Excel, one of the greatest new features is the formula builder. If you use Excel much for formulas at all, especially more complicated ones, it’s really a timesaver. It helps you get those things created and working much faster than you could do before.
Elements Gallery. The Elements Gallery concept is really great because it carries over from one program to the other, gives the programs a consistent feel. If you’re using a lot of templates or AutoShapes, you’ll find it a quick way to get at all that stuff. You could do all these things before, but it was a lot harder to find what you were looking for.

So, are there any disadvantages to upgrading to Office 2008?
Publishing Layout view can be frustratingly slow on G4 Macs, especially when you’re trying to move layout elements around onscreen. I would only use it on an Intel Mac. The same caveat holds true for PowerPoint; it’s hard to move things around. But the rest of the suite works great on faster G4 machines.
Office 2008 uses the same new, XML-based file format as Office 2007 for Windows. It’s great not to have to worry when someone with Office 2007 on a PC sends you something. Office 2008 can open those documents right up. But now when you send documents to Mac folks who haven’t upgraded, they won’t be able to open them! Once you upgrade to Office 2008, you’ve got to be aware that not everyone else has, and (unless you have a real need to use the XML format) set your Save options (in Preferences) to the older format so there won’t be problems with your attachments.
Then there’s the macro problem. Any macros you wrote in earlier versions of Office use the Visual Basic programming language (VBA), and they won’t work in Office 2008! If you’ve written a lot of macros for yourself, you’ll have to stick with Office 2004 until you have time to rewrite them in AppleScript.

What do you like best about "Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual?"
I’m happy with the way this book turned out. I think it covers everything you need to use this really powerful suite of programs for all your work. One chapter I’m particularly fond of, and which I think is missing from every other PowerPoint book I’ve looked at, is Chapter 15—Planning Great Presentations. It helps you prepare for your presentation and shows you how to use PowerPoint for its true purpose. PowerPoint isn’t doing the presentation—you are. You’re the star of the show! Unfortunately, too many people think it’s the other way around. .
Price: $20.51 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Transform your presentations--and boost your impact--with practical, easy-to-apply techniques for using PowerPoint 2007. Author Cliff Atkinson is a presentation-skills expert who is helping revolutionize the way Fortune 500 companies design and deliver their critical presentations. Even major news media reported the contribution of Cliff's techniques to a verdict in a high-profile trial. In his highly-regarded, popular book BEYOND BULLET POINTS--now fully updated for PowerPoint 2007--Cliff shares his innovative three-step method that helps you unlock the amazing story buried in those bullet-riddled slides. He guides you, step by step, as you discover how to combine the tenets of classic storytelling with the power of projected media to create a rich, engaging experience. With easy-to-use templates, advanced tips, and plenty of illustrations and examples, you'll learn techniques to help you clarify, visualize, and present your ideas so that your audience will remember your important message. This newly revised, popular guide now includes a CD with sample PowerPoint 2007 files and graphics..
Price: $17.74 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The smart way to learn Office PowerPoint 2007--one step at a time! Work at your own pace through the easy numbered steps, practice files on CD, helpful hints, and troubleshooting help to master the fundamentals of working with the latest version of PowerPoint, including how to navigate the new, easy-to-use user interface. You will discover how to create presentation outlines, work with slide masters and slide designs, add graphics and drawings, and publish your presentations to the Web. You'll even learn how to add narrations and custom animations--and more! With STEP BY STEP, you can take just the lessons you need or work from cover to cover. Either way, you drive the instruction--building and practicing the skills you need, just when you need them! Includes a companion CD with hands-on practice files..
Price: $11.93 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Helps readers learn all the most important functions of PowerPoint, including building basic slides, adding bells and whistles, and presenting both online and in the board room.
* Guides readers through creating and editing slides, importing data from other applications, adding charts, clip art, sound and video, working with hyperlinks and action buttons, and using PowerPoint when creating Web pages.
* PowerPoint is part of the standard Microsoft Office suite, which has over 120 million users worldwide.
* Bestselling author Doug Lowe has written more than 40 technology books..
Price: $8.72 [Notify me when price goes down.]

• New and inexperienced PowerPoint users will discover how to use the latest enhancements to PowerPoint 2007 quickly and efficiently so that they can produce unique and informative presentations
• PowerPoint continues to be the world's most popular presentation software
• This updated For Dummies guide shows users different ways to create powerful and effective slideshow presentations that incorporate data from other applications in the form of charts, clip art, sound, and video
• Shares the key features of PowerPoint 2007 including creating and editing slides, working with hyperlinks and action buttons, and preparing presentations for the Web

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Price: $10.25 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Did you learn PowerPoint in 15 minutes? Join the crowd...most people spend less than a half-hour getting to know the program that might be responsible for more first impressions of them and their company than anything else. This book is for earnest presenters and presentation designers who want to escape the perils that entrap so many who turn to PowerPoint for their presentations..
Price: $21.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]