Book ~ "PowerPoint Basics In 30 Minutes" (2020) Angela Rose

From Goodreads ~ When you're giving a slide presentation, a positive impression can make a sale or win over an audience. "PowerPoint Basics In 30 Minutes" can help you connect with audiences and make great presentations that get real results. This unofficial PowerPoint user guide covers the basic features of PowerPoint 2016 (part of the Office 365 suite), PowerPoint Online and the PowerPoint mobile apps, including PowerPoint for Android and PowerPoint for iOS. The PowerPoint manual also demonstrates how to use some of PowerPoint's most powerful features and tools, such as:

• Premade PowerPoint templates with gorgeous backgrounds and fonts
• Custom layouts that fit your personality or corporate identity
• Special formatting and design options
• Tools to place photos, video, and audio onto slides
• Shapes, graphs, tables, and SmartArt
• Graceful transitions between slides
• PowerPoint animations that can make text and other elements come to life
• Proofing tools for spelling and review
• Collaboration features that make it easy to work with colleagues or classmates
• Exporting PowerPoint PDFs, online versions for the Web, and package presentations to share with others
• Creating paper copies and printed PowerPoint handouts
• Showing your presentation with a mouse or mobile device or using a PowerPoint remote or PowerPoint clicker

Author Angela Rose also gives tips on how to communicate more effectively using PowerPoint decks. Whether you are giving a business presentation, preparing a lecture for a class or seminar, or using Microsoft PowerPoint for personal use, PowerPoint Basics In 30 Minutes can help you create a better-looking presentation that makes a big impact.

I've been using PowerPoint for many years and enjoy it.  Years ago I knew I was good at it and wanted to see how good I was at it so wrote and passed Microsoft's PowerPoint certification exam and got 100%!  I worked freelance for a couple years and taught Microsoft programs with a couple companies (I had gotten all my Microsoft certifications).  In my current job, of the Microsoft programs (excluding Outlook), I use PowerPoint about 90% of the time.  I have Office 365 at home and at work ... at home I pay for the annual subscription.

The book is directed to those who use Windows, Macs and online.  The chapters are:

1. Launching and navigating PowerPoint - the purchasing options, launching PowerPoint, Presenting to an audience, Backstage View (I didn't know that what this is actually has a name), navigating PowerPoint's ribbon interface, display options when working on presentations, saving your presentations, which file format to use, shutting down and locating a recovered file
2. Creating a basic presentation - inserting and editing new slides, slide order within your presentation, formatting text, images and aligning and group objects
3. Intermediate features - Shapes and SmartArt, Intelligent Services and PowerPoint Designer, charts, videos, text and object animations and slide transitions
4. Proofing, printing and sharing - Proofing a presentation, presentation collaboration tools, protecting a presentation and printing, sharing and exporting slide decks

When I saw this book, I knew it was a "basic" book but thought it would be interesting to check out ... and it was.  I was curious to see if I would learn anything new considering the years I've been using it and the amount of time I use it ... and I did.  Plus it was a good reminder of things that I'd forgotten because I don't use them or have gotten lazy and do things the way I've always done them.

The book is written in an easy-to-follow manner with lots of screenshots and I'd recommend it.  There were a couple times, though, when the author was explaining things that she didn't offer easier/alternative ways of doing things.  Like when you are going into "presentation" mode or "slide sorter" mode ... she advised you to go "View" on the ribbon and then choosing the mode rather than using the icons on the bottom right, which are quicker and handier.

BTW, the authors loves cats too!