George Fox University | Offices and Services | Institutional Technology | Powerpoint Overview

PowerPoint is a presentation authoring application. You can use PowerPoint to create and display on-screen presentations that include text, pictures, transitions, sounds, animations, and movies. The program also gives you options for printing audience handouts, transparencies, speaker's notes, and outlines as well as saving to HTML for the web.

PowerPoint may be a positive alternative if you are currently using an overhead projector or 35mm-slide projector to present information to your class.

Advantages

Low Cost: PowerPoint presentations do not incur the regular costs that printing transparencies and developing 35mm slides do.

Portability and Storage: Multiple presentation can be stored on a disk. Physical storage space required for transparencies and slides is far greater than that needed for PowerPoint presentations. Presentations can be emailed to students or colleagues as attachments. Institutional Technology staff can show you how to store your presentations on a web server. This solution allows you to access your materials from any computer with an Internet connection.

No Degradation: PowerPoint presentations do not degrade over time like film , transparencies, a paper handouts stored in a file cabinet.

Multimedia: PowerPoint presentations can include a wide variety of media. You can illustrate complex concepts with color animation, movies, and pictures or play a listening example directly from your computer.

Flexibility: You can reorganize and add to your presentation at any time as opposed to the reprinting or redeveloping involved with updating transparencies and slides. You can quickly jump between screens of your presentation and avoid fumbling with transparencies or stuck slides.

Cost

PowerPoint is one of the components of the Microsoft Office Suite that is installed on most computers on campus. Contact the help desk or the bookstore for current pricing and to have a copy of Microsoft Office installed on your computer. Individuals who only need to view presentations can download a free PowerPoint viewer from Microsoft.

Next Steps

Attend a hands-on workshop
Institutional Technology offers several hands-on workshops throughout the year. Sign up for a schedule workshop or contact Academic Technology to organize a workshop for a group of your colleagues. Most individuals can master authoring and running basic presentations by the end of one of our three-hour hands-on workshops.

View online documentation
You can download and view all of our workshop materials online. We've also provided a list of documentation and helpful sites on the Internet. The following resources are available for individuals interested in learning to create electronic presentations with PowerPoint:

Visit the faculty development lab
The faculty development lab is a place where faculty can come to experiment with new technology, get personalized assistance with developing the skills to effectively use technology in their courses, and access equipment they would not normally have in their offices.