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PowerPoint is a great and diverse program, allowing creation of a presentation quickly and easily with many features. Many people don't know many of the features available with PowerPoint so this article will give you an edge over the competition and help you realise its potential.

1. Consistency! Make sure your slideshow uses the same or similar templates and backgrounds throughout.

Right click and select "slide design" or "slide layout" to choose from many already listed. Consistency means people will understand better and want to pay attention.

2. Pictures! They say a picture says a thousand words and it's perfectly reasonable to use one or two on each slide, but don't clutter the page. Just copy them in from your source, e.g. internet or My pictures'. Right click the picture to format it, group it with others or choose its order in relevance to the front of the page.

3. Eye Catching! Use the first slide to grab the audiences' attention. State your company name or topic of the presentation. Try to keep it simple and eye catching as well as informative and interesting.

4. Animate! You can make your text and pictures come to life by animating them. Simply right click any text box or picture and then Custom Animation'. On the right hand task pane then click Add Effect' and choose from a wide range of pre-determined animations and entrance routes.

5. Slide transition! Adding a simple slide transition will look classy. Just click "Slide Show" at the top and then "Slide Transition". From there you can choose from the task pane a number of transitions as well as sounds to accompany them. If you are talking the audience through each slide, it's a good idea to set the slide transition to On mouse click' so that you can determine when the slide changes by clicking the mouse.

6. Sounds! You can use sounds on a PP presentation. Right click text or a picture; action settings, choose to either click the item or to mouse over it and at the bottom you can choose the desired sound. As with pictures; don't clog people's senses with over use of sounds. You can add your own sounds by clicking Insert; Movies and Sounds; Sound from File. Then browse your files to find the desired sound.

7. Movies! If a picture says a thousand words, you can imagine a movie might say hundreds of thousands. Make sure the desired video clip is saved to your documents and click Insert; Movies and Sounds; Movie from File. Browse your files to find the movie file and click OK. This will

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