PowerPoint is a complete presentation graphics package. It gives you everything you need to produce a professional-looking presentation. PowerPoint offers word processing, outlining, drawing, graphing, and presentation management tools- all designed to be easy to use and learn.

The following gives you a quick overview of what you can do in PowerPoint:

- When you create a presentation using PowerPoint, the presentation is made up of a series of slides. The slides that you create using PowerPoint can also be presented as overhead transparencies or 35mm slides.
- In addition to slides, you can print audience handouts, outlines, and speaker's notes.
- You can format all the slides in a presentation.
- You can keep your entire presentation in a single file all your slides, speaker's notes, and audience handouts.
- You can import what you have created in other products, such as Word and Excel into any of your slides.

Begin with a solid argument.
Include slides that reinforce your words, not slides that repeat your words.
Substitute intense visual images for bullet points.
Avoid the pre-defined templates imposed by PowerPoint wizards.
Stay away from distracting backgrounds
Emphasize visual legibility (readable text on a plain background)
Avoid dissolves, spins and other transitions.
Test your presentation with colleagues.
Don't feel that you are slave to the PowerPoint. If the class flows in a new direction, you should be able to adapt on the fly.

Animations: Animations are effects that allow you to reveal the points on a slide one by one.
Background: The Background dialog box provides various options that let you change the background look of a single slide or every slide in the presentation.
Bullets: Bullets are dots, arrows, or other symbols used to identify items in a list.
Clip Art: Clip art is a collection of professionally designed images that can be inserted into a presentation.
Graphics: Graphics are images such as clip art, word art, graphs, and charts.
Handouts: Handouts are smaller versions of your slides that are printed and can be distributed to the audience.
Presentation: A presentation is a collection of slides, handouts, speaker's notes, and an outline, all combined into a file that can be printed onto transparencies or projected from a computer.
Slides: Slides are the individual pages of your presentation. Slides can be designed with different titles, graphics, text, and much more.
Speaker's Notes: Speaker's Notes are pages with a copy of a slide on top and space below it for taking notes.
Template: A template is a slide or presentation that provides a predefined format and colour scheme that can be applied to another presentation.
Transition: A transition is an effect that can be run between slides to signal a shift from one slide to the next.