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Archive: Review of PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit

A new book by Geetesh Bajaj and Echo Swinford, PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit, is both unique and uniquely useful. PowerPoint 2007's interface, the ribbon, is so different from what we're used to, that running through a tutorial like this one will make the difference between tearing your hair out while staying up until midnight and smoothly, efficiently getting the job done on time.

Both authors are PowerPoint MVP's (Microsoft Valuable Professionals) and experts in their field. If I could distinguish the two, I'd say that Echo is the technical expert and Geetesh is the design expert. The individual talents that each author brings to the book is part of what makes it so valuable. Each makeover combines both workflow magic and design artistry so that you'll learn much more than you expect.

Warning: Don't try to read this book on your morning commute! I tried reading the book on its own and it wasn't very satisfying: the authors don't always show you before and after for each and every step. This book is a tutorial and you need to put the excellent CD in your CD drive and do the exercises. It's in the actual execution of the makeovers that you see the results on your screen. Meanwhile, you get a feel for the fastest way to correct major problems in a presentation and how to make it look much better.

The book has an easy humor which I found appealing. Here's a quote from p. 87:

"Every company has folks who are either too busy or too lazy. They don't want to do anything until the last minute, and the third presenter in our group presentation—Dan Klipkoos—is one of them! His slides look like a hurried, five-minute job. His reasoning is that he'll add the content after the presentation has been through the makeover that the design agency is doing!

"So, yes, you could fret and insist that Dan send the content now, but that won't help. Therefore, in this section, we'll show you how you can work with incomplete slides."

The CD includes all of the presentations that you'll work on. The authors have done something pretty amazing: they've saved each presentation at every step of every chapter so you can start at any point. This means that you don't need to go through an entire chapter if you don't want to. But I encourage you to do so, because the transformation that you'll see is very satisfying.

The CD also includes images, music tracks, templates, and themes.

If you go through this book, not only will you know PowerPoint 2007 a whole lot better, but you'll never look at a presentation in the same way again. You'll learn to apply a broad viewpoint that will enable you to vastly improve all of the presentations that you deal with.

Another plus is that the book is in full color! I'm very jealous, as none of my publishers has let me create a book in color. At least not yet. But for PowerPoint, the result is stunning. You really can see the difference between that blue and that gray.

If you've recently upgraded to PowerPoint 2007 and want to not only learn how to use it well but to improve your presentations, I highly recommend this book.