PowerPoint Basic Instructions with JFW
When PowerPoint first comes up, there is a dialog box on screen asking if you want to "Open an existing presentation" in Office 97 and Office 2000. There are four radio buttons here, and you can explore them if you wish. However, I prefer to simply press escape to clear these dialogs and begin working from the menus. Depending on how your version of MS PowerPoint is set up, you may hear the word "Control" after JFW reads the initial dialog box. It will sound something like this. "Open an existing presentation radio button pressed, four of four, Control". This means that when you press the escape key to clear the initial dialog, there is a floating control menu somewhere on the screen, and since it could hide what you are working on, here is how to turn it on and off.
1. First press escape to clear the initial PowerPoint dialog with the radio buttons.
2. Second, go to the View menu, ALT+V, press T for Toolbars, down arrow until you hear "control toolbox checked" and press enter to uncheck this, which closes the menus and this toolbox, and then takes you back to the main PowerPoint screen.
Once you have made these simple changes, if necessary, here is how you can create a simple PowerPoint presentation.
1. Go to the File menu, ALT+F and choose the first item, NEW.
2. You get a multilevel tab dialog box, with the focus on an icon inside of the first tab page. This icon is labeled "Blank Presentation.Pot" and the first tab you are on in the dialog box is "General Tab". You can begin using this icon by pressing enter, or you can go to the next multilevel tab page by pressing CTRL+TAB, which is the "Presentation Designs" tab. The Presentation Designs tab offers many pre-set color schemes for the colors of your slide show presentation. JFW will read the names of these presentation designs, but you may need someone to describe the layout of the colors that are available. For example, you would not want a slide show with graphics about a birthday party to be the background for a business presentation. A few good ones to use in general are: "fireball.pot", neon frame.pot, network blitz.pot, and pulse.pot. You can experiment with the different presentation designs later, but pick one for now.
3. Press ENTER on fireball.pot and you get a new dialog, called NEW SLIDE. Within this dialog are several types of slides, and when you go there first you land on the TITLE SLIDE. Press enter on this title slide.
NOTE: When you open an existing PowerPoint presentation, you are in a screen that has three basic areas. They are the slide view pane, the speaker’s notes pane, and the outline view pane. You can move from pane to pane by pressing the F6 key and JFW will let you know where you are and if anything is selected or not.
4. Do a SAY ALL (Insert+down arrow) and you will hear that there are two placeholders on the current slide. Placeholders are where your text will appear when you type it in. A good analogy for placeholders is that they are like magnets that you may put on your refrigerator. You can move them around, and in PowerPoint, you can move the placeholders around on the screen and actually change the size of the placeholders if you need to. I recommend not changing their sizes or location while you are learning.
In this case, you should hear "Center title Placeholder, and Subtitle Placeholder". This slide has a place for the title of your presentation, and it will be centered. It also has a place just below the title for Subtitles.
5. Press the TAB key to move to the center title placeholder.
6. Press the SPACEBAR and you will be in an edit mode, go ahead and type "My first Presentation".
7. Press ESCAPE to get out of the edit mode, then press TAB to go to the Subtitle placeholder.
8. Press the SPACEBAR to get into edit mode and type something like the following two lines:
"Using JAWS for Windows", then hit enter to go to the next line and type
"by Your Name".
9. Press ESCAPE to get out of edit mode.
You have now created your first slide, the title slide.
10. Next, go to the file menu and choose ALT+I for the insert menu, and choose the first item in this list which is "New Slide", or you can just press the quick key, CTRL+M to create the new slide.
11. The "new slide" dialog pops up again, but notice that this time, you are not on the title slide. Instead, PowerPoint has moved you to the next slide to the right and says "bulleted List". You can explore the other choices of slide types by pressing your arrow keys. Do so at your leisure.
12. Choose the "bulleted list" slide in this example by pressing ENTER on it.
13. SAY ALL (Insert+down arrow) will tell you the placeholders on the new slide, in this case, a title and a body placeholder.
14. Tab to the Title placeholder, press spacebar to get into edit mode, and type the title of this slide, for example, I used "JFW can now do PowerPoint!". Press escape to get out of edit mode.
15. Tab to the Body placeholder, press spacebar to get into edit mode, and type your first bullet point. In this case I typed "This is my first bullet point" and press ENTER to go to the next bullet point, just below the first one. Type in another bullet point. In this case I typed "You can make points with bullets". When finished press escape to get out of edit mode.
16. Press Control+M to create a new slide. Choose Bulleted list again. Type in the Title Placeholder, and then the bullet points.
17. ENTRY EFFECT. Creating animated bullet points. Move to the outline view by pressing F6. Use up or down arrow to put your cursor in slide two and on one of the bullet points in slide two.
Press ALT+D to activate the Slide Show menu.
Then choose M for Custom Animation. You will land in a combo box for ENTRY EFFECT that says "no effect".
Then choose down arrow until you land on "Fly".
Press TAB to the next combo box, which is the ANIMATION EFFECT combo box. This determines which direction the bullet points will "fly" from, and choose "from Right". Then press TAB to move to the SOUND EFFECT combo box. Press down arrow and choose the sound called "Whoosh".
Next, move to slide three in outline view, put your cursor on one of the bullet points. Repeat the above process, but choose the following:
Entry Effect: Fly.
Animation Effect: from Top Left.
Sound Effect: Laser.
18. For your next slide, on the new slide dialog box, choose Clip Art and Text. Fill in the Title Placeholder, then tab to the Bitmap Placeholder and press Enter. The Microsoft Clip Art Gallery comes up. Press ALT+I to import clips, and point to the A drive. There is a bitmap image there called FS Balloon.bmp. Type in A:\FS Balloon.bmp and press enter.
You will hear a dialog asking you to describe the clip art, edit. Press Enter and go on. Then you will hear Clip 1 of 1, press Enter and go on. Then you will hear INSERT CLIP BUTTON and press Enter again, and the bitmap image is inserted into your PowerPoint presentation.
Press TAB to move to the Body placeholder, and press spacebar to go into edit mode. Type several points, like JAWS, MAGic, Open Book, etc. as bullet points. Press Escape to get out of edit mode and save the whole presentation with Control+S.
To view the PowerPoint presentation, go to the VIEW menu, ALT+V, and choose SLIDE SHOW, or the shortcut key W. You can also just press F5. You will be on the title slide and JFW will read the first slide for you automatically. To move to and read the next slide, simply press the spacebar. If you don’t want to hear the spacebar echoed during an actual presentation, you can toggle JAWS to speak "none" by pressing Insert+F2 until you hear JAWS say "none".
Basically, that is all there is to creating a PowerPoint presentation. You can continue with different slide presentation designs, or you can continue to use the bulleted list. Of course, you should stop and save your file, just like saving any other windows program. CTRL+S or ALT+F, then S.
There you have a very basic overview of how to create and read a PowerPoint presentation. I hope this helps. Thanks,
Dan Clark
account development manager
phone 800-444-4443 X 1016
Freedom Scientific Blind/Low Vision Group