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Special Edition Using Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 Review by anonymous
Complete but flawed
For ever since I remember Que has producing big books on a program which have details of almost everything the program does. Que bills this as "the only PowerPoint 2003 book you'll need," and though that may be open to question, this book would be worth choosing if you only had one book.
Patrice-Anne Rutledge has done a great job of showing how to use the features. The book is full of screen shots and explanations of choices in dialog boxes, and there's plenty of evidence that she draws on her experience of presentations she's created.
However . . . presentations aren't just about knowing how to use the program. You need skills in creating slides and delivering them. The last 230 pages of this 720 page book are written by Tom Mucciolo, and this is where the book falls down.
In spite of having his own business coaching people on how to present, in print Mucciolo has trouble getting to the point, and his chapters are full of superfluous text and often unfunny and annoying jokes. It's almost as though he was struggling to make the chapters long enough.
So ignore the book beyond page 491. What you'll get is well-written details of the program; what you'll miss is a few ideas that aren't really worth reading the rest of the book.