Science PowerPoint tips and tutorials

PowerPoint XP/2003 has the option of placing any toolbar as a floating toolbar, which can be positioned anywhere on the screen, even very next to the drawn object within the slide area. Here we show how to create the floating toolbar that contains many other useful drawing commands; however which are not as essential as those described in Essential drawing tools I and II previously. In your future use of PowerPoint, this Toolbar could be activated or deactivated, depending on your drawing needs.
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A selection of drawing tools that are frequently used and should be kept accessible is shown in Figure 3.
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PowerPoint XP/2003 has numerous basic and advanced features that are displayed on separate Toolbars and hidden in multiple menus. Among plethora of buttons available there are some that you will probably never use, some you will use very infrequently and some that you may want to have within a quick reach all the time. So to streamline the workflow it is essential that you organize your workspace in such a way that you have all you need just 1-mouse-click away. The Drawing Toolbar is obviously an essential part of this workspace and we will help you to organize it in a handy way. Figure 1 shows an example of the PowerPoint screen that is ready for major work in creating objects in biomedicine.
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Science communication has been always heavily reliant on images, drawings, charts and diagrams. The growing complexity of life sciences in particular puts an increasing pressure on scientists, health professionals and students to clearly communicate their scientific results and present ideas and hypothesis in a way that is easily grasped by the audience. In the broad field of biomedical sciences, where images are essential part of almost any presentation, skillfully crafted drawings, charts or diagrams can make a critical difference in conveying the message in lecture or seminar room. Pictures speak a thousands words, however few scientist take time to develop themselves slides representing complex structural, cellular and anatomical objects. Understandably so, they just take too much time to make and often require good knowledge of more advanced graphical software.

Although PowerPoint is a dominant medium in scientific presentations, most users usually do not take full advantage of its potential. When trying to envision complex cellular and histological objects and their cartoon representations, PowerPoint users tend to think more about advanced graphical software packages for art professionals rather tan PowerPoint, and only few realize that PowerPoint has adequate set of basic tools to create high quality slides depicting objects in life sciences. This is especially true for PowerPoint XP/2003 which has many critical enhancements over 2000 version, including blending, transparency and antialiasing. These new, though still basic tools are quite easy to master and if used creatively, may be quite sufficient for producing even complex drawings.

In this Journal we will describe how to use PowerPoint to make good-looking objects and slides in Biology and Medicine. We will publish on a bi-weekly basis tutorials, tips and techniques on how to use both simple and more advanced PowerPoint features to generate complex visual material for lectures and seminars. We also would like to invite you to share with us and with all PowerPoint users tricks and techniques that you may think may be useful for other scientists and students.