I am in a scientific/technical field. To me, content comes before style. Show me too many whistles and bells (Word Art, animation, sound clips, etc.) and the BS shields go up. In that sense, my perspective is 180º opposite that of sales professionals, whom I gather are both Microsoft's core market for PowerPoint and Ms. Wempen's core audience for this book.
These differences in perspective show up in this books relatively scant treatment of importing images and other objects. For someone who uses a lot of PNG, JPG, or other image files in their presentations, there are questions about how much resolution (how large a file size) is helpful and how much is overkill. You won't find treatment of that subject in this book. Likewise, you're largely on your own with the subtleties and complexities of making relatively obscure scientific graphing software work with PowerPoint through the "wonderful magic" of OLE (or whatever they're now calling it).
Often the index is a very important component of a reference book. You can get software to compile an index for you, but depending on that is like depending entirely on your word processor's spelling and grammar checking functions, rather than having a human copy editor. This book seems to me to have let the machine do it. For instance, I was trying to determine how to omit a slide from a presentation rather than deleting it. I first looked up "omit" in Microsoft's online help. No luck (Microsoft, of course, depends third party authors like Ms. Wempen to provide adequate documentation of Office suite software, at no cost to Microsoft.) No luck in "the Bible" either. After kludging around a while in the menus, I found "hide" in the "Slide Show" menu. I then turned to "the Bible". There is no entry for "hide". There are two entries for "hiding". One, in the 30 pages "quick-start" pre-book, tells how to hide the very annoying Office Assistant that I long ago exorcised. The other refers to "backup slides" on page 90, which is a discussion of various types of audiences.
I do wish the CD came with some PP examples to use along with the text.
Robert