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Alexander Graham Bell had Watson, Batman had Robin, and Dr. Frankenstein had Igor. Everybody needs an Assistant, and PowerPoint users are no exception. That's why Microsoft decided to update and improve the feature it introduced in Office 97 — the Office Assistant. Naturally, the changes to the Assistant in Office 2000 span the entire Office suite.
The Office Assistant is an animated persona who suddenly morphs onto your desktop with sage advice and suggestions and even a little idea light that gives you a clue that you could use a clue! You can also ask the Office Assistant a question when you're not sure what to do, and the Assistant thoroughly searches the PowerPoint online Help database to provide the answer.
When you first start up PowerPoint, the Office Assistant appears, as shown in Figure 1. As you can see, this Office Assistant resembles a cute little pooch. As it turns out, this one — named Rocky — is but one of eight Assistants that you can choose from.
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Figure 1: The Office Assistant. |
The fun thing about the Assistant is that he is animated. Watch the Assistant on-screen as you work. Every once in a while he blinks, and on occasion he dances or makes a face. The Assistant often responds to commands that you choose in PowerPoint. For example, if you call up the Find command (Edit-->Find or Ctrl+F), the Assistant makes a gesture as if he is searching for something. And when you print your presentation, the Assistant does some cute little printer schtick. Microsoft went to a lot of trouble to make sure that the Assistant is entertaining, and the results are sometimes amusing. When you ask the Assistant for help, he sits down, plops his feet up on a desk, and takes copious notes — don't you wish real Assistants cared so much!
Notice that the Assistant has a special type of dialog box called a balloon, which includes an area for you to type a question and several buttons that you can click. The balloon functions like any other dialog box, but it has a special appearance that's unique to the Assistant.
PowerPoint used to have Help topics that you simply clicked and used, but now Help is driven by the user interacting with the Assistant. Most of the time, if you type in your question nicely and ask pretty-please, the Assistant answers with information on the appropriate Help subject.
When you click any topic presented by the Assistant, you see two boxes at the bottom of the Assistant's word balloon — one that says Options, and another that says Search. If you choose Options, a dialog box appears that allows you to turn off the Assistant. If you do turn off the Assistant, the Help functions behave differently.
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