The demo opens with a title card that displays the text Make a yearly sales plan presentation.

Preparing for a yearly sales presentation to management can take a lot of time. I need to get forecasts for my sales team, analyze the data, and then put together the presentation.

An Excel worksheet titled Sales Forecast appears. The pointer clicks Data on the menu bar, points to List, and then clicks Publish List. The Publish List to SharePoint Site Wizard appears, and a corporate URL is typed in the Address box. The scene returns to the Excel worksheet, showing a Windows SharePoint Services message box. The message box contains the information that the list has been successfully published and a link to a particular Web site. The pointer clicks the link, and the Sales Forecast page of a Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services team site appears.

Fortunately, there are a few tools to help me with these tasks. When I collaborate with my sales team, I use an Excel 2003 list with a SharePoint server. This way, everyone can fill in their forecast information at the same time, and I can synchronize the final forecast in Excel on my computer.

The worksheet with the heading Sales report by quarter appears, with a column chart and a trendline to project future sales.

Once I have the forecast information, I can use Excel trendlines to project even further into the future.

The scene changes to the PowerPoint "Yearly Sales Plan Presentation" template in normal view, with the Slides tab, slide pane, and notes pane displayed. A slide titled Introduction: Sales Team Organization is visible in the slide pane. While the scroll box moves down the vertical scroll bar, a succession of other template slides appear in the slide pane.

When I'm ready to pull my data into PowerPoint, I use the "Yearly Sales Plan" template to guide me. It's much easier than starting from scratch!

The scene returns to the Excel worksheet with the heading Sales report by quarter, which no longer displays the chart and trendline. The pointer selects all the data on the worksheet, clicks Insert on the menu bar, and then clicks Chart. On the Standard Types tab of the Chart Wizard, the chart type and sub-type are already selected. The pointer clicks Next, and a column chart appears in the worksheet. A new PowerPoint presentation appears in the foreground, and the Excel chart is copied to the first slide. Then a larger image of the entire chart is displayed on the PowerPoint slide.

One thing I like to do is place charts right into PowerPoint. This is a great way to show numbers very quickly — for example, when I need to compare actual sales against projected sales.

The PowerPoint "Yearly Sales Plan Presentation" template reappears. The title Channel Sales is typed between the company name and the words 2005 Sales Plan.

With all the time I save pulling presentations together, I actually have time to practice and read up on presentation tips — and that makes me more confident when I'm presenting.

The PowerPoint template disappears. The text Microsoft Office appears with the Microsoft Office logo, and under them the URL http://www.office.microsoft.com appears.