Help

The Help system that is provided is extremely extensive and you will probably find a lot of your questions can be answered here.
There are several ways to obtain help, the easiest being to press F1.
Alternatively you can select (Help > Microsoft Office PowerPoint Help).
Using the Help facility is reasonably intuitive and help is available at any time even when you are in the middle of a task.
The forward and backwards buttons work just as they do in a browser allowing to you go back to previous topics.

Ask a Question

In the top right hand corner of your PowerPoint application is a textbox that allows you to type in a question or keywords at any time.
Don't worry about capitalisation or even about entering a complete sentence. Just typing in a keyword will work.
A list of all the topics will be displayed in the Search Results task pane.

In PowerPoint 2002 the list of topics are displayed below the text box.
In PowerPoint 2000 or before you had to use the Office Assistant to ask a question.

Office Assistant

The Office Assistant is an animated feature designed to offer assistance with any task you want to perform.
The Office assistant is designed to give you suggestions and tips relating to the specific task in hand.
There are 8 different types of Office Assistant that come as standard.