Try the library (public one, that is). They have how-to books on all the Office programs. I’ve used “The Excel Bible” which is part of a series. Probably there’s an equally good one for PowerPoint. BTW I don’t exactly hate PowerPoint but I wish it just didn’t get used so much. Besides the hassle of doing stuff in it, there’s the hassle of staying awake while someone else reads theirs off during a talk 😉
Also, Publisher, to the best of my knowledge isn’t Microsoft so cutting and pasting may not be supported between them. Try cutting and pasting into a pure text thing like Notebook, then take out all the line breaks and cut/paste that into the PP.