Microsoft Office 2016 At Work For Dummies (2016)
Chapter 14
Getting Started with PowerPoint
In This Chapter
Moving around in a presentation
Choosing the right view
Creating a new presentation with a template
Adding and removing slides
Using content placeholders
Manually placing text on a slide
Moving and resizing slide objects
Deleting slide objects
PowerPoint is the most popular presentation software in the world. Presentation software creates support materials for people who give speeches. You can project PowerPoint slides on a big screen behind you as you speak, create handouts to distribute to the audience, and print note pages for your own reference. PowerPoint can also create self-running presentations for distribution via CD or online.
This chapter offers you some basics for working with PowerPoint. You learn how to start a new presentation, add slides and text to it, and move and resize the content on a slide. In later lessons, you learn how to add other types of content and special effects to a show.
Start a new presentation
When you start PowerPoint, as with the other Office applications, a Start screen appears. From here, you can:
Click Blank Presentation, or press Esc, to start a new blank presentation.
Click one of the other templates to start a new presentation based on it
Open an existing presentation.
Figure 14-1: The Start screen in PowerPoint.
To start a new presentation at any other time than startup, press Ctrl+N for a blank one, or click File ⇒ New and choose a template.
Move around in a presentation
A slide is an individual page of the presentation. The term page isn’t a perfect descriptor, though, because PowerPoint slides are designed to be displayed on a computer screen or with a projector rather than printed. A presentation is a collection of one or more slides saved in a single data file.
At a big-picture level, the PowerPoint interface is very similar to that in Word and Excel: It has a Ribbon, a File tab, and a status bar. The default view of the presentation, called Normal view, consists of three panes, as shown in Figure 14-2.
The presentation shown in Figure 14-2 was created with the Welcome to PowerPoint template. Here are some things to note:
The Slides pane is the bar along the left side. Thumbnail images of the slides appear here. It is sometimes called the thumbnails pane or the slides pane.
The Slide pane (that’s singular, not plural) in the middle shows the active slide in a large, editable pane. Here’s where you do most of your work on each slide. It is sometimes called the editing pane.
The Notes pane runs along the bottom of the screen. Here you can type any notes to yourself about the active slide. These notes don’t show onscreen when you display the presentation, and they don’t print (unless you explicitly choose to print them).
The Notes pane is minimized in a new blank presentation. To see it, position the mouse pointer just above the status bar (orange bar) at the bottom of the screen and drag upward. Drag the top border of the Notes pane down again to hide it.
Another way to display or hide the Notes pane is to click the Notes indicator on the status bar.
You can navigate a presentation in many of the same ways you moved through other applications’ content.
Click above or below the vertical scroll bar in the Slide pane, or press Page Up or Page Down, to move one slide at a time.
You can also drag the scroll box to move more quickly as well.
You can click an up or down arrow on a scroll bar to scroll a small amount at a time.
You can also click a slide in the Slides pane to jump directly to that slide.
The Slides pane has its own scroll bar, in case you can’t see all the slides there at once.
Figure 14-2: Normal view consists of three panes.
Figure 14-3: Drag upward from the status bar to display the Notes pane.
Figure 14-4: Ways to move around in Normal view.
Choose the right view
PowerPoint provides several views for you to work with. Each view is useful for a different set of activities. Here are some things to remember about views:
To switch views, on the View tab, click a button for the view you want.
The Master views are not regular PowerPoint views; they enable you to edit the underlying designs and layouts on which individual slides are based. You will learn about them in Chapter 15.
Slide Show view is not represented on the View tab. To switch to Slide Show view, use the From Beginning or From Current Slide button on the Slide Show tab instead.
You can also click one of the View buttons in the bottom-right corner of the PowerPoint window:
Normal
Slide Sorter
Reading View
Slide Show
Figure 14-5: View buttons on the View tab of the Ribbon.
Figure 14-6: View buttons on the status bar.
Here’s a quick overview of the available views:
· Normal: You’ve already seen this one in Figure 14-4; it’s the default. It consists of a Slides pane, a Slide pane in which you can edit the slide, and a Notes pane in which you can record private notes and comments.
· Outline: This view is identical to Normal view except instead of the Slides pane there is an Outline pane that shows a text outline for each slide.
In Outline view, only text from the slide’s text placeholders appears in the Outline pane. If you have any manually created text boxes (such as those you create with Insert ⇒ Text Box), their text doesn’t appear there.
· Slide Sorter: This view shows thumbnail images of each slide, like the Slides pane does in Normal view, but it takes up the entire window. You can’t edit slide content in this view, although you can rearrange and delete slides. See Figure 14-7:
If your presentation has sections, as the Welcome to PowerPoint template’s presentation does, each section appears on a separate row in Slide Sorter view. You can manage sections with the Home ⇒ Section command.
To zoom in or out on the thumbnail view, drag the Zoom slider. A lower zoom means more slides are visible at once, and they’re smaller. A higher zoom means fewer slides are visible, but you can see each one more easily.
· Notes Page: This view shows a vertically oriented page for each slide, as shown in Figure 14-8:
The top half of the page shows the slide.
The bottom half of the page provides a large text box into which you can enter and edit note text.
Use the Zoom slider to zoom in to make the note text easier to see as you work with it if desired.
· Slide Show: This is the view you would use to show the presentation full-screen on your monitor. It’s covered in detail in Chapter 17. Each slide fills the entire screen, one by one, and you click to advance.
· Reading: Reading view is like Slide Show view except the presentation runs in a window rather than full-screen. That’s useful because you can do other things, like work with other programs or windows, while the presentation is running.
Figure 14-7: Slide Sorter view is good for arranging slides.
Figure 14-8: Notes Page view makes it easy to compose and edit lengthy speaker notes.
Most people prefer to work in Normal view most of the time when creating a presentation, so switch back to Normal view before you go any further, after experimenting with the other views.
Add and remove slides
Each new blank presentation begins with one slide in it: a title slide. (Presentations based on other templates may have more.) You can easily add more slides to the presentation by using the default layout (Title and Content) or any other layout you prefer.
Several methods are available for creating new slides, and each one is best suited for a particular situation. In the following sections, you learn each of the methods.
Create a new slide in the Slides pane
In the Slides pane in Normal view, you can click to place a horizontal insertion point between two existing slides or at the bottom of the list of slides and then press Enter to create a new slide. (See Figure 14-9.)
Figure 14-9: Create a new slide from the Slides pane (Normal view).
The layout of the new slide depends on the layout of the slide immediately before (above) it. If that slide uses the Slide Title layout, the new slide uses the Title and Content layout. Otherwise the new slide uses the same layout as the preceding slide. You learn more about slide layouts in Chapter 15.
Create a new slide in the Outline pane
In Outline view, you can create a new slide as follows:
In the Outline pane, click at the beginning of the title of the slide that the new slide should come before.
2. Press Enter. A new paragraph (a slide title) is created, and that causes a whole new slide to be created also.
Press the Up arrow key once to move the insertion point up into the new blank slide title, and type the title text.
Figure 14-10: Create a new slide from the Outline pane (Outline view).
Create a new slide from the Ribbon
When you create using the Ribbon, you can select the layout you want for the new slide. Follow these steps:
In Normal view, select the slide that the new slide should come after.
On the Home tab, click New Slide to create a slide with the same layout as the selected one (unless the selected one is a title slide, in which case the layout will be Title and Content).
OR
Click the arrow on the New Slide button, and then select the desired layout from the gallery that appears.
Figure 14-11: Create a slide by selecting a layout from the New Slide button’s gallery.
Duplicate a slide
If you need to create a series of very similar slides, you might find it easier to copy or duplicate a slide and then make the small modifications to each copy.
Copying and duplicating are two separate commands in PowerPoint, but they have essentially the same result.
When you copy a slide (or multiple slides), you place a copy of it on the Clipboard, and then you paste it from the Clipboard into the presentation. You can paste anywhere in the presentation or into a different presentation (or, for that matter, a different document altogether).
To copy a slide:
Select the slide in the Slides pane.
Press Ctrl+C or choose Home ⇒ Copy.
3. Click where you want the copy to go. If you want to place the copy after a certain slide, select that slide.
4. Press Ctrl+V or choose Home ⇒ Paste.
Figure 14-12: Copy a slide using the Clipboard.
When you duplicate a slide (or multiple slides), you don’t have to paste, because that command accomplishes both a copy and a paste operation at the same time. However, you also don’t get to choose where they’re pasted; they’re pasted directly below the original selection.
Select the slide(s) to be duplicated. To select more than one slide, hold down Ctrl as you click each one in the Slides pane.
Click the arrow on the New Slide button to open its menu.
Click Duplicate Selected Slides.
Figure 14-13: Duplicate one or more slides.
Delete a slide
Deleting a slide removes it from the presentation. To delete a slide, right-click it and choose Delete Slide, or select it in the Slides pane and press the Delete key. (See in Figure 14-14.)
Figure 14-14: Delete a slide.
There’s no Recycle Bin for slides; you can’t get them back after you delete them. However, you can undo your last action(s) with the Undo button on the Quick Access toolbar, and that includes undoing deletions. If you haven’t saved your work since you made the deletion, you can also get a deleted slide back by closing the file without saving changes and then reopening it.
Change the slide layout
A slide’s layout determines the placeholders that appear on it and the arrangement and positioning of those placeholders.
To change a slide’s layout, follow these steps:
Select the slide to change in the Slides pane.
On the Home tab, click Layout to open a gallery.
Click the desired layout.
The layouts available depend upon several factors, including the template you started with, the theme that is applied (see Chapter 15), and any custom layouts you may have created in Slide Master view. The nine layouts shown in Figure 14-15 are the default ones that come with the Blank template.
Figure 14-15: Choose a different layout.
Use content placeholders
The most common type of placeholder is a multipurpose Content placeholder. It gives you a choice of filling it either with text or with one of six types of graphical content.
You can fill each placeholder with only one type of content; if you want other content on the slide, you must use a layout with multiple content placeholders or add the extra content manually, as described in the next two sections. The available types of content are:
Table
Chart
SmartArt Graphic
Picture
Online Picture
Video
Figure 14-16: The types of graphical content for a Content placeholder.
Fill a Content placeholder with text
To fill a Content placeholder with text, click in the box and start typing. It’s as simple as that!
Here are some things to keep in mind about Content placeholders:
Most templates and designs use bulleted lists in the Content placeholder boxes by default, which means any text you type will automatically be formatted as a bulleted list.
You can turn off the bullet for a paragraph by clicking the Bullets button on the Home tab.
Use the Numbering button to convert a bulleted list to a numbered one.
To demote (indent) a paragraph — for example, to create a subordinated bulleted list within a list, click Increase List Level on the Home tab.
To promote a paragraph, click Decrease List Level.
It might seem counterintuitive to increase something you are demoting, but think about the list level as a hierarchy, with 1 as the most superior. If you increase the level, you demote the item to a later, less-important level.
Another way to demote a paragraph is to press Tab when the insertion point is at the beginning of the paragraph. Another way to promote is Shift+Tab.
You can use the commands in the Font and Paragraph groups on the Home tab to format the text in the placeholder, the same as you do in Word. Here are a few minor differences to note:
Shadow adds a shadow to the text.
Character Spacing lets you adjust the spacing between letters from the Ribbon. In Word this capability is available in the Paragraph dialog box.
Clear All Formatting removes all manually applied formatting, reverting back to the formatting specified by the template or the design.
Columns enables you to set a text placeholder box in multiple columns.
Align Text enables you to set vertical alignment within the text box of Top, Middle, or Bottom.
Text Direction changes the orientation of the text to vertical, stacked, or rotated.
Convert to SmartArt Graphic converts the selected paragraphs to a SmartArt graphic.
Figure 14-17: Here are some text formatting buttons that are different in PowerPoint than in Word.
Fill a Content placeholder with a graphical element
To use one of the graphical types of content, click the corresponding icon in the Content placeholder. A dialog box appears that guides you in selecting the content to include. The process is a bit different for each of the content types. Most of these content types you have worked with in earlier chapters; the dialog boxes are the same or nearly the same as in other Office applications. The one type you haven’t used yet, SmartArt graphics, is covered in Chapter 15.
Just as an example, here’s how to use a Content placeholder to insert a picture:
Click the Pictures icon in the Content placeholder.
In the Insert Pictures dialog box, select the desired picture.
Click Insert.
Figure 14-18: Click the placeholder icon you want.
Figure 14-19: In the dialog box that appears, choose the content to place in the placeholder.
Manually place text on a slide
First, a warning. Whenever possible, you should use the placeholders on the slide layouts and not create text boxes manually. One reason is that text in manual text boxes doesn’t appear in the Outline pane in Outline view. Manually placed text boxes also aren’t affected when you change layouts or designs for a slide, so with the new arrangement of placeholders the text box might be obscured, or might obscure other content.
Nevertheless, sometimes you really do need a manual text box. For example, you might want a little informational box to appear floating next to a picture or chart to explain it.
To create a text box on a slide, follow these steps:
On the Insert tab, click Text Box.
Drag to draw the desired text box on the slide.
3. Release the mouse button, and then type in the text box that appears.
Figure 14-20: In the dialog box that appears, choose the content to place in the placeholder.
Manually place a picture on a slide
Same warning here as in the previous section: Try not to manually place pictures if you can help it. Use placeholders whenever possible. If you make changes to the layouts or change to a different design later, you’ll thank me for this advice, because pictures in placeholders resize and move as needed, rolling with the changes. Manually placed pictures don’t.
To manually insert a picture, do the following:
1. On the Insert tab, click Pictures.
2. In the Insert Pictures dialog box, select the desired picture. (It’s the same dialog box as in Figure 4-19.)
3. Click Insert.
You can also insert various other types of graphics manually using the buttons on the Insert tab, such as Online Pictures, Chart, and SmartArt.
Move and resize slide objects
Objects on a slide are all free-floating frames. You can move and resize them just like in Word and Excel:
Drag an object by any part except the selection handles to move it. If it’s a picture, you can drag it by any part, including the middle. If it’s a text box, you have to drag it by its border.
Drag a selection handle to resize it. To maintain the aspect ratio, hold down Shift and drag only the corner selection handles.
Drag the rotation handle to rotate it.
Figure 14-21: Drag the object’s border to move it, or drag a selection handle to resize.
You can specify an exact size for an object in the Size group:
The tab on which the Size group appears depends on the object type. For example, for a picture, it’s on the Picture Tools Format tab, and for a chart it’s on the Chart Tools Format tab.
Set an exact height in the Height box.
Set an exact width in the Width box.
Figure 14-22: Control an object’s size precisely with the Height and Width settings.
Delete slide objects
To delete an object on a slide, select the object and press Delete on the keyboard. You can get a deleted object back immediately after deleting it by using Undo. Click the Undo button on the Quick Access toolbar or press Ctrl+Z. (See in Figure 14-23.)
Figure 14-23: Undo a deletion with the Undo button or Ctrl+Z.