What is “PowerPoint”?

With “PowerPoint”, we can make presentations using slides comprised of text, images, films, graphics and sounds.  “PowerPoint” is an excellent resource for those who need to convey information via presentations.

You can do these presentations using a laptop and/or a projector, on a tablet, via the Internet or you can print the materials so they can be shared during your presentations.

You can save your presentation as video, pdf or HTML. You can even upload a presentation to “YouTube”.

As “PowerPoint” is part of the “Microsoft Office” pacakage, it allows us to interact between the various applications of this system. For example, spreadsheets created in “Excel” can be copied and pasted into a “PowerPoint” presentation.

 

The working environment

Let us first discuss what we see when we open “PowerPoint” 2010.
At the top, we find the title bar (1).
On the left of the titlebar, we have the “Quick Access” (a) toolbar.
By default, this toolbar has the “Save”, “Undo” and “Redo” buttons.
We can add or remove buttons to this toolbar

In the middle of the titlebar, we find the name of our file and the name of the application (b).

On the right of the titlebar, we have the “Minimize”, “Maximize” and “Close” (c) buttons.

Under the titlebar, we have the “Ribbon” (2). In the “Ribbon”, we find all the task buttons which help us perform all the tasks in “PowerPoint”.

What’s new in the 2010 version of “PowerPoint” is that, we can customize the “Ribbon”. This was not the case in the 2007 version. More on customizing the “Ribbon” and the “Quick Access” toolbar in the next lesson.

The current slide in which we are working is shown (3) under the “Ribbon”. On the left side, we find the different slides that are used in the presentation (4). At the bottom of the window, we have the “Status Bar” (5), containing the different display (d) and the zoom controls (e).

Now that we have had an overview of the key elements displayed on our screen, we can take a closer look.

 

The “Ribbon”

At the top, we have nine standard “Ribbon” tabs:

“File” – “Home” – “Insert” – “Design” – “Transitions” – “Animations” – “Slide Show” -“Review” – “View”

Clicking a tab gives us various groups in the “Ribbon”, depending on the selected tab. For example, the “Home” tab, has the “Clipboard”, “Slides”, “Font”, “Paragraph,” “Drawing” and “Editing” groups. You can see this in the image below.

Each group has its own command buttons which will be explained further in the following lessons.

Those of us who have worked with the 2007 version of “PowerPoint” will have noticed that, the “Office Button” (1) has disappeared. This has been replaced with the “File” (2) button. Clicking this button takes you to the “Backstage” view, which I explain more extensively in a later lesson.

 

Customizing the “Quick Access” toolbar

As mentioned earlier, we can modify the “Ribbon” and the “Quick Access” toolbar.

Let me first start with the “Quick Access” toolbar. This is the easiest and quickest.

By clicking on the downward pointing arrow next to the toolbar, we can add commands.

The most commonly used commands appear in a drop-down list. If you want to add a command to the “Quick Access” toolbar, then click the command in the list. You will see that this is now checked.

If you would like to remove a command from the “Quick Access” toolbar, click it again to uncheck the command in the list. Or a second way to do this is, to right-click the command in the toolbar and choose “Remove from Quick Access Toolbar”

If you want to add a command that is not on the list, click “More Commands ..”.

This opens the “PowerPoint Options” dialog tab where the “Quick Access Toolbar” is selected.

 

All available commands in “PowerPoint” can be found in these lists.

Commands are divided into categories. Click the downward pointing arrow to choose another category from the “Choose commands” from the drop-down list box.

Select the command in the left pane and click the “Add >>” button.
To remove a command, select the command in the right pane and click the “<<Remove” button.

By clicking on the up and down arrows, you can change the positioning of the commands in the “Quick Access” Toolbar.

 

In the “Customize Quick Access Toolbar:” drop down list, you can choose whether you want these settings applied to all documents “For all documents” or just for the document (“For Presentation..”) that you are currently working with.

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