The working environment

As in any “Office” 2007 application, the working environment of “PowerPoint” 2007 is completely changed.

Let me first, quickly go over what we see when we open “PowerPoint” 2007.
At the top left hand corner, we find the “Office” button.
When we click on this button, we have access to commonly used functions in “PowerPoint”, such as “New”, “Open” and “Save” and “Print”. This pretty much replaces the “File” button which was present in the previous versions of “Word”.

To its right, in the title bar, we find the “Quick Access toolbar”.
By default, this toolbar comes with the “Save”, “Undo” and “Redo”buttons.
The “Quick Access” toolbar is the only toolbar wherein we can add or remove buttons.

In the middle of the title bar, we find the name of our file and the name of the application.
On the right side of the title bar we have the “Minimize” “Maximize” and “Close” buttons.

Under the titlebar, we have the “Ribbon”.
In the “Ribbon”, we find all the commands that can be used, in “PowerPoint”.
The “Ribbon” replaces the various tools, in the various toolbars we had, in previous versions of “PowerPoint”.
We will discuss these tools in subsequent lessons.

Below the “Ribbon” is the slide on which we are currently working.

At the bottom of the window, we have the “Status bar”, containing the different view buttons and the zoom slider.

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

The “Ribbon”

At the top, we have the 7 standard “Ribbon” tabs:
“Home” – “Insert” – “Design” – “Animations” – “Slideshow” – “Review” – “View”.
Clicking a tab displays the 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 these in the image below.
Each group has its own command buttons, which will be explained further, in the following lessons.

The “Ribbon” cannot be modified or removed.
The only thing we can do with the “Ribbon” is to minimize or maximize it.

Minimizing the “Ribbon” can be done in various ways.
One way is to double-click the selected tab.
A second way is to right-click on any tab, command button, or group and select “Minimize the ribbon ” in the pop-up menu.
A third way, and this is for those of you who like to work with “hot keys”, is pressing the “Ctrl”+ “F1” buttons on your keyboard.

To maximize the “Ribbon” again, double-click on any tab or press the “Ctrl “+”F1” buttons on your keyboard.

When the “Ribbon” is minimized, you still have all command buttons available in the “Ribbon”.
Simply select a different tab and all command buttons in this tab are displayed.
If you click a command button, it automatically minimizes the “Ribbon”.

Contextual tabs:

Besides the regular tabs that appear when you insert objects, contextual tabs are at the end of the “Ribbon”.

As the name suggests, a contextual tab offers access to buttons that you may need, such as when we have inserted a table.

Contextual tabs are always on the right of the “Ribbon”. The tab name, which is “Chart Tools” in this case, appears on the title bar. This is done to make room for the (sub) commands with tabs, which stand on the row of tabs when added. These (sub) tabs are all under the contextual tab.

The various groups that appear when a (sub) tab is selected, are dependent on the selected object in our presentation.
You hide the Contextual tabs by “de-selecting” the object.

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