PowerPoint How-to 1

I know a lot of you are required to produce PowerPoint presentations for class and, like Word, PowerPoint can be kind of tricky to work with. So my next few posts will be on using PowerPoint.

Let’s start off with the basics: the working section of the screen.

Click to make bigger.

The middle area is your working area. This is where you write and design each slide. To the left is your view of the slides you’ve created in miniature. You can see it in slide view, which will show you the order of your slides, or outline view, where you will see all the text you’ve written arranged in order.

The bottom is your note section. For each slide you can write down what you want to say about it or you can just jot down points you want to remember. When you give your presentation these cannot be seen by your audience.

At the bottom right are your view options. The first view is the normal view, that is, what the illustration above shows. The second button will give you the slide sorter view: it shows you your slides in order so you can more easily rearrange them if your want. The third view is the slide show. This is what you want to press to start your presentation. You can use this to see how your slides will look.

When you are in presentation mode, press the arrow key → to go forward. Pressing the escape key “Esc” will end your presentation.

Next to the view buttons is a slider that allows you to zoom in and out so you can see your slide bigger if need be.

Next let’s look at the Home tab.

First up is the slides section. You have a new slide button which you can press to add slides. Note the little arrow next to the words “New Slides.” Click this to get a drop-down menu with further options of slide designs. These pre-set layouts give you the areas you need to work with so you can just add your own content rather than trying to add text and picture boxes yourself. Try using different layouts so you can learn what they have. You can always erase them is they don’t suit what you’re doing. (If you just press the new slide button you get what layout you chose last.)

The Layout button lets you change the layout (or design) of the slide you are currently working on.

The Reset button returns the slide you are working on to the default layout. So if you made changes you don’t like you can put it back to the way you started out.

The Delete button deletes the slide currently in your view area.

Next is the Font section, which works exactly like the one in Word. For a more detailed look at it go here: http://ghntslibrary.blogspot.com/2011/10/microsoft-office-word-review.html

The Paragraph is also similar to Word although you can change the direction of text here so it can be vertical.

The Drawing section lets you create different shapes. Just choose the shape you want, click and hold the left mouse button on the slide and move the mouse (while holding down the button) to make a shape. Let go of the button when you are done. You can then re-size and reposition it. The little scribble button lets you draw on the slide.