Let's take a look at our Microsoft Office PowerPoint window.
When you open PowerPoint, you have a new, blank presentation.
The first view that you will see is the Normal view.
There are several ways to view your presentation but the three you will use the most are located
here at the bottom of the window. There is a slide sorter view which makes it
easy to rearrange slides, and the slide show view that starts your presentation.
To the right, is the Zoom tool. You can zoom in and out by left-clicking the
slider and dragging it back and forth. You can also use the scroll bar above it to
scroll left and right in the window. At the top of the window, you have the Ribbon,
which is the new menu system that is arranged in tabs.
On each tab you'll find commands organized in groups.
Above the Ribbon, you'll see the Quick Access toolbar.
One of the simplest things you can do to make accomplishing basic tasks faster is to customize
the Quick Access toolbar. The Quick Access toolbar resides right next
to the Microsoft Office Button in all the Office 2007 applications and allows you to
reach commonly used commands quickly. By default, the Save, Undo, and Redo commands
appear on the toolbar. To view the commands you can add, simply click
the down arrow next to the toolbar and a menu appears.
I'm going to add the Spelling command. And now we can see that it appears on the
toolbar. As you can see, a check mark appeared beside
spelling. This means it is selected and appears on the
toolbar. To remove a command from the toolbar, just
left- click any command with a check mark, and it will no longer appear on the toolbar.
See how easy it is to add and remove commands? You can add more commands besides the ones
that appear on the drop-down list. Just select More Commands, and from the dialog
box that appears, select the command you wish to add, click the Add button, and then click
OK. This gives you the ability to really customize
PowerPoint. While working with PowerPoint, you may find
that there are times that you want to work on your presentation without the Ribbon.
Microsoft gives you the ability to minimize and maximize the ribbon.
To minimize the ribbon, click the drop-down arrow next to the Quick Access toolbar.
Select Minimize Ribbon from the list. And the Ribbon disappears.
Click the arrow again. You can see that a check mark appears next
to Minimize the Ribbon, which indicates this feature is toggled on.
To Maximize the Ribbon, just select Minimize the Ribbon to toggle the feature off, and
the Ribbon will appear. In addition to the Quick Access toolbar and
the Ribbon, the Microsoft Office Button appears at the top of your window.
When you left-click the button, you access a menu.
From this menu, you can create a new presentation, open existing presentations, save them in
a variety of ways, and print. You can also add security features, send,
publish, and close the file. You can also click the PowerPoint Options
button to open a dialog box where you can make some changes to the default settings.
In the Popular section, Show MiniToolbar is selected.
This shows the information that appears when you hover over a command like this.
If you're new to PowerPoint, this information is helpful.
If you're a power user, this may be more of an annoyance.
You can turn this feature off here if you'd like.
I'm actually going to leave this on. There are a lot of things you can change here.
For example, I want to know if I'm using my words correctly in my presentation.
I can go to the Proofing command and then look down where it says When correcting spelling
in PowerPoint, I'm going to put a check beside Use contextual spelling.
By doing this PowerPoint will let me know if I'm using a word incorrectly.
Oh...and there's one more thing I want to show you.
If you go back to the Popular section and look down for color scheme, you can change
the color scheme from the normal blue to silver or black.
I think I will try black. Yeah that looks really good! Now I'm ready
to start my presentation.