As you get further into developing your presentation, it can be helpful to learn how to review and
manage your slides.
You might be surprised by some of the tools PowerPoint has to offer, including ways to
practice your presentation and take notes.
First, this view should be familiar to you.
There's a place to navigate your slides, and a place to edit your presentation.
This actually has a name—it's called Normal view.
And it's one of four views that you can access using the buttons at the bottom of the window.
The second view is Slide Sorter, where you'll find thumbnail versions of each slide in your
presentation.
Here, you can easily change the order of your slides, justly dragging and dropping the thumbnails.
Next up is Reading View.
This fills most of your screen with a preview of your presentation, leaving room for navigation
buttons here.
Finally, we have Slide Show View, which completely fills the screen with what the audience will
see when you present.
There's a handy menu in the bottom left corner that appears only when you move your mouse,
giving you the ability to navigate your slides… and access other features, like the pen and
highlighter tool.
Thinking ahead a bit, I'd like to start writing some notes about what I plan to say during
my presentation.
Luckily, PowerPoint has a place for that—two places, actually.
The first is the Notes pane, located at the bottom of the screen.
(You might need to click the command to make it appear.)
First I'm going to click and drag the edge of the pane to make it a little bigger.
Now we can click inside… and start typing our notes.
This is a great place to add ideas, talking points, or just little reminders for yourself.
There's even a way to print these notes, so you can refer them later when you're presenting.
The second place where you can view and enter notes can be found on the View tab.
Just click the Notes Page command… and you can focus on the notes for each slide one
at a time.
To navigate, use the arrow keys on your keyboard, or the scroll bar on the right.
You can also type your notes directly into the text box.
Go ahead and zoom in if you need to.
In addition to the notes tool, PowerPoint gives you a couple more ways to prep and manage
your slides.
For instance, have you ever written an outline for something at work or at school?
I think you'll like this next feature.
All you have to do is click the command that says Outline View… and the left pane will
display an outline version of all the text in your slides.
This makes it easy to review the contents of your presentation, and also fine-tune things
if you need to.
To exit, click the Normal command at the bottom of the window, or right here on the View tab.
The other thing I like to do at this point is organize my slides into sections, which
can make them easier to navigate.
In this example, we have sort of a two-part presentation—first there are dogs, then
there are cats and other pets—so I think I'd like create a section for each.
To get started, select the slide where you want your first section to begin.
Then go to the Home tab… click the Section command… and choose Add Section from the
menu.
To name the section while it's still selected, click the command again… then go ahead and
choose Rename.
We're going to label this one Dogs to make it easy to tell the sections apart.
Next, I'm going to repeat the process to create another section later in the presentation.
It's going to start with this slide here, and it's going to be called Cats and Other
Small Pets.
Now we can collapse and expand the sections using the tiny arrows next to each section
name.
All together, sections are a great way to break up your presentation, so you can display
only the slides you're currently working with.
Now you know several different ways to prep and manage your slides.
How you use these features is up to you, but they're bound to come in handy as you continue
working in PowerPoint.