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In this video, we are going to discuss a few PowerPoint basics.
Right now, we are looking at the desktop of my Windows XP computer.
Your desktop may look different, because you may be using a different version of Windows.
When I click on the start button, I may see PowerPoint in my recently used programs.
If I don't, then I will want to click on the All Programs menu, select the Microsoft Office
group, and then click on Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007.
I want to briefly review some of the common features found in all Office 2007 programs.
Office 2007 replaced the menu bar with the ribbon and the Office button. The Office button
is where you will find options such as opening and saving files, printing, selecting global
options for PowerPoint, and exiting the PowerPoint application.
It is important that you feel comfortable looking through the ribbon to find the icons
that you may be looking for.
Like other Windows programs, PowerPoint has a titlebar that tells you the name of the
application that we are using and the name of our current file.
PowerPoint also has a status bar that indicates that we are using the Office theme and that
we are on slide one of one. To the right of the status bar, we have a number of view options
and we have zoom controls that allow us to zoom in and out of our document.
And before we forget, like all Office programs, in the top right hand corner we have a help
button in case we get stuck and need to look up how to perform a task.
The first thing we will do is take a look at the empty PowerPoint document that was
created when we opened the application. The document isn't really empty because it contains
a title slide and that title slide contains two placeholders.
The first thing we will do is we will type a title for our presentation in the title
placeholder.
If we want to, we could also add a subtitle in the subtitle placeholder.
Once we have entered information on our title slide, we can create a second slide by clicking
the new slide dropdown on the home ribbon.
Any time we see an icon with a tiny drop down arrow, this indicates that more options are
available. So I will now click on this drop down arrow and then I will select Title and
Content.
This has created a second slide which we can notice in our left hand slide view. On the
second slide, there are two placeholders.
There is a place holder for our title
and there is a placeholder for content. As we add text content, it automatically creates
a bulleted list.
If we want to create sublist, all we have to do is press the tab key.
Notice that, like other Office 2007 applications, the spell checker is integrated. Another important
feature in Office 2007 is the ability to format pieces of text using the toolbar, not only
the toolbar in the ribbon, but also the toolbar that appears when you right click on text.
Using the spell checker, I can tell it to ignore words. I may decide that I want to
have a header or footer on my slide that will tell me the name of my presentation and the
current slide number that I am on.
I can create this headers and footers by going to the insert ribbon and clicking on header
or footer.
I may wish to have the slide number and my footer not appear on my title slide, so I
can check that option as well. I can choose to have the footer appear only on the current
slide or apply it to all slides.
I may wish to jazz up my presentation, and I can easily do that by clicking on the design
ribbon and then selecting one of the pre-built themes that comes with PowerPoint 2007.
You will notice that there is a drop down arrow which indicates that are more themes
that are available. I can select one of these themes and it applies it to my entire presentation.
When I want to view my presentation, I can go up to the Slide Show ribbon and view my
presentation from the beginning, using the spacebar or the arrow keys to advance or go
back through my presentation.
I can press the Escape button to return to PowerPoint.
Once I have finished creating my presentation, I can click on the office button and I can
save my presentation, giving it a name and location.