|
When you start PowerPoint, it greets you with a screen that's so cluttered with stuff that you're soon ready to consider newsprint and markers as a viable alternative for your presentations. The center of the screen is mercifully blank, but all around the edges and tucked into every corner are little icons and buttons and menus and whatnot. What is all that stuff?
Figure 1 shows the basic PowerPoint screen in all its cluttered glory. The following list points out the more important parts of the PowerPoint screen:
Figure 1: PowerPoint's cluttered screen.
- Menu bar: Across the top of the screen, just below the Microsoft PowerPoint title, is the menu bar. The deepest and darkest secrets of PowerPoint are hidden on the menu bar. Wear a helmet when exploring it.
 | PowerPoint has an annoying "feature" that tries to simplify menus by showing only those commands that you frequently use on the menus. If this feature has been enabled on your computer, the menus start out by showing only those commands that the programmers at Microsoft think you'll use most often. The less frequently used commands are hidden beneath the double down arrow that appears at the bottom of each menu. As you work with PowerPoint, the commands that you use most often show up on the menus, so you don't have to click the down arrow to access them. |
Here's the bottom line: If you can't find a menu command, don't give up. Just click the double down arrow at the bottom of the menu. Or, just stare at the menu for a few seconds. Eventually, PowerPoint realizes that you can't find what you're looking for, and the missing menu commands magically appear.
- Toolbars: Just below the menu bar are two of the many toolbars that PowerPoint offers you in an effort to make its most commonly used features easy to use. Each toolbar consists of a bunch of buttons that you can click to perform common functions. The toolbar on the top is the Standard toolbar; immediately beneath it is the Formatting toolbar.
Down near the bottom of the screen is the Drawing toolbar. It has buttons that let you draw pictures on your slides.
| If you're not sure about the function of one of the billions and billions of buttons that clutter the PowerPoint screen, place the mouse pointer on the button in question. After a moment, the name of the button appears in a box just below the button. |
- Current slide: Right smack in the middle of the screen is where your current slide appears.
- Outline tab and Slide tab: On the left side of the slide is an area that has two tabs, labeled Outline and Slides. The Outline tab shows your presentation arranged as an outline. You can switch between the Slides tab and the Outline tab by clicking the tab you want to view. (For more information on working in Outline View, see Chapter 3.) The Slides tab, shown in Figure 1, shows little thumbnail images of your slides.
- Notes Pane: Beneath the slide is a small area called the Notes Pane, which you can use to add notes to your slides.
- Task Pane: To the right of the slide is an area called the Task Pane. The Task Pane is designed to help you complete common tasks quickly. When you first start PowerPoint, the Task Pane appears with the New Presentation options, which enable you to create a new presentation or open an existing presentation. As you work with PowerPoint, you'll encounter other options in the Task Pane for common tasks, such as searching, changing the slide design, or setting animation options.
- Status bar: At the very bottom of the screen is the status bar, which tells you the slide that is currently displayed (for example, Slide 1 of 1).
- Salad bar: The salad bar is located . . . well, actually, there is no salad bar. You have to pay extra for that.
You'll never get anything done if you feel that you have to understand every pixel of the PowerPoint screen before you can do anything. Don't worry about the stuff that you don't understand; just concentrate on what you need to know to get the job done and worry about the bells and whistles later.
| Lots of stuff is crammed onto the PowerPoint screen — enough stuff that the program works best if you let it run in Full Screen mode. If PowerPoint doesn't take over your entire screen, look for the boxy-looking Maximize button near the top-right corner of the PowerPoint window (it's the middle of the three buttons clustered in the top-right corner — the box represents a window maximized to its largest possible size). Click it to maximize the PowerPoint screen. Click it again to restore the PowerPoint screen to its smaller size. |
|
