PowerPoint 2013 For Dummies
Overview
Get up and running with this full-color guide to PowerPoint 2013!
PowerPoint, the number one presentation software, has been revised and improved with the introduction of Microsoft Office 2013. With this all-new, full-color book by your side, you will learn how to take full advantage of all of PowerPoint's powerful and dynamic capabilities. Bestselling veteran For Dummies, author Doug Lowe breaks it all down so that you can create a powerful and effective slideshow presentation with the new wide-screen theme and variant that incorporates videos, pictures, and shapes, and allows you to create customized icons using powerful tools.
- Shows you how to create presentations
with pizzazz using the new collection of themes, and then helps you align shapes, text boxes, and graphics
PowerPoint 2013 For Dummies points you to the power of this updated application so that you can create effective and impressive presentations.
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About The Author
Doug Lowe is the bestselling author of more than 40 For Dummies books. He's covered everything from Microsoft Office to creating web pages to technologies such as Java and ASP.NET, and has written several editions of both PowerPoint For Dummies and Networking For Dummies.
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powerpoint 2013 for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
PowerPoint 2013 is the most powerful presentation software available to create and edit slide show presentations for work, home, or school. PowerPoint 2013 offers a number of helpful keyboard shortcuts for performing tasks quickly. Here are some shortcuts for common PowerPoint formatting, editing, and file and document tasks.
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Although the actual number of things that can go wrong when working with PowerPoint is probably closer to 10,000, the situation is rarely hopeless. Here are some possible stumbles . . . and some ways to pick yourself up and get your presentation started again.
I can't find my file
You spent hours polishing that presentation, and now you can't find the file.
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The actual number of things that can go wrong when working with PowerPoint 2013 is probably closer to 10,000, but the following are among the things that go wrong most often.You can't find your file.Either you saved the file in a different folder, or you used a different filename to save it than you intended.
The most likely way to find your presentation is to check the list on the right side of the File menu.
The Artistic Effects command in PowerPoint 2013 applies one of several special filters to your picture in an effort to make the picture look like it was created by an artist rather than photographed with a $60 digital camera. Depending on the nature of the original picture, the results may or may not be convincing; the only way to find out is to try.
If you’ve never attempted to add a chart to a PowerPoint slide, the process can be a little confusing. A chart is simply a series of numbers rendered as a graph. You can supply the numbers yourself, or you can copy them from a separate file, such as an Excel spreadsheet.
You can create all kinds of different charts, ranging from simple bar charts and pie charts to exotic doughnut charts and radar charts.
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PowerPoint 2013’s new Corrections command can help you make adjustments to those pictures that just don’t come out quite right. This command, found on the Picture Tools Format tab, lets you adjust a picture’s sharpness, brightness, and contrast.
To change a picture’s sharpness, contrast, or brightness, click the Corrections button and choose one of the preset options from the gallery of choices that appears.
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You can use the Create Handouts command in PowerPoint 2013 to create a Word document that you can then print and distribute to your audience. Using this feature is simple; just follow these steps:Choose File→Export→Create Handouts, then click the Create Handouts button.This brings up the dialog box shown.
Choose the formatting option you want to use.
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Basic tables are simple to create in PowerPoint 2013. The easiest way to create a slide that contains a table is to use the Title and Content slide layout. Just follow these steps:Open the Home tab on the Ribbon and then click the New Slide button in the Slides group to add a slide with the Title and Content layout.
Custom animation is the nitty-gritty of PowerPoint 2013 animation. Custom animation is the only way to apply text animation that’s more complicated than the predefined Fade, Wipe, or Fly In styles of the Animate drop-down list. In addition to animating text, custom animation lets you animate other objects on your slides, such as pictures, shapes, and charts.
Once upon a time, PowerPoint 2013 had but rudimentary drawing tools — the equivalent of a box of crayons — but PowerPoint now has powerful drawing tools that are sufficient for all but the most sophisticated aspiring artists. Here are a handful of general tips for drawing pictures in PowerPoint 2013.
Zoom in for drawing in PowerPoint
When you work with the PowerPoint drawing tools, you might want to increase the zoom factor so that you can draw more accurately.
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There are a lot of things you can do with PowerPoint 2013, and having shortcuts for the things you do most often is very handy. Some of the things you’ll frequently do in PowerPoint include creating, saving, and printing new presentations, as well as opening existing presentations, adding new slides, and getting help from PowerPoint.
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An action button is a special type of AutoShape that places a button on the PowerPoint 2013 slide. When the user clicks the button during a slide show, PowerPoint takes whatever action you’ve designated for the button. A well-planned arrangement of action buttons scattered throughout a presentation can make it easy for someone to view the presentation in any order he or she wants.
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A comment in PowerPoint 2013 is a lot like a sticky note. The beauty of comments is that you can turn them on and off. Therefore, you can view the comments while you’re editing your presentation, and you can turn them off when it’s time for the show.
To add a comment to a presentation, follow these steps:Call up the slide to which you want to add a comment and click where you want the comment to appear.
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Collaborating on a presentation created in PowerPoint 2013 can be as easy as adding comments. A comment is a lot like a sticky note. The beauty of PowerPoint comments is that you can turn them on and off. Therefore, you can view the comments while you’re editing your presentation, and you can turn them off when it’s time for the show.
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Headers and footers provide a convenient way to place repeating text at the top or bottom of each slide, handout, or notes page. You can add the time and date, slide number or page number, or any other information that you want to appear on each slide or page, such as your name or the title of your presentation.
If you don’t like the standard layouts that come with PowerPoint 2013’s built-in Slide Master, you can add a layout and customize it any way you want. To add your own layout, just follow these steps:Choose View→Master Views→Slide Master or Shift+click the Normal View button near the bottom right of the window.
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With PowerPoint 2013 Slide Masters, any elements you add to the Master itself are also included in each layout that’s associated with the Master. For example, if you set the background color for the Slide Master, that color is used for each layout. Likewise, if you add a big blue rectangle in the top-left corner of the Slide Master, that rectangle is visible in the top-left corner of each layout.
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You can add several types of objects to the Slide Master in PowerPoint 2013. You can add clip art, pictures, or even a video or sound clip. Anything that you can add to an individual slide can be added to the Slide Master.
To add recurring text to each slide, follow this procedure:Call up the Slide Master if it’s not displayed already.
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PowerPoint 2013 enables you to draw attention to your pictures by adding stylistic features such as borders, shadows, and reflections. Here is a slide with several copies of a picture, each with a different style applied.
To add a style effect to a picture, select the picture and open the Picture Tools tab on the Ribbon.
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PowerPoint 2013 includes a nifty feature that lets you record the timings for each slide and for each animation element (such as bullet points appearing). At the same time, you can record your own voice to use as a narration for the presentation.
To record the timings, you essentially rehearse the presentation as if you were giving it to an audience.
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Adding a movie motion clip to a PowerPoint 2013 slide is similar to adding a sound clip. A crucial difference exists, however, between motion clips and sound bites: Video is meant to be seen (and sometimes heard). An inserted motion clip should be given ample space on your slide.
The following steps show you how to add a video clip to a slide:Find a good movie and, if needed, download it or upload it to your hard drive.
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A bookmark is a marked location within the playback of a video file in PowerPoint 2013 that can be used to trigger an animation effect. Here are the steps for creating a video bookmark and animating an object when the video playback reaches the bookmark:Add a video to the slide.Select the video object and then select the Video Tools Playback tab.
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You can add a chart to an existing PowerPoint 2013 slide by using the Insert tab to insert a chart into any slide. Add a chart to your slide by following these steps:Move to the slide on which you want to place the chart. Activate the Insert tab on the Ribbon.Click the Chart button in the Illustrations group to summon the Insert Chart dialog box.
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One way to add a chart to your PowerPoint 2013 presentation is to create a new slide by using a layout that includes a Content placeholder (an object that reserves space for content on the slide). Then click the Chart icon in the Content placeholder to create the chart.
The following procedure shows how to insert a new slide that contains a chart:Move to the slide that you want the new slide to follow.
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The Animation pane in PowerPoint 2013 is a task pane that appears to the right of the slide and displays important information about the animations you have added to your slides. The Custom Animation task pane is hidden by default, but you should turn it on before you start adding custom animations to your slides.
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PowerPoint 2013 doesn’t provide a way to add more than one page of notes for each slide. However, these steps show you a trick that accomplishes essentially the same thing:Create a duplicate slide immediately following the slide that requires two pages of notes.To duplicate the slide, move to the slide that you want to duplicate in Normal View and press Ctrl+D to duplicate the slide.
If you have created multiple Masters for a PowerPoint 2013 presentation, you can select which Master to use for each slide in your presentation. To apply a Master to one or more slides, follow these steps:Select the slide or slides to which you want to apply the alternate Slide Master.The easiest way to do this is to click the slide that you want in the thumbnails area on the left of the screen.
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After you’ve created a table in PowerPoint 2013, you can set its style by using the controls under Table Tools on the Ribbon. The easiest way to format a table is by applying one of PowerPoint’s predefined table styles.
Before you apply a style, however, use the check boxes that appear at the left side of the Design tab under Table Tools on the Ribbon.
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You can use the Edit Theme group in the Slide Master tab on the Ribbon in PowerPoint 2013 to change the theme applied to a Slide Master. Note: All the layouts that belong to a given Master use the same theme. So, it doesn’t matter whether the Slide Master itself or one of its layouts is selected when you change the theme; either way, the entire Slide Master is changed.
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Whenever you have more than one object on a PowerPoint 2013 slide, the potential exists for objects to overlap one another. Like most drawing programs, PowerPoint handles this problem by layering objects like a stack of plates. The first object that you draw is at the bottom of the stack; the second object is on top of the first; the third is atop the second object; and so on.
The Customize group of the PowerPoint 2013 Design ribbon tab includes a Slide Size control that lets you change the size of the slide from standard to widescreen. You should use widescreen only if you plan on showing the presentation on a projector that displays in widescreen format.
Besides standard and widescreen formats, you can also click the Slide Size button and then choose Customize Slide Size.
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A chart style is a predefined combination of formatting elements such as colors and shape effects. For PowerPoint 2013, Microsoft provides a large assortment of chart styles to choose from.
To change the style for a chart, follow these steps:Click the chart to select it.The Ribbon expands to include the three Chart Tools tabs.
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A chart layout is a predefined combination of chart elements such as legends, titles, and so on. You can easily change the layout of your charts in PowerPoint 2013. Microsoft studied thousands of charts and talked to chart experts to come up with galleries of the most common layouts for each chart type.
To change the layout for a chart, follow these steps:Click the chart to select it.
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PowerPoint 2013 enables you to create 14 basic types of charts. Each type conveys information with a different emphasis. Sales data plotted in a column chart might emphasize the relative performance of different regions, for example, and the same data plotted as a line chart might emphasize an increase or decrease in sales over time.
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The theme that’s applied to your PowerPoint 2013 presentation determines the basic look of the presentation’s text. However, you’ll often want to change that look, sometimes subtly and sometimes dramatically. You can control the most commonly used font settings by using the Font group in the Home tab on the Ribbon.
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The Handout and Notes Masters in PowerPoint 2013 contain formatting information that’s applied automatically to your presentation. Follow these simple steps to change the Handout Master:Choose View→Master Views→Handout Master or hold down the Shift key while clicking the Slide Sorter View button.The Handout Master rears its ugly head.
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Notes pages in PowerPoint 2013 consist of a reduced image of the slide, plus any notes that you type to go along with the slide. When printed, notes pages are formatted according to the Notes Master. To change the Notes Master, follow these steps:Choose View→Master Views→Notes Master.The Notes Master comes to life.
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After you’ve created a SmartArt diagram in PowerPoint 2013, you can adjust its appearance in many ways. The easiest is to change the SmartArt Style that’s applied to the diagram. A SmartArt Style is simply a collection of formatting elements such as colors and shape effects that are assigned to the various elements of a SmartArt diagram.
The Compare feature in PowerPoint 2013 lets you compare the differences between two versions of a presentation and accept or reject the differences. This feature is useful if you’ve sent a copy of the presentation to a reviewer and you want to selectively incorporate the reviewer’s changes.
Using the Compare feature is easy.
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PowerPoint 2013 includes a Compress Pictures command that can eliminate the extraneous detail in your images and thereby reduce the size of your presentation files. To save even more space, the Compress Pictures command also removes any parts of your pictures that have been cropped.
You can use this command to compress just a single picture or to compress all the pictures in your presentation at once.
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PDF, which stands for Portable Document Format, is a popular format for interchanging files. You can easily convert a PowerPoint 2013 presentation to PDF format by following these steps:Choose File→Export→Create PDF/XPS Document. Click the Create PDF/XPS button.This brings up the Publish as PDF or XPS dialog box.
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Most PowerPoint 2013 presentations have at least some slides that include a bulleted list, which is a series of paragraphs accented by special characters lovingly known as bullets. In the old days, you had to add bullets one at a time. Nowadays, PowerPoint comes with a semi-automatic bullet shooter that is illegal in 27 states.
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Previous versions of PowerPoint included a feature called WordArt that let you insert special objects that could incorporate fancy text effects, such as gradient fills or curved paths. For PowerPoint 2013, Microsoft has integrated WordArt into PowerPoint, so that you can apply WordArt formatting to any bit of text in your presentation just by highlighting the text and applying the WordArt formats.
One type of diagram that people often want to create with PowerPoint 2013 is a flowchart. Although SmartArt doesn’t have an option for creating flowcharts, you can easily create flowcharts by using PowerPoint’s AutoShapes.
To create a flowchart, follow these basic steps:Draw each flowchart shape by using basic shape objects.
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A group is a collection of objects that PowerPoint 2013 treats as though they were one object. Using groups properly is one key to putting simple shapes together to make complex pictures without becoming so frustrated that you have to join a therapy group. (“Hello, my name is Doug, and PowerPoint drives me crazy.
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If you want your PowerPoint 2013 slide to include a numbered list, use the Numbering button, which appears next to the Bullets button on the Home tab. When you click the Numbering button, PowerPoint adds simple numbers to the selected paragraphs.
If you want to change the numbering format, click the arrow next to the Numbering button to display a list of number style choices.
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Organization charts are an essential part of many presentations. The hierarchical SmartArt diagrams in PowerPoint 2013 are ideal for creating organization charts. You can create diagrams that show bosses, subordinates, co-workers, and assistants. You can easily rearrange the chain of command, add new boxes or delete boxes, and apply fancy 3-D effects.
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If you don’t like any color schemes that come with PowerPoint 2013's built-in themes, you can create your own color scheme. Begin by selecting a color scheme that’s close to the one you want to use.
Be warned that after you deviate from the preselected color scheme combinations, you’d better have some color sense.
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The Custom Shows feature in PowerPoint 2013 lets you create several similar slide shows stored in a single presentation file. For example, suppose that you’re asked to give presentations about company benefits to management and non-management staff. You can create a presentation containing slides for all the company benefits and then create a custom show containing only those slides describing benefits that are available to non-management staff.
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Hyperlinks in PowerPoint 2013 are not limited to slides in the current presentation. Hyperlinks can lead to other presentations. When you use this kind of hyperlink, a person viewing the slide show clicks the hyperlink, and PowerPoint automatically loads the indicated presentation. The hyperlink can lead to the first slide in the presentation, or it can lead to a specific slide within the presentation.
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In PowerPoint 2013, a hyperlink is simply a bit of text or a graphic image that you can click when viewing a slide to summon another slide, another presentation, or perhaps some other type of document, such as a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet. The hyperlink may also lead to a page on the World Wide Web.
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Grouping action buttons into a navigation toolbar makes a PowerPoint 2013 slide show easy to navigate. You can add a set of navigation buttons to the bottom of your Slide Master. To create a navigation toolbar that appears on every slide, follow these steps:Switch to Slide Master View.From the View tab on the Ribbon, click the Slide Master button in the Master Views group.
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Microsoft has endowed PowerPoint 2013 with the capability to have more than one Slide Master. This feature lets you set up two or more Slide Masters and then choose which Master you want to use for each slide in your presentation.
To add a new Master to a presentation, follow these steps:Switch to Slide Master View.
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A transition is how PowerPoint 2013 gets from one slide to the next during an onscreen slide show. The normal way to segue from slide to slide is simply cutting to the new slide — effective, yes, but also boring. PowerPoint enables you to assign any of the more than 50 different special effects to each slide transition.
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The easiest way to create a SmartArt diagram in PowerPoint 2013 is to create a new slide and enter the bullet list as if you were going to display the list as normal text and then convert the text to SmartArt. Just follow these steps:Create a new slide with the Title and Content layout.Type your bullet list. Use one or two levels of bullets, but try to keep the list as short and concise as you can.
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Wouldn’t it be great if you could easily combine the slides from a PowerPoint 2013 presentation with a video of you presenting it? Then anyone can watch the presentation later, when you can’t be there. Good news! Beginning with PowerPoint 2013, you can!
In fact, creating a video version of your presentation couldn’t be much easier.
Sometimes you want to cut off the edges of a picture so that you can include just part of the picture in your PowerPoint 2013 presentation. For example, you might have a picture of two people, only one of whom you like. You can use PowerPoint’s cropping feature to cut off the other person. (Note that you can crop bitmap images, but not vector pictures.
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PowerPoint 2013 is a presentation program designed to work with a projector to display presentations that will bedazzle your audience members and instantly sway them to your point of view. You might want to display it to your computer screen first, though, to catch any mistakes or rough spots.
When your masterpiece is ready, you can show it on the screen.
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One of the most useful shapes in the PowerPoint 2013 Shapes gallery is the Freeform Shape tool. It’s designed to create polygons, but with a twist: Not all the sides have to be straight lines. The Freeform Shape tool lets you build a shape whose sides are a mixture of straight lines and free-form curves.
Follow these steps to create a polygon or free-form shape:Select the Freeform shape from the Shapes gallery.
Rectangles and circles aren’t the only two shapes that PowerPoint 2013 can draw automatically. The Shapes gallery includes many other types of shapes you can draw, such as pentagons, stars, and flowchart symbols.
The following steps explain how to draw a shape:Click the Shapes button in the Illustrations group of the Insert tab.
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To draw an object on a PowerPoint 2013 slide, first call up the Insert tab on the Ribbon. Then click the Shapes button (located in the Illustrations group) to reveal a gallery of shapes you can choose from. Finally, select the shape you want to draw from the Shapes gallery.
Keep these pointers to keep in mind:
Choosing a location: Before you draw an object, move to the slide on which you want to draw the object.
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A useful drawing tool in PowerPoint 2013 is the Curve Shape tool, which lets you draw curved lines or shapes. Here’s the procedure for drawing a curved line or shape:Select the Curve shape tool from the Shapes gallery.You can find the Shapes gallery in the Shapes group on the Insert tab. When you select this tool, the cursor changes to a cross-hair pointer.
PowerPoint 2013 enables you to embellish a chart in many ways: You can add titles, labels, legends, and who knows what else. The easiest way to add these elements is by selecting a chart layout. However, you can create your own unique chart layout by adding these elements individually.
To do that, select the chart and then click the Chart Elements button that appears next to the chart.
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The Find command can find text buried in any text object on any slide. You know that buried somewhere in that 60-slide PowerPoint 2013 presentation about Configurable Snarfblats is a slide that lists the options available on the Vertical Snarfblat, but where is it? This sounds like a job for the PowerPoint Find command!
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To flip an object means to create a mirror image of it. To rotate an object means to turn it about its center. PowerPoint 2013 lets you flip objects horizontally or vertically, rotate objects in 90-degree increments, or freely rotate an object to any angle.
Rotation works for text boxes and Shape text. Therefore, you can use rotation to create vertical text or text skewed to any angle you want.
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Slide Masters in PowerPoint 2013 enable you to add background objects that appear on every slide in your presentation. You can, however, hide the background objects for selected slides. You can also change the background color or effect used for an individual slide. These steps show you how:
Display the slide that you want to show with a plain background.
You can create some pretty cool-looking and complicated equations by using PowerPoint 2013’s handy-dandy Equation feature. You wouldn’t even consider using ordinary text to try to create these equations, but they take only a few minutes to create with the Equation tool.
To add an equation to a slide, follow these steps:Click the Insert tab of the Ribbon.
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Whether you buy PowerPoint 2013 by itself or get it as a part of Microsoft Office, you also get access to an online collection of thousands of clip art pictures that you can drop directly into your presentations. The following steps explain how to insert picture art into your presentation:Move to the slide on which you want to plaster the picture.
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If you happen to already have an image file on your computer that you want to insert into a slide presentation, PowerPoint 2013 lets you insert the file. These steps show you how:Move to the slide on which you want to splash a picture and open the Insert tab on the Ribbon.Select the slide that you want to modify in the gallery.
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WordArt appears on the Insert tab on the Ribbon in PowerPoint 2013, which provides a convenient way to insert a text box with text that is already formatted with WordArt formatting.
To insert WordArt, follow these steps:Move to the slide on which you want to insert WordArt. Click the Insert tab on the Ribbon and then click the WordArt button in the Text group.
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You can configure a sound object to play automatically whenever you display a PowerPoint 2013 slide, or you can set it up so that it will play only when you click the sound object’s icon. Note that if you want the sound to play automatically and the sound is a WAV file, it’s easier to add it to the slide transition than to add it as a separate object.
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Nothing looks more amateurish than objects dropped randomly on a PowerPoint 2013 slide with no apparent concern for how they line up with each other. The Drawing Tools tab includes an Align button that brings up a menu with the following commands:
Align Left
Align Center
Align Right
Align Top
Align Middle
Align Bottom
Distribute Horizontally
Distribute Vertically
The first three commands (Align Left, Center, and Right) align items horizontally; the next three commands (Align Top, Middle, and Bottom) align items vertically.
One cute little animation you can do in PowerPoint 2013 is to make text — especially a short heading — jiggle. Not a lot, but just a little. The effect works best if the text has a funny typeface, such as Cosmic or Jokerman.
By using a very small motion path and setting the timing options to repeat until the end of the slide, you can make the text jiggle just a little bit the entire time the slide is onscreen:Type the text that you want to jiggle and use the Font drop-down list to choose an appropriately silly typeface.
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If you don’t like the layout of your slides in your PowerPoint 2013 presentation, call up the Slide Master and do something about it, as shown in these steps:Open Slide Master View by opening the View tab on the Ribbon and then clicking the Slide Master button, found in the Master Views group.Alternatively, you can hold down the Shift key and then click the Normal View button near the bottom right of the screen.
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Because PowerPoint 2013 chooses an arbitrary position on the slide to insert pictures, you undoubtedly want to move the clip art to a more convenient location. You probably also want to change the size of the picture if it’s too big or too small for your slide.
Follow these steps to force your inserted clip art into full compliance:Click the picture and drag it wherever you want.
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Often, you may need to share a PowerPoint 2013presentation with someone who doesn’t own a copy of PowerPoint. Fortunately, PowerPoint includes a Package for CD command that creates a CD with the presentation and a special program called the PowerPoint Viewer that can display the presentation on a computer that doesn’t have PowerPoint installed.
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If the data you want to chart in PowerPoint 2013 already exists in an Excel workbook, the easiest way to chart it in PowerPoint is to first create the chart in Excel. Then copy the chart to the clipboard, switch over to PowerPoint, and paste the chart to the appropriate slide. When you do so, the chart appears in PowerPoint exactly as it did in Excel.
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PowerPoint 2013 offers the capability to remove the background from a picture. For example, you can crop out a single element, such as your dog's head, and have it float on the slide.
To accomplish this bit of photo-editing magic, follow these steps:Double-click the picture whose background you want to remove.
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You can use the handy Replace command in PowerPoint 2013 to change all occurrences of a word to phrase. Suppose that the Rent-a-Nerd company decides to switch to athletic consulting, so it wants to change the name of its company to Rent-a-Jock. Easy. Just use the Replace command to change all occurrences of the word Nerd to Jock.
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If you’ve played around with your Masters in PowerPoint 2013 too much, you may inadvertently delete a layout placeholder that you wish you could get back. For example, suppose that you delete the footer placeholder from a Master and now you want it back. No problem! Just follow these steps:Switch to Slide Master View.
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If you’re lucky enough to work at a company that uses SharePoint, you have several additional PowerPoint 2013 features at your disposal. One of the most useful is the capability to create and use slide libraries, which are special types of document folders that store individual slides, not whole documents. When you’ve saved slides in a slide library, you can easily insert them into a presentation.
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PowerPoint 2013 enables you to set tab stops to control the placement of text within a text object. For most presentations, you don’t have to fuss with tabs. Each paragraph is indented according to its level in the outline, and the template that you use to create the presentation presets the amount of indentation for each outline level.
You can set various options for playing video files in PowerPoint 2013 via the Video Tools Playback tab on the Ribbon. As you can see, this tab contains several controls that let you edit the way the sound file is played.
Control when a video is played
By default, videos play when you click the Play button that appears beneath the video frame.
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Microsoft has integrated cloud computing into PowerPoint 2013 by providing its own dedicated cloud storage resource, called SkyDrive, and designating it as one of the primary places you can store your PowerPoint presentations. When you install Office 2013, you are given the opportunity to create a free SkyDrive account that offers up to 7GB of free cloud storage, with the capability to purchase additional storage.
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You can easily share a PowerPoint 2013 presentation with a friend or colleague by sending an invitation via e-mail. The invitation e-mail will include a link that will open the presentation in a web-based version of PowerPoint called the PowerPoint Web App.
From the PowerPoint Web App, the user can view the presentation.
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PowerPoint 2013 includes a new online presentation feature that makes it ridiculously easy to share your presentation with other people remotely over the Internet. To use it, simply follow these steps:Click the Present Online button in the Slide Show Ribbon tab.Doing this brings up the Present Online dialog box.
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If you prefer to ignore the constant nagging by PowerPoint 2013 about your spelling, you can always check your spelling the old-fashioned way: by running the spell checker after you finish your document. The spell checker works its way through your entire presentation, looking up every word in its massive list of correctly spelled words and bringing any misspelled words to your attention.
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Slide libraries, a new feature with PowerPoint 2013 are special types of document folders that store individual slides, not whole documents. To incorporate a slide from a SharePoint slide library into a presentation, just follow these steps:Open the presentation you want to copy slides intoDo not open the presentation from which you want to steal the slides.
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Stealing slides from another PowerPoint 2013 presentation isn’t a serious crime. In fact, Microsoft provides a special command on the Insert tab on the Ribbon to let you do it. Here are the steps:Open the presentation you want to copy slides into.Do not open the one you want to steal the slides from yet.
Click the Home tab on the Ribbon and then click the New Slide button and choose Reuse Slides.
The center section of the Drawing Tools tab in PowerPoint 2013 is called Shape Styles. It lets you control various stylistic features of your shapes. For example, you can set a fill color, set the outline, and add effects such as shadows or reflections.
You can set these styles individually, or you can choose one of the preselected shape styles that appears in the Shape Styles group.
Most animations in PowerPoint 2013 are initiated by mouse clicks. However, you can set up several animations to activate automatically — in sequence or all at the same time. To do so, you must use PowerPoint’s Animation Timing features.
The first trick to controlling animation timing is to get the effects listed in the custom animation list in the correct order.
One of the best ways to collaborate on a PowerPoint 2013 presentation is by adding comments to a presentation. A comment is a lot like a sticky note. The beauty of comments is that you can turn them on and off. Therefore, you can view the comments while you’re editing your presentation, and you can turn them off when it’s time for the show.
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To help you create well-ordered slides, PowerPoint 2013 lets you display a grid of evenly spaced lines over the slide. These grids aren’t actually a part of the slide, so your audience won’t see them when you give your presentation. They exist simply to make the task of lining things up a bit easier.
In addition to the grid, PowerPoint also lets you use guides.
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The slide background used in many PowerPoint 2013 templates is a gradient fill rather than a solid color. The color is gradually shaded from top to bottom, which creates an interesting visual effect.
You can create your own custom gradient fill by following these steps:Choose the slide that you want to shade.This step isn’t necessary if you want to apply the shading to all slides in the presentation.
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The Draw Table command in PowerPoint 2013 lets you draw complicated tables onscreen by using a simple set of drawing tools. This command is ideal for creating tables that are not a simple grid of rows and columns, but rather a complex conglomeration in which some cells span more than one row and others span more than one column.
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The Animation Painter in PowerPoint 2013 makes it easy to copy a complete animation effect from one object to another. To use the Animation Painter, follow these steps:Apply an animation effect to one of the objects in your slide show.For example, if you applied a custom animation to a slide’s subtitle, you might also want to apply that same animation to the title.
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The data that provides the numbers plotted in a PowerPoint 2013 chart is stored in an Excel workbook. Depending on how you created the chart, this Excel workbook can either be a separate workbook document or be embedded within your PowerPoint document. Either way, you can work with Excel whenever you want to modify the chart data.
If you had to create every PowerPoint 2013 presentation from scratch, starting with a blank slide, you would probably put PowerPoint back in its box and use it as a bookend. Creating a presentation is easy, but creating one that looks good is a different story. Making a good-looking presentation is tough even for the artistically inclined.
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Sections in PowerPoint 2013 let you divide a presentation into two or more groups of slides. Sections are designed to be used with large presentations that contain a large number of slides that can easily be grouped into logical groupings.
Using sections couldn’t be easier. To create a new section in your presentation, just select the first slide that you want in the new section, switch to the Home tab, click the Section button (found in the Slides group), and then choose Add Section.
PowerPoint 2013 is the most powerful presentation software available to create and edit slide show presentations for work, home, or school. PowerPoint 2013 offers a number of helpful keyboard shortcuts for performing tasks quickly. Here are some shortcuts for common PowerPoint formatting, editing, and file and document tasks.
PowerPoint 2013 includes a nifty little feature called SmartArt, which lets you add several different types of useful diagrams to your slides. With SmartArt, you can create List, Process, Cycle, Hierarchy, Relationship, Matrix, Pyramid, and Picture diagrams. And each of these basic diagram types has multiple variations.
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An easy way to share a PowerPoint 2013 presentation with colleagues is to simply e-mail them a copy of the presentation. PowerPoint includes a built-in feature for doing that. Here are the steps:Open the presentation that you want to send out for review.If the presentation is already open, choose File→Save to save any changes you made since you opened it.
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If you're ready to format text in PowerPoint 2013, this table gets you on the road toward ooohs and aaahs of doing so.. If you use PowerPoint 2013 templates as the basis for your presentations, your text is already formatted acceptably. To really pull out the pyrotechnic stops, however, you have to know a few basic formatting tricks.
And so it came to pass that these ten PowerPoint 2013 commandments were passed down from generation to generation. Obey these commandments and it shall go well with you, with your computer, and yea even with your projector.
I. Thou shalt frequently saveth thy work
Every two or three minutes, press Ctrl+S. It takes only a second to save your file, and you never know when you’ll be the victim of a rotating power outage (even if you don’t live in California).
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The following is a list of a few random tips and pointers that will help you produce readable slides in PowerPoint 2013. Your primary concern is that your slides are readable and understandable for everyone who will be viewing them.
Try reading the slide from the back of the room
The number-one rule of creating readable slides is that everyone in the room must be able to read them.
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If you have an audience for your PowerPoint 2013 presentation, you want them to be entertained — or at least engaged. Nothing frightens a public speaker more than the prospect of the audience falling asleep during the speech. Here are some things you can do to prevent that from happening. (Yawn.)
Don’t forget your purpose
Too many presenters ramble on and on with no clear sense of purpose.
Besides slide transitions, the most common type of animation in PowerPoint 2013 is adding entrance and exit effects to the text that appears on the slide. This effect is especially useful for bullet lists because it lets you display the list one item at a time.
You can have each item appear out of nowhere, drop from the top of the screen, march in from the left or right, or do a back somersault followed by two cartwheels and a double-twist flip (talc, please!
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Don’t worry — when you print a PowerPoint 2013 presentation, no one’s waiting to ambush you with annoying one-liners like that guy who used to be on Saturday Night Live. The Print command. The Printmeister. Big presentation comin’ up. Printin’ some slides. The Printorama. The Mentor of de Printor. Captain Toner of the Good Ship Laseroo.
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When you switch to Slide Master View in PowerPoint 2013, an entirely new tab appears on the Ribbon. This new tab is appropriately called Slide Master.
Here’s a quick overview of each group on this tab and the controls found in them:
Edit Master: The controls in this group let you edit the Slide Master. You can use the Insert Slide Master button to create a new Slide Master, or you can use the Insert Layout button to add a new layout to an existing Master.
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PowerPoint 2013 is designed to create slides that are presented directly on a screen rather than printed out. The screen can be your computer’s own monitor, a projector, or an external monitor, such as a giant-screen television. In most cases, the default settings for showing a presentation are adequate. However, in some cases, you may want to take control and run the slide show yourself.
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If you want to add recurring text — or some clever illustration — to each slide within your PowerPoint 2013 presentation, look to Slide Master for simple steps to success. Just follow this procedure:
Call up the Slide Master (by clicking Slide Master in the Presentation Views group of the Views tab) if it’s not displayed already.
Like any good Windows program, PowerPoint uses the standard Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, Find, and Replace commands. These commands work on text that you’ve selected, or if you’ve selected an entire object, the commands work on the object itself. In other words, you can use these commands with bits of text or with entire objects.
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