PowerPoint 2016 For Dummies
Overview
Get up and running with PowerPoint 2016 Does using PowerPoint make you want to pull your hair out? PowerPoint 2016 For Dummies takes the pain out of working with PowerPoint, offering plain-English explanations of everything you need to know to get up and running with the latest version of the software. With full-color illustrations and step-by-step instructions, it shows you how to create and edit slides, import data from other applications, collaborate with other users in the Cloud, add charts, clip art, sound, and video—and so much more. PowerPoint is the world's de facto presentation software, used and supported in over 60 countries. The time has never been better to take advantage of the latest software to make killer PowerPoint presentations. From adding special effects to your presentations to working with master slides and templates, this hands-on friendly guide is the fast and easy way to make PowerPoint work for you.
- Presented in full color to better illustrate the powerful presentation features of the software
- Helps you take advantage of all of PowerPoint's new features
- Available in conjunction with the release of the next version of Microsoft Office
- Written by bestselling author Doug Lowe
If you're a new or inexperienced PowerPoint user who spends more time trying to figure out how the software works than you do actually working on your presentations, PowerPoint 2016 For Dummies is just what you need to gain back hours of your work day and make professional, impactful presentations.
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About The Author
Doug Lowe is a veteran author with more than 40 For Dummies books to his credit, including titles on everything from Microsoft Office productivity with PowerPoint to networking to programming in ASP.NET.
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powerpoint 2016 for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
PowerPoint 2016 is the most powerful presentation software available to create and edit slide show presentations for work, home, or school. PowerPoint 2016 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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PowerPoint
The actual number of things that can go wrong when working with PowerPoint 2016 is probably closer to 10,000, but the following ten 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.
PowerPoint
In PowerPoint 2016, 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 web.Adding a hyperlink to a presentation is easy.
PowerPoint
A comment in PowerPoint 2016 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.
PowerPoint
Notes are like an adjunct attachment to your PowerPoint 2016 slides. They don't appear on the slides themselves but are displayed separately. Each slide in your presentation has its own page of notes.
Notes are usually hidden at the bottom of the screen in a tiny Notes pane that's just large enough to display a line or two of text.
PowerPoint
You can add several types of objects to the Slide Master in PowerPoint 2016. 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.
PowerPoint
One of the cool things about PowerPoint 2016 is that it lets you create slides that contain not only text and pictures but also sounds. You can configure the sound object to play automatically whenever you display the slide, or you can set it up so that it will play only when you click the sound object's icon.
PowerPoint
PowerPoint 2016 enables you to draw attention to your pictures by adding stylistic features such as borders, shadows, and reflections. The following figure shows a slide with several copies of a picture, each with a different style applied.
Pictures with style.
To add a style effect to a picture, select the picture and open the Picture Tools tab on the Ribbon.
PowerPoint
Video doesn't just belong on YouTube. You can easily add video clips to your PowerPoint 2016 presentations and play them at will. Adding a movie motion clip to a 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).
PowerPoint
To add a chart to your PowerPoint 2016 presentation, you can add a chart to an existing slide by using the Insert tab to insert a chart into any slide. Follow 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.
PowerPoint
When you first create a presentation in PowerPoint 2016, it has just one slide, which is useful only for the shortest presentations. Fortunately, PowerPoint gives you about 50 ways to add new slides to your presentation. You see only three of them here:
On the Home tab, click the New Slide button in the Slides group, as shown in the following figure.
PowerPoint
With PowerPoint 2016, adding a chart to your presentation is easy. The following procedure shows you how to insert a new slide that contains a chart:
Move to the slide that you want the new slide to follow.
Click the Home tab and then click the New Slide button in the Slides group.
This action reveals a list of slide layouts.
PowerPoint
Like the Slide Master, the Handout and Notes Masters in PowerPoint 2016 contain formatting information that's applied automatically to your presentation. Here, you find out how you can modify these Masters.
Changing the Handout Master
Follow these simple steps to change the Handout Master:
Choose View→Presentation Views→Handout Master or hold down the Shift key while clicking the Slide Sorter View button.
PowerPoint
The Themes group of the PowerPoint 2016 Design tab lets you select a theme to apply to your slides. PowerPoint 2016 comes with a ton of carefully crafted themes that give a professional look to your presentations. If you're somewhat artsy, you can design your own themes, as well.
A theme is a set of design elements that are applied to one or more slides in a presentation.
PowerPoint
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 2016, 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.
PowerPoint
In PowerPoint 2016 you can use the Create Handouts command 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 here.
PowerPoint
The easiest way to create a SmartArt diagram in PowerPoint 2016 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.
PowerPoint
The hierarchical SmartArt diagrams are ideal for creating organization charts in PowerPoint 2016. Organization charts — you know, those box-and-line charts that show who reports to whom, where the buck stops, and who got the lateral arabesque — are an essential part of many presentations.
You can create diagrams that show bosses, subordinates, co-workers, and assistants.
PowerPoint
To draw an object on a PowerPoint 2016 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, as shown here. Finally, select the shape you want to draw from the Shapes gallery.
The Shapes gallery.
Here are some 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.
PowerPoint
When you select a text object for editing, PowerPoint 2016 transforms into a baby word processor so you can edit the text. Note that PowerPoint automatically wraps text so that you don't have to press Enter at the end of every line. Press Enter only when you want to begin a new paragraph.
Text in a PowerPoint presentation is usually formatted with a bullet character at the beginning of each paragraph.
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PDF, which stands for Portable Document Format, is a popular format for interchanging files. You can easily convert a PowerPoint 2016 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 dialog box shown here.
Creating a PDF document.
PowerPoint
You can apply WordArt formatting to any bit of text in PowerPoint 2016. WordArt also appears on the Insert tab on the Ribbon, 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:On 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.
PowerPoint
Whether you buy PowerPoint 2016 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.
PowerPoint
If you don't like the layout of your slides in a PowerPoint 2016 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 Presentation Views group.
Alternatively, you can hold down the Shift key and then click the Normal View button near the bottom right of the screen.
PowerPoint
If the data you want to chart already exists in an Excel workbook, the easiest way to chart it in PowerPoint 2016 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.
PowerPoint
Normal View in PowerPoint 2016 is the view that you normally work in to edit your slides, move things around, add text or graphics, and so on. However, Normal View has one serious limitation: It doesn't give you a big picture of your presentation.
You can see the details of only one slide at a time, and the Slide Preview pane lets you see snapshots of only a few slides.
PowerPoint
If you're lucky enough to work at a company that uses SharePoint, you have several additional PowerPoint 2016 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.
The PowerPoint 2016 printing features are useful, but PowerPoint is really 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.
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Microsoft has integrated cloud computing into PowerPoint 2016 by providing its own dedicated cloud storage resource, called OneDrive, and designating it as one of the primary places you can store your PowerPoint presentations. (OneDrive used to be called SkyDrive, but Microsoft had to change the name because of a trademark lawsuit.
PowerPoint
PowerPoint 2016 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 (shown in the margin).Doing this brings up the Present Online dialog box.
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A transition is how PowerPoint 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.
PowerPoint
Each PowerPoint 2016 theme includes a built-in color scheme, which consists of sets of colors chosen by color professionals. Microsoft paid these people enormous sums of money to debate the merits of using mauve text on a teal background. You can use these professionally designed color schemes, or you can create your own if you think that you have a better eye than the Microsoft-hired color guns.
PowerPoint
The Clipboard task pane in PowerPoint 2016 lets you gather up to 24 items of text or graphics from any Office program and then selectively paste them into your presentation. To summon the Clipboard task pane, click the dialog box launcher in the Home tab on the Ribbon at the bottom right of the Clipboard group.
PowerPoint
PowerPoint 2016, like the other applications in the Office 2016 suite, offers a new "Tell Me" feature. In the case of PowerPoint, it's called Tell Me What to Do.
The Ribbon in PowerPoint 2016 contains scores of buttons that enable you to use any of PowerPoint's many features for creating and formatting slides.
PowerPoint
Templates in PowerPoint 2016 jump-start the process of creating good-looking presentations. If you had to create every presentation from scratch, starting with a blank slide, you would probably put PowerPoint 2016 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.
Like any good Windows program, PowerPoint 2016 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.
There are a lot of things you can do with PowerPoint 2016, 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.
PowerPoint 2016 is the most powerful presentation software available to create and edit slide show presentations for work, home, or school. PowerPoint 2016 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.
If you’re ready to format text in PowerPoint 2016, this table gets you on the road toward ooohs and aaahs of doing so. If you use PowerPoint 2016 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.
PowerPoint 2016 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 TV. 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.
PowerPoint
During an onscreen PowerPoint 2016 slide show, you can use the keyboard and mouse to control your presentation. The following tables list the keys and clicks that you can use.
Keyboard Tricks for Your Slide Show
To Do This
Press Any of These Keys
Display next slide
Enter, spacebar, Page Down, or N
Display preceding slide
Backspace, Page Up, or P
Display first slide
1+Enter
Display specific slide
Slide number+Enter
Toggle screen black
B or .
If you've never attempted to add a chart to a slide in PowerPoint 2016, 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.
If you have a projector or second monitor connected to your computer, PowerPoint 2016 will show the presentation's slides on the projector or second monitor and switch the primary monitor to Presenter View. The figure shows Presenter View in action.
Presenter View.
The following paragraphs describe the various features that are available in Presenter View:
Current slide: The current slide is displayed in the center-left portion of the screen.
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