Chapter 2: PowerPoint Nuts and Bolts
In This Chapter
Starting PowerPoint
Creating a PowerPoint presentation from a template
Saving presentations
Saving presentations for earlier versions of PowerPoint
Opening and closing a presentation
Entering the document-property descriptions
Understanding what XML is
Undoing and repeating actions
The purpose of this chapter is to launch you deep into PowerPoint Land. This chapter describes tasks that you do almost every time you run the program. It explains how to start PowerPoint and create, save, open, and close presentations. You find out what document properties are and what PowerPoint’s new XML format is all about. Throughout this chapter are tips, tricks, and shortcuts for making basic PowerPoint tasks go more smoothly. Finally, I offer some shortcut commands that you will find extremely useful.
Starting PowerPoint
Unless you start the PowerPoint program, you can’t construct PowerPoint presentations. Many have tried to construct presentations from mud and paper-mâché without starting PowerPoint first, but all have failed. Here are the various and sundry ways to start PowerPoint:
The old-fashioned way: Click the Start button and choose All Programs⇒Microsoft Office⇒Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007.
The Start menu: Click Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 on the Start menu, as shown in Figure 2-1. The Start menu is the menu you see when you click the Start button. By placing a program’s name on the Start menu, you can open the program simply by clicking the Start button and then clicking the program’s name. To place PowerPoint 2007 on the Start menu:
1. Click the Start button and choose All Programs ⇒Microsoft Office.
2. Move the pointer over Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 on the submenu, but don’t click to select the program’s name.
3. Right-click Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 on the submenu and choose Pin to Start Menu on the pop-up menu that appears when you right-click.
To remove a program’s name from the Start menu, right-click the name and choose Remove from This List.
|
Figure 2-1: Three of several ways to start PowerPoint. |
|
Desktop shortcut icon: Double-click the Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 shortcut icon, as shown in Figure 2-1. A shortcut icon is an icon you can click to do something in a hurry. By creating a PowerPoint shortcut icon on the Windows desktop, you can double-click the icon and start PowerPoint in a hurry. To place a PowerPoint shortcut icon on the desktop:
1. Click the Start button and choose All Programs ⇒Microsoft Office.
2. Move the pointer over Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 on the submenu, but don’t click the program’s name.
3. Right-click Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 on the submenu and choose Send To ⇒Desktop (Create Shortcut) on the pop-up menu that appears.
Quick Launch toolbar: Click the PowerPoint 2007 shortcut icon on the Quick Launch toolbar, as shown in Figure 2-1. The Quick Launch toolbar appears on the Windows taskbar and is easy to find. Wherever your work takes you, you can see the Quick Launch toolbar and click its shortcut icons to start programs. Create a PowerPoint shortcut icon and follow these steps to place a copy of it on the Quick Launch toolbar:
1. Click the shortcut icon on the desktop to select it.
2. Hold down the Ctrl key.
3. Drag the shortcut icon onto the Quick Launch toolbar.
To change an icon’s position on the Quick Launch toolbar, drag it to the left or the right. To remove an icon, right-click it and choose Delete.
Yet another way to start PowerPoint is to make the program start automatically whenever you turn on your computer. If you’re the president of the PowerPoint Fan Club and you have to run PowerPoint each time your computer starts, create a PowerPoint shortcut icon and copy it into this folder if your computer runs Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Start Menu\Programs\ Startup
Copy the shortcut icon into this folder if your computer runs Windows Vista:
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\ Start Menu\Programs\Startup
Creating a New Presentation
When you start PowerPoint, the program creates a new, blank presentation just for you. You can make this bare-bones presentation the starting point for constructing your presentation, or you can get a more sophisticated, fully realized layout and design by starting with a template.
A template is a starter file for creating a presentation. Each presentation is founded on a template. Each presentation inherits its colors, designs, fonts, and slide layouts from the template on which it was founded (the blank presentation gets its design from a simple, bare-bones template). When you decide between creating a presentation from the blank presentation or a template, you’re really deciding what your presentation will look like.
Figure 2-2 shows a slide created from the blank presentation (left) and a slide created from a template (right). Notice that the blank-presentation slide isn’t really “blank.” As Book II, Chapter 3 explains, you can redesign a blank presentation very easily. You can choose a theme, a background color for the slides, and fonts, and you can fashion your own slide layouts. When you create a presentation with a template, all design decisions are made for you. You get ready-made background colors, fonts, and slide layouts.
|
Figure 2-2: A slide made from the blank presentation (left) and a template (right). |
|
Deciding between the blank presentation and a template
Templates are a mixed blessing. They’re designed by artists and they look very good. Some templates come with boilerplate text — already written material that you can recycle into your presentation. However, presentations made from templates are harder to modify. Sometimes the design gets in the way. A loud or intricate background may overwhelm the diagram or chart you want to put on a slide. For example, the clip-art image on the blank- presentation slide in Figure 2-2 would look out of place on the template slide because the image and the template background are incompatible.
Starting from the blank presentation means doing the design work on your own, although, as I mentioned earlier, designing presentations isn’t as hard as most people think because you can choose ready-made themes and background styles for a blank presentation. Sometimes simpler is better. By starting from a blank presentation, you aren’t locked into someone else’s design choices, and you have more creative opportunities.
The difference between a template and the blank presentation is similar to the difference between a tract house and a house you build on your own. Buying the tract house is less work. You can move right in. But if you build a custom house, you can build it to your taste and specifications, and it’s unique. No one has a house quite like yours. Your house looks different from the neighbors’ houses.
Creating a blank presentation
PowerPoint shows you a blank presentation each time you open the program. You can save this presentation and start to work or, if you’re working on another presentation already and you want to create a new, blank presentation, you can follow these steps to create it:
1. Click the Office button.
2. Choose New on the drop-down list.
You see the New Presentation dialog box, shown in Figure 2-3.
3. Double-click Blank Presentation.
A new presentation appears. You can also create a new blank presentation by pressing Ctrl+N. Try visiting the Design tab and choosing a theme or background style to get a taste of all the things you can do to redesign a presentation.
|
Figure 2-3: The New Presentation dialog box is the starting point for creating a new presentation. |
|
Creating a presentation from a template
The New Presentation dialog box (refer to Figure 2-3) offers many opportunities for finding a suitable template. To open this dialog box, click the Office button and choose New on the drop-down list.
As you employ the following techniques to find a template, remember that you can click the Back or Forward button in the dialog box to retreat and advance during your search. Here are all the ways to search for a template in the New Presentation dialog box:
Use a template on your computer: Click Installed Templates (you’ll find this button in the upper-left corner of the dialog box. Templates that you loaded on your computer when you installed PowerPoint appear in the dialog box. Double-click a template to create a presentation.
Search online at Microsoft: Make sure your computer is connected to the Internet, enter a search term in the Search box, and click the Start Searching button. For example, enter “marketing” to search for templates suitable for presentations about marketing products. Templates appear in the dialog box. Click a template to examine it. Double-click a template to download and use it to create a presentation.
Use a template you created (or downloaded earlier from Microsoft): Double-click the My Templates button. The New Presentation dialog box appears. Select a template and click OK. (Book VII, Chapter 2 explains how to create your own templates.)
Starting from another presentation
If you can use another presentation as the starting point for creating a new presentation, more power to you. With the New from Existing command, you can nab slides from another presentation and make them the foundation for a new one. Follow these steps to commandeer another presentation:
1. Click the Office button and choose New on the drop-down list.
You see the New Presentation dialog box (refer to Figure 2-3).
2. Click the New from Existing button.
The New from Existing Presentation dialog box appears.
3. Locate and select the presentation whose slides and design you covet.
4. Click the Create New button.
I hope you shoplifted that presentation from yourself, not from a convenience store.
Swapping one template for another
Suppose you decide on the blank presentation or a certain template when you create a presentation, but you regret your decision. You want a different template. As long as you already created a presentation with the template you want, you can impose its template design on your presentation. If necessary, create a presentation using the template you want, and then follow these steps to swap another presentation’s template for your presentation’s template:
1. Select the last slide in your presentation.
2. On the Home tab, open the drop-down menu on the New Slide button and choose Reuse Slides.
The Reuse Slides task pane appears.
3. Click the Browse button and choose Browse File on the drop-down list.
You see the Browse dialog box.
4. Locate and select the presentation with the template you want; then click the Open button.
Slides from the presentation appear in the Reuse Slides task pane.
5. Click the Keep Source Formatting check box.
You can find this check box at the bottom of the Reuse Slides task pane.
6. Right-click a slide in the task pane and choose Insert All Slides on the shortcut menu.
All slides from the other presentation arrive in your presentation with their formatting intact.
7. Click the View tab.
8. Click the Slide Master button.
You land in Slide Master view. Book II, Chapter 2 explains what master slides are and how you can use them to format slides.
9. Scroll to the top of the Slides pane, right-click the first slide (the Slide Master), and choose Delete Master on the shortcut menu.
All the slides take on the formatting of the new Slide Master.
10. Click the Close Master View button on the Slide Master tab to leave Slide Master view.
You likely have to delete the slides that arrived along with the new template, but that’s a small price to pay for being able to commandeer an entirely new template.
Saving Your Presentation Files
Soon after you create a new presentation, be sure to save it. And save your presentation from time to time as you work on it as well. Until you save your work, it rests in the computer’s electronic memory (RAM), a precarious location. If a power outage occurs or your computer stalls, you lose all the work you did since the last time you saved your presentation. Make it a habit to save files every ten minutes or so or when you complete an important task.
To save a presentation, do one of the following:
Click the Save button.
Press Ctrl+S.
Click the Office button and choose Save on the drop-down list.
I wish that saving were just a matter of clicking the Save button, but saving your work also entails telling PowerPoint where you prefer to save presentations. It also means saving presentations for use in earlier versions of PowerPoint as necessary, and saving AutoRecovery files. Better read on.
Telling PowerPoint where you like to save presentations
When you attempt to save a presentation for the first time in the Save As dialog box, PowerPoint shows you the contents of the My Documents folder (in Windows XP) or the Document folder (in Windows Vista) on the assumption that you keep most of your presentations in that folder. The My Documents folder is the center of the universe as far as PowerPoint is concerned, but perhaps you keep the majority of your presentations in a different folder. How would you like to see your favorite folder first in the Save As and Open dialog boxes?
To direct PowerPoint to the folder you like best and make that folder’s name appear first in the Save As and Open dialog boxes, follow these steps:
1. Click the Office button and choose PowerPoint Options on the drop-down list.
You see the PowerPoint Options dialog box.
2. Select the Save category.
Figure 2-4 shows the topmost options in this category.
3. In the Default File Location text box, enter the address to the folder where you prefer to keep your presentations.
For example, if you are fond of keeping presentations in the My Stuff folder on the C drive of your computer, enter C:\My Stuff.
4. Click OK.
|
Figure 2-4: The Save options in the PowerPoint Options dialog box. |
|
Saving presentations for use in earlier versions of PowerPoint
Not everyone is a proud owner of Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007. Before you pass along a document to a co-worker who has an earlier version of PowerPoint, save your document so that your co-worker can open it. Presentations are stored in the XML format in PowerPoint 2007 (later in this chapter, “Understanding the New PowerPoint XML Format” explains XML). Unless you save your document for earlier versions of PowerPoint, people who don’t have the latest version can’t open them.
Saving a presentation for use in PowerPoint 97–2003
Follow these steps to save a presentation so that someone with PowerPoint 97, 2000, 2002, or 2003 can open it:
1. Click the Office button.
2. Choose Save As ⇒PowerPoint 97-2003 Format.
You see the Save As dialog box.
3. Enter a new name for the presentation, if necessary.
4. Click the Save button.
Presentations saved in the PowerPoint 97–2003 format have the .ppt, not the .pptx, file extension.
Converting PowerPoint 97–2003 presentations to 2007
When you open a presentation made in an earlier version of PowerPoint, the program switches to compatibility mode. PowerPoint 2007 shuts down features that weren’t a part of earlier versions of PowerPoint to accommodate the presentation. You can tell when PowerPoint is in compatibility mode because the words “compatibility mode” appear in the title bar next to the presentation’s name.
Follow these steps to convert a 97–2003 presentation for use in PowerPoint 2007:
1. Open the presentation file.
2. Click the Office button and choose Convert on the drop-down list.
A dialog box informs you what converting means.
3. Click OK.
Saving presentations for earlier versions of PowerPoint by default
If you’re way ahead of the pack and you always have to save PowerPoint presentations in a different format so that co-workers can open them, make the different format the default format for saving all your presentations. That way, you don’t have to choose a new format whenever you pass off a file to a co-worker.
Follow these steps to change the default format for saving presentations:
1. Click the Office button and choose PowerPoint Options on the drop-down list.
The PowerPoint Options dialog box appears.
2. Select the Save category (refer to Figure 2-4).
3. In the Save Files in This Format drop-down list, choose PowerPoint Presentation 97–2003.
4. Click OK.
Remember that you made PowerPoint 97–2003 the default format for saving presentation files. Someday soon, your co-workers will catch up with you. They will acquire PowerPoint 2007. And when that happens, return to the PowerPoint Options dialog box and choose PowerPoint Presentation in the Save Files in This Format drop-down list.
Saving “AutoRecovery information”
To insure against computer and power failures, PowerPoint saves presentations in the background every 10 minutes. These presentations are saved in AutoRecovery files. After your computer fails, you can try to recover some of the work you lost by getting it from the AutoRecovery file (see the sidebar “When disaster strikes!”).
PowerPoint saves AutoRecovery files every 10 minutes, but if you want the program to save the files more or less frequently, you can change the AutoRecovery setting. “AutoRecovering” taxes a computer’s memory. If your computer is sluggish, consider making AutoRecovery files at intervals longer than 10 minutes; if your computer fails often and you’re worried about losing data, make AutoRecovery files more frequently.
Follow these steps to tell PowerPoint how often to save data in an AutoRecovery file:
1. Click the Office button and choose PowerPoint Options on the drop-down list.
The PowerPoint Options dialog box appears.
2. Click the Save category (refer to Figure 2-4).
3. Enter a Minutes setting in the Save AutoRecovery Information Every xx Minutes box.
4. Click OK.
When disaster strikes!
After your computer fails and you restart PowerPoint, you see the Document Recovery task pane with a list of files that were open when the failure occurred:
AutoSaved files are files that PowerPoint saved as part of its AutoRecovery procedure (see “Saving ‘AutoRecovery information’”).
Original files are files that you saved by clicking the Save button.
The Document Recovery task pane tells you when each file was saved. By studying the time listings, you can tell which version of a presentation — the AutoRecovery file or the file you saved — is most up-to-date.
Open the drop-down list for a presentation and select one of these options:
Open: Opens the presentation so that you can examine it. If you want to keep it, click the Save button.
Save As: Opens the Save As dialog box so that you can save the presentation under a different name. Choose this command to keep a copy of the recovered file on hand in case you need it.
Delete: Deletes the AutoRecovery file (this command is available with AutoRecovery files, not files that you saved on your own).
Show Repairs: Shows repairs made to the file as part of the AutoRecovery procedure.
Opening and Closing Presentations
To get to work on a presentation, you have to open it first. And, of course, you close a presentation when you’re finished working on it and want to carry on normal activities. These pages explain all the intricate details of opening and closing presentations. In these pages, you will find many tips for finding and opening the presentation you want to work on.
Opening a presentation
PowerPoint and Windows offer many shortcuts for opening presentations. To open a presentation, take the standard route — click the Office button and choose Open — or take advantage of the numerous ways to open presentations quickly.
The slow, conventional way to open a presentation
If you can’t open a file by any other means, you have to resort to the Open dialog box:
1. Click the Office button and choose Open on the drop-down list (or press Ctrl+O).
You see the Open dialog box, as shown in Figure 2-5.
2. Locate and select the presentation you want to open.
Very shortly, I show you some tricks for locating a presentation in the Open dialog box.
3. Click the Open button.
Your presentation appears in PowerPoint. You can also double-click a presentation name to open a presentation.
|
Figure 2-5: The Open dialog box in Thumbnails view. |
|
The Open dialog box offers a bunch of different ways to locate a presentation you want to open:
My Recent Documents button: View presentations you recently worked on in the dialog box.
Look In drop-down list: Look for folders or presentations on a different drive, network location, or disk (you can also click the My Computer button). Earlier in this chapter, “Telling PowerPoint where you like to save presentations” explains how to make a folder of your choice appear first in the Look In drop-down list.
Back button: Revisit folders you saw before in the course of your search.
Up One Level button: Move up the folder hierarchy to show the contents of the folder one level above the one you’re looking at.
Views drop-down list: Display folder contents differently (refer to Figure 2-5). In the Thumbnails view and Preview view, you can see the first slide in a presentation. Details view can be helpful when you have trouble finding a file. In Details view, you see how large files are and when they were last edited.
Folders: Double-click a folder to see its contents in the Open dialog box.
Speed techniques for opening presentations
As shown in Figure 2-6, the fastest way to open a presentation is to click the Office button and click the presentation’s name on the Recent Documents list. This list shows the names of the last nine presentations you opened. By moving the pointer over a name, you can see which folder it’s stored in. Click the pin next to a name to make the name remain on the list even if it isn’t one of the last nine presentations you opened (click a second time to “unpin” a name).
Deleting and renaming presentations in the Open dialog box
Deleting and renaming presentations are really the business of the Windows operating system, but you can delete and rename documents one at a time inside the Open dialog box. Within the Open dialog box, select the presentation that needs deleting or renaming and follow these instructions to delete or rename it:
Deleting a presentation: Click the Delete button in the dialog box (or click the Tools button and choose Delete on the pop-up menu, or right-click and choose Delete). Then click Yes in the Confirm File Delete message box.
Renaming a presentation: Click the Tools button and choose Rename on the pop-up menu (or right-click and choose Rename). Then type a new name.
|
Figure 2-6: Choosing a presentation on the Recent Documents list. |
|
Here are other speed techniques for opening presentations:
In Windows Explorer or My Computer: Locate the presentation in one of these file-management programs and double-click its name. You can click the Start button and choose My Documents to open Windows Explorer to the My Documents folder.
Shortcut icon: Create a shortcut icon to a presentation and place the icon on the Windows desktop. In Windows Explorer or the Open dialog box, right-click the presentation’s name and choose Send To⇒Desktop (Create Shortcut). To quickly open the presentation, double-click its shortcut icon on the desktop.
Closing a presentation
Closing a presentation is certainly easier than opening one. To close a presentation, save your file and use one of these techniques:
Click the Office button and choose Close on the drop-down list. The PowerPoint program remains open although the presentation is closed.
Click the Close button, the X in the upper-right corner of the PowerPoint window (or press Alt+F4). Clicking the Close button closes PowerPoint as well as your presentation.
If you try to close a presentation without first saving it, a message box asks whether ditching your presentation is in your best interests, and you get a chance to click Yes in a message box and save your presentation. Sometimes closing a presentation without saving the changes you made to it is worthwhile. If you made a bunch of editorial mistakes and want to start over, you can close the file without saving the changes you made. Next time you open the presentation, you see the version that you had before you made all those mistakes.
Entering the Document Properties
Document properties are a means of describing a presentation. If you manage two dozen or more presentations, you owe it to yourself to record document properties. You can use them later on to identify presentations.
|
Figure 2-7: Enter document properties so that you can identify presentations. |
|
You can read a presentation’s document properties without opening a presentation:
In Windows Explorer, My Computer, or the Open dialog box, right-click a presentation’s name and choose Properties. You see the Properties dialog box, as shown on the right side of Figure 2-7.
In the Open dialog box, switch to Properties view (refer to Figure 2-5). You can do this in Windows XP, but not Windows Vista.
PowerPoint offers a command for erasing document properties. Click the Office button and choose Prepare⇒Inspect Document. In the Document Inspector dialog box, click the Inspect button and then click the Remove All button if you want to remove document properties (see Book VI, Chapter 5 for details).
Understanding the New PowerPoint XML Format
Microsoft adopted XML for PowerPoint 2007 and its other Office programs (except Publisher) to make sharing information between the programs easier. Because files made in the Office 2007 programs are formatted in XML — because they’re written in the same language — data from one Office program can be copied to another without the data’s having to be translated from one binary file format to another. What’s more, files in the XML format are half the size of files written in the old binary formats. And because XML is an open format — programmers know the codes with which the XML is written — people outside Microsoft can write programs that produce XML data for use in Office programs. XML makes it easier for different programs to exchange information.
You can tell whether a PowerPoint, Excel, or Word file is formatted for a 2007 program or an earlier version of the program by glancing at its file extension. PowerPoint, Excel, and Word files have four-letter, not three-letter file extensions, with x (for XML) being the last letter. Table 2-1 lists Office program file extensions.
| Program | Office 2007 | Office 97–2003 |
|---|---|---|
| Access | mdb. or.accdb | .mdb |
| Excel | .xlsx | .xls |
| PowerPoint | .pptx | .ppt |
| Publisher | .pub | .pub |
| Word | .docx | .doc |
You can convert PowerPoint 97–2003 files for use in PowerPoint 2007 (see the sidebar “Converting PowerPoint 97–2003 presentations to 2007,” earlier in this chapter).
Shortcut Commands Worth Knowing
The rest of this chapter takes you on a whirlwind tour of shortcut commands that can save time as you construct PowerPoint presentations. These commands belong in the Hall of Fame. They are Undo, Repeat, and AutoCorrect.
Undoing a mistake
Fortunately for you, all is not lost if you make a big blunder, because PowerPoint has a marvelous little tool called the Undo command. This command “remembers” the previous 20 editorial and formatting changes you made. As long as you catch your error in time, you can “undo” your mistake.
|
Figure 2-8: Fixing a mistake on the Undo drop-down list. |
|
PowerPoint gives you the option of being able to undo more than 20 actions. Click the Office button and choose PowerPoint Options. In the PowerPoint Options dialog box, select the Advanced category. Then enter a number in the Maximum Number of Undos box. Being able to undo numerous actions is nice, of course, but it also taxes your computer’s memory and can make your computer grumpy and sluggish.
Repeating an action — and quicker this time
Entering text quickly with the AutoCorrect command
Book II, Chapter 4 explains how you can use the AutoCorrect command to help correct typing errors, but with a little cunning you can also use it to quickly enter hard-to-type jargon, scientific names, and the like. To open the AutoCorrect dialog box, click the Office button, choose PowerPoint Options, select the Proofing category in the PowerPoint Options dialog box, and then click the AutoCorrect Options button. Select the AutoCorrect tab in the AutoCorrect dialog box, as shown in Figure 2-9.
|
Figure 2-9: With a little cunning, you can use AutoCorrect to enter hard-to-type text. |
|
In the Replace column on the AutoCorrect tab are hundreds of common typing errors and codes that PowerPoint corrects automatically. The program corrects the errors by entering text in the With column whenever you mistakenly type the letters in the Replace column. However, you can also use this dialog box for a secondary purpose to quickly enter text.
To make AutoCorrect work as a means of entering text, you tell PowerPoint to enter the text whenever you type three or four specific characters. In Figure 2-9, for example, PowerPoint is being instructed to insert the words “Cordyceps sinensis” (a mushroom genus) whenever I enter the characters /cs (and press the spacebar). Follow these steps to use AutoCorrect to enter text:
1. Open the AutoCorrect tab of the AutoCorrect dialog box (refer to Figure 2-9).
2. In the Replace text box, enter the three or four characters that will trigger the AutoCorrect mechanism and make it enter your text.
.jpg)
Don’t enter a word, or characters that you might really type someday, in the Replace box. If you do, the AutoCorrect mechanism might kick in when you least expect it. Enter three or four characters that never appear together. And start all AutoCorrect entries with a slash (/). You might forget which characters trigger the AutoText entry or decide to delete your AutoCorrect entry someday. By starting it with a slash, you can find it easily in the AutoCorrect dialog box at the top of the Replace list.
3. In the With text box, enter the hard-to-type name or word(s) that will appear when you enter the Replace text on a slide.
4. Click the Add button.
5. Click OK.
Test your AutoCorrect entry by typing the Replace text you entered in step 2 (which, of course, includes the slash I recommended) and pressing the spacebar (AutoCorrect doesn’t do its work until you press the spacebar).
To delete an AutoCorrect entry, open the AutoCorrect dialog box, select the entry, and click the Delete button.