The PowerPoint Interface
PowerPoint is a fairly typical Windows-based program in many
ways. It contains the same basic elements that you expect to see: title bar,
menu bar, window controls, and so on. And like all Office 2003 applications, it
has a task pane that provides shortcuts for
common activities. Here's a quick rundown of some basic elements, which are
shown in Figure:
Toolbars: The Standard and Formatting toolbars appear at the top, and the Drawing toolbar at the bottom, by default. Other toolbars come and go automatically as needed, and they can also be displayed or hidden by right-clicking any visible toolbar and choosing from the menu that appears.
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Task pane: This pane pops up on its own for certain activities as well as when PowerPoint starts. You can also display or hide it manually from the View menu.
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Slide pane: This is where the PowerPoint slide(s) that you are working on appear.
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View buttons: Near the bottom left corner of the screen are some tiny icons for switching back and forth between the various views. (More on views shortly.)
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Tabs: In Normal view (which is shown in Figure 1-1), the left-hand pane has two tabs: Outline and Slides. (In this book I refer to that pane as the Outline/Slides pane.) Each shows a different view of the list of slides in the presentation.
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If you have only a single row of toolbar buttons at the top
of your screen, the Standard and Formatting toolbars are probably all bunched up
on a single row together. That's the default for PowerPoint (unfortunately, in
my opinion). To place them on two separate rows, choose Tools⇨Customize, and on the Options tab, mark the Show Standard
and Formatting toolbars on two rows checkbox. Another default setting you will
probably want to change before going much further is to turn off the
Personalized Menus feature. It's the one that hides some of the menu commands
when you first open menus. To turn that off, choose Tools ⇨ Customize again, and on the Options tab, mark the Always
show full menus checkbox.
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