Ressources Powerpoint

New slide

Before we go on to consider the underlying structure of a PowerPoint presentation, we’ll just look at an individual slide and insert some typical content types.

When you first launch PowerPoint you should see a new, blank presentation with a ‘Title’ slide already visible and waiting for your content. We’ll just follow the instructions on the slide itself and type in a title and subtitle

Now we can click on the ‘New Slide’ button on the Home ribbon tab, or just use the Control+m keyboard shortcut, to create a new ‘Title and Content’ slide. You will see a set of six icons in the centre of the content area, together with a ‘Click to add text’ prompt. We will examine the different content types represented by the icons in future units but, for now, we’ll type in some text bullet points and then use the in the Drawing group of the Home ribbon tab to add some simple graphics.

Text

A Title and Content slide includes a text ‘box’ which defaults to displaying text as bullet points. We can just type each of our points in followed by the Enter or Return key and PowerPoint will create our bullet points for us

Once we start entering text, PowerPoint assumes our ‘box’ is to be used as a text box and stops displaying the icons for the other content types.

Because our text is formatted as bullet points, we can demote and promote lines of text to different indentation levels using the Increase List Level and Decrease List Level buttons in the Paragraph group of the Home ribbon tab, or by using the Tab key increase or Shift+Tab to decrease the list level. If you use either of the ‘Increase’ options repeatedly you will see the text go down through the various list levels. Here we have just left our Text and Shapes headings at level 1 and increased the individual topics by one level

We have access to the same range of text formatting options as in the other Office applications either from the Font group of the Home ribbon or using the ‘mini toolbar’ that appears automatically when we select text

Here we have selected the word Typing and set the following font attributes:

• Font size
• Font colour
• Bold
• Italic

The mini toolbar also includes the Format Painter command which allows us to select any text that we have already formatted, click on the ‘painter’ and then drag it over other text to ‘paint’ that text with the copied formatting

Incidentally, there is a useful keyboard shortcut that works in Word and Outlook as well, to reset the formatting – select the text and use Control+Space to remove all the font formatting that you have applied in one go, without resetting the list levels.

So far we have been using the default placeholder defined automatically by PowerPoint when we started typing text.  We can insert text boxes of any shape or size and position them where we like on the slide. This is covered in more detail later in the course in the unit called Text Boxes.

Shapes

In the slide pictured below we have used the Shapes button in the Drawing group of the Home ribbon to display a drop-down gallery of shapes

We have first selected a right-arrow shape and drawn and dragged an appropriately sized rectangle on our slide to create the arrow, then down the same with the down arrow. When you select a shape, circles and squares will appear at the corners and edges of the shape – you can click on these and drag them to change the size and proportions. The green circle allows you to rotate the shape, and the yellow diamonds to change the proportions of the shape components

Here we have rotated the shape and then used the yellow diamond by the arrow-head to make the arrow-head shallower and the yellow diamond at the base to make the line narrower

We can move a single object by selecting it and then clicking in the object, away from all the size/shape handles. A four arrow headed cursor should appear and we can drag this to where we want to position our object. We can also use normal Copy and Paste buttons or keyboard shortcuts to copy our object.

We can select multiple shapes and other objects either by ‘drawing’ (pointing, clicking and dragging on the slide) a selection box that completely encloses them

or by holding down Shift and clicking on multiple objects.  When multiple objects are selected, formatting and size operations will affect them all in one go

Finally in this unit: once multiple objects have been selected, you can use the ‘Group’ option in the Home > Drawing > Arrange dropdown to group them together so that they behave as a single object. If you select a grouped object then the Arrange dropdown will display an ‘Ungroup’ option to allow you to restore them to separate objects that can be edited individually. Once ‘ungrouped’, selecting any previously grouped object will allow you to select ‘regroup’ from the Arrange options to restore your grouping.

Sample templates

As well as starting your slide design with a blank presentation, you can also start with an existing ‘template’. The Unit Templates and Slide Masters will look at setting up your own templates, but PowerPoint includes a set of Sample Templates and access to dozens of templates from Office.com that you might want to explore. You can find these templates in File, New or, for PowerPoint 2007, Office button, New.