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PowerPoint Essentials
PowerPoint Essentials
PowerPoint Essentials
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PowerPoint Essentials

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Microsoft PowerPoint is the go-to software for creating presentations. And it's easier to use today than ever.

 

PowerPoint Essentials will teach you PowerPoint in a straight-forward, easy to follow manner, walking you through from the absolute beginning to an intermediate level and beyond, one step at a time.

 

So what are you waiting for? Let's get started.

 

PowerPoint Essentials contains the individual titles PowerPoint for Beginners and Intermediate PowerPoint by M.L. Humphrey.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherM.L. Humphrey
Release dateOct 20, 2019
ISBN9781393566892
PowerPoint Essentials
Author

M.L. Humphrey

Hi there Sci Fi fans, my name is Maurice Humphrey. I am a Vermont native, husband, father, grandfather, well over 60, Navy veteran, retired IBM engineer, retired printer repairman, Graduated: Goddard Jr. College, VT Technical College, and Trinity College. Over the years I've written technical articles, taught technical classes, and presented at technical conventions. I've been reading science fiction for over 50 years now. First books were "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" by Jules Verne and "The Stars Are Ours" by Andre Norton. I've read and collected many great stories, and a considerable amount of junk ones as well. I'd say by now that I probably have a good idea of what I consider a good story.

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    Book preview

    PowerPoint Essentials - M.L. Humphrey

    PowerPoint Essentials

    Also by M.L. Humphrey

    Listing of all books by M.L. Humphrey


    Word Essentials

    Word for Beginners

    Intermediate Word


    Excel Essentials

    Excel for Beginners

    Intermediate Excel

    50 Useful Excel Functions

    50 More Excel Functions


    Access Essentials

    Access for Beginners

    Intermediate Access

    PowerPoint Essentials

    PowerPoint for Beginners

    Intermediate PowerPoint

    Author's Note

    This book is a compilation of two titles,PowerPoint for Beginners, and Intermediate PowerPoint. The titles are presented here as they were written.

    PowerPoint Essentials

    M.L. Humphrey

    Contents

    PowerPoint for Beginners

    Introduction

    Basic Terminology

    Tab

    Click

    Left-click/Right-click

    Select or Highlight

    Dropdown Menu

    Expansion Arrows

    Dialogue Box

    Scroll Bar

    Arrow

    Cursor

    Quick Access Toolbar

    Control Shortcuts

    Undo

    Absolute Basics

    Starting a New PowerPoint Presentation

    Opening an Existing PowerPoint File

    Saving a PowerPoint File

    Renaming a PowerPoint File

    Deleting a PowerPoint File

    Closing a PowerPoint File

    Your Workspace

    Choosing a Presentation Theme

    Powerpoint Slide Types

    Title Slide

    Section Header

    Title and Content Slide

    Two Content

    Comparison

    Title Only

    Content With Caption

    Picture With Caption

    Quote With Caption

    Blank

    Other

    Working With Your Presentation Slides

    Selecting a Slide or Slides

    Moving a Slide or Slides

    Cutting a Slide or Slides

    Copying a Slide or Slides

    Pasting a Slide or Slides

    Adding a New Slide

    Duplicating a Slide

    Deleting a Slide

    Choosing the Slide Layout

    Resetting a Slide

    Adding Text to a Presentation Slide

    Formatting Text In a Presentation

    Font

    Font Size

    Font Color

    Bolding Text

    Italicizing Text

    Underlining Text

    Change Case

    Clear Text Formatting

    Other

    Formatting Paragraphs In a Presentation

    Decrease List Level/Increase List Level

    Left-Align/Center/Right-Align a Paragraph

    Top/Middle/Bottom Align Text

    Using Multiple Columns

    Change Spacing Between Lines of Text

    Bullets and Numbering

    Format Painter

    Other

    Adding a Table to a Presentation Slide

    Insert Your Table

    Adding Text or Numbers to Your Table

    Aligning Text Within Cells

    Adding Additional Rows or Columns

    Deleting a Row or Column

    Deleting the Table

    Moving the Table

    Changing Column Width

    Changing Row Height

    Resizing the Table

    Splitting Cells in a Table

    Merging Cells in a Table

    Adding a Picture to a Presentation Slide

    Moving a Picture

    Resizing a Picture

    Rotating a Picture

    Cropping a Picture

    Bring Forward/Send Backward

    Alignment

    Picture Styles

    Adjusting a Picture

    Animations

    Basic Design Principles

    Font Size

    Font Type

    Summaries Instead of Explanations

    Contrast

    Don’t Get Cute

    Adding Notes To A Slide

    Other Tips and Tricks

    Spellcheck

    Find

    Replace Text

    Replace Font

    Presentation Size

    Presenting Your Slides

    Printing Your Presentation

    Print

    Copies

    Printer

    Printer Properties

    Print All Slides/Print Selection/Print Current Slide/Custom Range

    Full Page Slides/Notes Pages/Outline/Handouts

    Collated/Uncollated

    Portrait Orientation/Landscape Orientation

    Color/Grayscale/Pure Black and White

    Edit Header & Footer

    Where to Look For Other Answers

    Conclusion

    Intermediate PowerPoint

    Introduction

    Basic Terminology

    Additional Text and Slide Formatting Options

    Insert an Equation

    Insert WordArt

    Shapes

    Shapes Part 1: Insert Shapes

    Shapes Part 2: Format Inserted Shapes

    Shapes Part 3: Move Shapes Relative to One Another

    Shapes Part 4: Action Buttons

    Rulers, Gridlines, and Guides

    Headers and Footers

    Charts

    Insert a Chart: Basic Steps and Chart Types

    Insert a Chart: Data, Editing, and Formatting

    Insert SmartArt

    Insert a Video

    Insert Online Pictures

    Insert Photo Album

    Master Slides: Just a Quick Note

    Changing The Background Of All Slides At Once

    Select All

    Sections

    Comments

    Incorporating Group Edits

    Zoom and Views

    Save As PDF

    Save As JPG, PNG, or GIF

    Slide Transitions

    Conclusion

    About the Author

    Copyright

    PowerPoint for Beginners

    PowerPoint Essentials - Book 1

    Introduction

    The purpose of this guide is to introduce you to the basics of using Microsoft PowerPoint. If you’ve ever found yourself in a situation where you need to present to a larger audience than just a handful of people then you’ve probably needed PowerPoint. It’s great for summarizing and organizing information and also the go-to software for creating presentation slides.

    Of course, if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a presentation made by a large consulting firm then you’ve probably seen how PowerPoint can be abused and misused to the point of ridiculousness. (Or is it just me that thinks that crowding a slide with so much information there’s no way it could actually be legible if presented on a screen is wrong?)

    Anyway. This guide will walk you through the basics of how to use PowerPoint. By the time you finish reading this guide you will be fully capable of creating a basic PowerPoint presentation that includes text, pictures, and/or tables of information. You will also be able to format any text you enter, and will know how to add notes to your slides, animate your slides so that each bullet point appears separately, and launch your presentation as a slide show or print a copy or handouts.

    (And, yes, this guide will even allow you to create overly-crowded dense slides with too much information on them if that’s really what you want to do.)

    As you can see, I will also be sprinkling in my opinion throughout this guide so it isn’t just going to be how to do things in PowerPoint but why you might want to do it in a certain way.

    There are other aspects to PowerPoint that I’m not going to cover in this guide. For example, we’re not going to discuss how to use SmartArt.

    The goal of this guide is to give you enough information on how to create a basic presentation without overwhelming you with information you may not need. I do, however, end with a discussion of your help options for learning more should you need it.

    This guide is written using PowerPoint 2013. If you have a version of PowerPoint prior to 2007 your interface will look very different from mine. At this point, it’s probably worth paying to upgrade to a more recent version of Office for anyone using a pre-2007 version, but that’s up to you. If you do stick with an older version of PowerPoint, you’ll be limited in terms of the resources you can find to help you when you get stuck. (Also the themes that will be discussed in this guide may not exist in your version.)

    If you’ve already read Word for Beginners or Excel for Beginners, some portions of this guide will be familiar to you because the text options in PowerPoint work much the same way they do in Word and Excel. Also, the PowerPoint interface is structured in much the same way as both Word and Excel. If you’re familiar with one of those programs already you should find PowerPoint easier to learn than someone who is new to all three.

    Alright then. Now that you know what this guide is going to cover, let’s get started with some basics.

    Basic Terminology

    Before we get started, I want to make sure that we’re on the same page in terms of terminology. Some of this will be standard to anyone talking about these programs and some of it is my personal quirky way of saying things, so best to skim through if nothing else.

    Tab

    I refer to the menu choices at the top of the screen (File, Home, Insert, Design, Transitions, Animations, Slide Show, Review, and View) as tabs. If you click on one you’ll see that the way it’s highlighted sort of looks like an old-time filing system.

    Menu tabs

    Each tab you select will show you different options. For example, in the image above, I have the Home tab selected and you can do various tasks such as cut/copy/paste, add new slides, change the slide layout, change fonts or font size or font color, change text formatting, add shapes, find/replace, etc. Other tabs give other options.

    Click

    If I tell you to click on something, that means to use your mouse (or trackpad) to move the arrow on the screen over to a specific location and left-click or right-click on the option. (See the next definition for the difference between left-click and right-click).

    If you left-click, this selects the item. If you right-click, this generally creates a dropdown list of options to choose from. If I don't tell you which to do, left- or right-click, then left-click.

    Left-click/Right-click

    If you look at your mouse or your trackpad, you generally have two flat buttons to press. One is on the left side, one is on the right. If I say left-click that means to press down on the button on the left. If I say right-click that means press down on the button on the right.

    Now, as I sadly learned when I had to upgrade computers, not all trackpads have the left- and right-hand buttons. In that case, you’ll basically want to press on either the bottom left-hand side of the trackpad or the bottom right-hand side of the trackpad. Since you’re working blind it may take a little trial and error to get the option you want working. (Or is that just me?)

    Select or Highlight

    If I tell you to select text, that means to left-click at the end of the text you want to select, hold that left-click, and move your cursor to the other end of the text you want to select.

    Another option is to use the Shift key. Go to one end of the text you want to select. Hold down the shift key and use the arrow keys to move to the other end of the text you want to select. If you arrow up or down, that will select an entire row at a time.

    With both methods, which side of the text you start on doesn’t matter. You can start at the end and go to the beginning or start at the beginning and go to the end. Just start at one end or the other of the text you want to select.

    The text you’ve selected will then be highlighted in gray.

    If you need to select text that isn’t touching you can do this by selecting your first section of text and then holding down the Ctrl key and selecting your second section of text using your mouse. (You can’t arrow to the second section of text or you’ll lose your already selected text.)

    Dropdown Menu

    If you right-click on a PowerPoint slide, you will see what I’m going to refer to as a dropdown menu. (Sometimes it will actually drop upward if you’re towards the bottom of the document.)

    A dropdown menu provides you a list of choices to select from like this one that you’ll see if you right-click on a Title Slide in a presentation:

    Slide dropdown menu

    There are also dropdown menus available for some of the options listed under the tabs at the top of the screen. For example, if you go to the Home tab, you’ll see small arrows below or next to some of the options, like the Layout option and the Section option in the Slides section. Clicking on those little arrows will give you a dropdown menu with a list of choices to choose from like this one for Layout:

    Dropdown arrow from home tab

    Expansion Arrows

    I don’t know the official word for these, but you’ll also notice at the bottom right corner of most of the sections in each tab that there are little arrows. If you click on one of those arrows PowerPoint will bring up a more detailed set of options, usually through a dialogue box (which we’ll discuss next).

    In the Home tab, for example, there are expansion arrows for Clipboard, Font, Paragraph, and Drawing. Holding your mouse over the arrow will give a brief description of what clicking on the expansion arrow will do like here for the Clipboard section on the Home tab:

    Expansion arrow

    Dialogue Box

    Dialogue boxes are pop-up boxes that cover specialized settings. As just mentioned, if you click on an expansion arrow, it will often open a dialogue box that contains more choices than are visible in that section. When you right-click on a PowerPoint content slide and choose Font, Paragraph, or Hyperlink that also opens dialogue boxes.

    Dialogue boxes often allow the most granular level of control over an option. For example, this is the Font dialogue box which you can see has more options available than in the Font section of the Home tab.

    Font dialogue box

    Scroll Bar

    PowerPoint has multiple scroll bars that are normally visible. One is on the right-hand side of the slides that are displayed to the left of your screen (but only when there are enough slides to require scrolling). The other is on the right-hand side of the current slide that you’re viewing in the main display section of PowerPoint when there are at least two slides in your presentation.

    Side scroll bars

    You can either click in the space above or below the scroll bar to move up or down a small amount or you can left-click on the bar, hold the left-click, and drag the bar up or down to move more quickly. You can also use the arrows at the top and the bottom to move up and down through your document.

    In the default view where you can see an entire slide in the main screen, the right-hand scroll bar will move you through your presentation. Clicking on the scroll bar for the left-hand pane will keep you on the current slide but show you other slides in the presentation. (That you can then click on if you want to go to that slide.)

    I generally use the scroll bar on the left-hand side when I use one at all.

    You won’t normally see a scroll bar at the bottom of the screen, but it is possible. This would happen if you ever change the

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