Opening PowerPoint brings up the Home tab on the ribbon, giving fast access to the most important tools for working with data. This handy setup saves time and boosts productivity, making it easier to dive right into your work. People who deal with data every day will find this especially useful. Keep going to discover tips that will make your data tasks feel like a breeze.
To the left of this tab is the “File” menu, in red – formerly the Office menu -, offering a range of various and varied options on slideshows, as well as on the software itself. All the options, basic or advanced, to configure and customize PowerPoint, can be found here.
On the right is a very wide choice of features of the slideshow presentation software, accessible through this famous tabbed structure. These tabs may also vary. Other tabs may appear during the use of PowerPoint, especially if you take the course, to provide you with a range of additional features. These are contextual tabs. For example, if you edit an image or table, one or more context tabs reserved for this purpose will automatically be displayed.
As you can see, each tab of the Office Ribbon is itself divided into several groups. They make it easier to find your way around and avoid a host of features in such a small space. Thus PowerPoint has separated all the functionalities according to their use: font formatting in one group, paragraph formatting in another, etc.
But let’s not forget that Office 2010, in this case PowerPoint, has several thousand features. Imagine all these features in the ribbon, it would still be a bit messy, or you’d have a hundred tabs!
For this reason, some feature groups are not fully displayed. You can then click on the zoom icon at the bottom right of each group to access a window containing all the features of the group.
It is possible that the display of the ribbon may be slightly different depending on the resolution of your screen. Indeed, in order to save space on small screens, the text can be deleted next to the buttons or some buttons not displayed. The 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratios offer the best display quality. You can make the same observation if you resize the window.
The Quick Access Toolbar
Even higher is the “Quick Access Toolbar” from which you can actually open and save files and access many PowerPoint functions (the same as in the ribbon, we will come back to this in due course).
The Quick Access Bar works like the Microsoft Windows Quick Launch Bar. It allows quick access to the most commonly used features of Word, as a general rule.
The PowerPoint icon is not part of the quick access bar. It simply simulates the right click on the title bar.
By default, the following features are already present recommended you read:
Save (whose keyboard shortcut is Ctrl + S, note it !): allows you to save your document (we will see this feature towards the end of this chapter ;
Undo the last action (whose keyboard shortcut is Ctrl + Z, note it too);
Repeat the last action (whose keyboard shortcut is Ctrl + Y, a little last one to know for the route).
These are the three most commonly used features, regardless of the document you are editing. However, you can add several other features. Simply click on the down arrow to the right of this bar. It allows you to add (or delete) several features such as creating a new file ( Ctrl + N), opening a file previously saved on your hard disk ( Ctrl + O), printing ( Ctrl + P), spelling correction ( F7), etc.
We will learn as we go through the tutorial how to use each of these features, so you can adapt this quick access bar to your personal use of PowerPoint.
In addition, there is no need to remember the shortcuts of the features I gave in the second step. Please note that an appendix is available at the end of the course and gives you a summary of all the useful shortcuts in Word. Put it aside, it can be useful to you!
The formula bar
Between your work area and the ribbon is a very important field: the “formula bar”.
This area is very important and deserves a chapter for itself (and it will have one). For the moment, let’s not complicate things, remember that this very long field is called “formula bar”.
Note however that the drop-down list to the left of the field is not part of the formula bar.
The status bar
Below your work area is the status bar.
In this bar are the “elevators”, again surrounded by many other buttons. These elevators allow you to move around the grid. Their use is not very complicated, just click on the arrows to move. 🙂
