By E. A. Vander Veer
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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Creating a Basic Presentation

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PowerPoint 2007 is the great equalizer. Even if you're familiar with previous versions of PowerPoint, when it comes to PowerPoint 2007 you're pretty much in the same boat as someone who's never even heard of presentation software. That's because the entire PowerPoint interface has changed. As you saw in the Introduction, Microsoft has done away with toolbars, renamed and reorganized menu options, and even axed a couple of features.

Fortunately, the new interface makes quite a bit of sense once you get used to it. That's what this chapter is for: to familiarize you with PowerPoint 2007 by walking you through the creation of a basic bullets-and-background slideshow presentation. You'll learn how to create a new slideshow, choose a look and feel, add text and slides, print speaker notes and handouts, and finally, how to unveil your masterpiece.

Part 3 shows you how to jazz up your basic slideshow with diagrams, charts, sounds, animations, and more.

You've got two basic choices when it comes to creating a new presentation:

• You can start from scratch, using a blank canvas. If you're familiar with earlier incarnations of the PowerPoint program, or if you're interested in learning the ins and outs of PowerPoint quickly, then you'll probably want to choose this option. (As daunting as "from scratch" sounds, you don't have to do all the work yourself; Section 1.2 shows you how to apply a canned look and feel—or theme—to your new presentation.)
• You can create a new presentation based on an existing template, theme, or presentation. A template is a generic presentation file designed for you to reuse. Complete with themes (see the box), background images, and even generic content (such as page numbers and placeholder text), templates let you jump-start your presentation by giving you everything you need except your specific content. If you're creating a presentation for your local school board, for example, then you'll need to add the content that describes your findings, conclusions, and suggestions.
  Templates are the better option when you need to crank out a presentation in a jiffy. PowerPoint comes with a handful of professionally designed templates and themes, but you can also create presentations based on a template, theme, or presentation that you've previously created, or one that you've found online and downloaded onto your computer.

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Beginning a New Presentation

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You've got two basic choices when it comes to creating a new presentation:

• You can start from scratch, using a blank canvas. If you're familiar with earlier incarnations of the PowerPoint program, or if you're interested in learning the ins and outs of PowerPoint quickly, then you'll probably want to choose this option. (As daunting as "from scratch" sounds, you don't have to do all the work yourself; Section 1.2 shows you how to apply a canned look and feel—or theme—to your new presentation.)
• You can create a new presentation based on an existing template, theme, or presentation. A template is a generic presentation file designed for you to reuse. Complete with themes (see the box), background images, and even generic content (such as page numbers and placeholder text), templates let you jump-start your presentation by giving you everything you need except your specific content. If you're creating a presentation for your local school board, for example, then you'll need to add the content that describes your findings, conclusions, and suggestions.
  Templates are the better option when you need to crank out a presentation in a jiffy. PowerPoint comes with a handful of professionally designed templates and themes, but you can also create presentations based on a template, theme, or presentation that you've previously created, or one that you've found online and downloaded onto your computer.

PowerPoint divides these two basic choices into six specific options that are based on whether you want to piggyback your new presentation on an existing template, theme, or presentation. When you fire up PowerPoint and select Office button → New, you see the following six choices for creating a presentation, each of which is described in detail in the following sections:

• Blank and recent. Lets you create either a blank presentation or a presentation based on one of the themes or templates you recently applied to a PowerPoint presentation.
• Installed Templates. Lets you create a presentation based on one of the handful of generic templates that comes with PowerPoint, such as Classic Photo Album or Corporate Presentation.

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Choosing a Theme for Your Presentation

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No matter which approach you use to create a presentation—from scratch, from an existing presentation, from a template, or from a built-in theme—once you have a presentation, you can change how it looks in one fell swoop by changing its theme.

A theme is a collection of characteristics including colors, fonts, and graphic effects (such as whether the shapes you add to your slides have drop shadows). For example, applying the built-in Deluxe theme turns your background a tasteful shade of blue and displays your title text (which appears in the Corbel font) in an attractively contrasting, gently shadowed shade of yellow—all thanks to the theme.

You can change all of these characteristics individually, of course, as you'll see in Chapter 3. But applying themes gives you more bang for your buck in several important ways:

• Using themes is quicker than changing individual settings one at a time. Applying a theme is a two-click proposition. Changing the dozen-plus settings controlled by a theme would exercise your click finger a lot more than that. And themes save you time you'd otherwise spend figuring out which colors look good together.
• Using themes helps ensure a decent-looking, readable slide. Consistency is an important design principle: it sets the tone for your presentation and lets your audience focus on your message. When you change settings manually, you can end up with a distracting mishmash of colors and fonts on a single slide or across slides. Not so with themes. Once you apply a theme, the theme takes control of your settings. If you change the background color of your slides, then the theme automatically changes the title and subtitle fonts to compatible colors—colors that aren't just readable against your new background, but attractive, too.
  You can change the color scheme, fonts, effects, background, and layering order for any given theme without "breaking" the theme. For example, if you change the subtitle color from white to black, then PowerPoint automatically adjusts the background color and other settings so that your subtitle text is still readable. But you can also override theme settings. Section 3.2.4 shows you how.

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Adding Text

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You'll want to add at least some text to most, if not all, PowerPoint presentations you create. (See the box for advice on how much prose to add to your presentation.) Knowing that, the PowerPoint designers made it easy for you to add text to your slides. The following sections show you how.

When you start to work with a new presentation, the ribbon displays the Home tab, which should look somewhat familiar if you've used PowerPoint 2003 (Figure 1-13).

Figure 1-13: Until you click a text box, most of the text-related options appear grayed out, meaning you can't use them. See Figure 1-14 for a glimpse of the subtitle box.

Blank presentations come complete with title and subtitle placeholder text boxes. To replace the placeholder text in either of these two text boxes with your own text, simply click inside the placeholder and begin typing. When you do, two things happen:

• PowerPoint displays the Drawing Tools | Format tab and, on the Home ribbon, activates many of the text formatting options (Figure 1-14). You can use these options to change the font, size, and color of your text, turn your text into a right-justified paragraph or a bullet point, and much more. (Chapter 3 describes your options in detail.)
• Resize and transform handles appear at the corners and edges of the text box (Figure 1-14). Tiny white resize handles, which are square on the edges of the text box and circular on the corners, let you stretch or shrink your text box by dragging them. The circular green transform handle appears above the top of your text box and lets you tilt it. Drag the handles to tilt or resize your text box.
  

  Figure 1-14: As soon as you click a text box, PowerPoint activates the text formatting and drawing tools and reveals the Drawing Tools | Format tab. Now, in addition to typing your text, you can format it, change its color, or add an effect (such as a glow or bevel). Drag any of the eight white resize handles to resize your text box; drag the circular green transform handle to rotate the text box. Chapter 3 covers text manipulation in more detail.

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Adding More Slides

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When you create a new blank presentation, PowerPoint spots you one slide. But in most cases, you'll want your presentation to contain a lot more slides than that. Fortunately, adding a new slide is easy, as you'll see in the following sections.

PowerPoint gives you two options: adding a slide with layout identical to the current slide, and specifying a different slide layout. A slide layout is a description of what content appears where on a slide. For example, applying a Title Slide layout to a slide positions title and subtitle text placeholders near the middle of your slide, and nothing else. Applying a Title and Content layout positions a title text placeholder near the top of a slide, and an object placeholder beneath that.

To add a slide with a layout identical to the current slide:

1. Select any non-title slide.
   PowerPoint doesn't automatically duplicate title slides for a pretty obvious reason: 99 percent of the time, you don't want two title slides in a single presentation.
   For the one percent of the time when that's exactly what you want, add a slide, and then change the slide's layout to Title Slide as shown on Section 4.1.1.
2. Click the Home tab.
   The ribbon you see in Figure 1-17 appears.
   

   Figure 1-17: Clicking the New Slide button is the quickest way to add a slide to your presentation. You can always change the layout, of course, but when you want to add a different kind of slide—say, one with a subtitle or columns—you can save yourself some time by choosing a new slide layout right off the bat, as shown in the steps below.
3. Click the New Slide button.
   PowerPoint inserts a new slide after the current slide. If that's not what you want (for example, if you want to add a slide to the beginning of your presentation), then you can easily change the order of your slides. Section 5.2.3 shows you how.

PowerPoint gives you another way to add a new slide with a layout similar to the current slide. In the Slides pane (at the left side of your workspace, as shown in Figure 1-16), you can right-click the page after which you want to create a new slide. Then, from the menu that appears, select Duplicate.

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Moving Around Inside a Presentation

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Moving around your presentation when you only have one slide isn't much of an issue. But once you start adding slides, you'll want a way to hop quickly from your first slide to your last. You'll also want to jump to specific slides in the middle of your presentation; for example, to tweak a particular slide's layout, to add content, or to delete it.

PowerPoint gives you several ways to flip through your presentation. This section acquaints you with the easiest and most useful options: using your workspace scroll bar, using the View pane on the left side of the screen, and using the Home ribbon's Find function.

In PowerPoint, you see a scroll bar on the right side of your workspace similar to the one in Figure 1-19.

Figure 1-19: If you've got more than one slide, the vertical scroll bars always appear in PowerPoint, no matter which tab you select or which ribbon appears at the top of your workspace. Scrolling tells PowerPoint to display slides not just in the main workspace, but also to display thumbnail versions in the Slides pane.

To scroll through your presentation, all you need to do is click the scroll bar and drag up (to scroll toward the beginning of your presentation) or down (to scroll toward the end). As you go, PowerPoint displays each slide in turn.

To flip forward (or back) through your presentation one slide at a time, click the Next Slide (or Previous Slide) arrow shown in Figure 1-19.

Slides and Outline tabs are not views (they both appear in Normal view) but are tabs that let you see slide thumbnails or an outline of your slideshow, respectively, in the Slides (Figure 1-20) or Outline (Figure 1-21) pane.

Figure 1-20: Here, the Slides tab is selected. You're viewing the contents of the first (selected) slide.

Figure 1-21: Here's the same presentation in outline form. To banish the View pane altogether, click the X in the upper-right corner. To resize it, simply drag the resize handle on the right side of the pane. (In keeping with its new-and-improved design philosophy, PowerPoint doesn't let you make the View pane larger than one-quarter of the total interface.)

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Adding Speaker Notes

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Speaker notes are optional text notes you can type into PowerPoint. You can associate a separate speaker note with each slide of your presentation. Your audience can't see speaker notes, but you can. You may find speaker notes useful:

• While you're putting your presentation together. If you know you need to add a graphic to slide six and a couple of bullet points to slide 33, then you can jot down reminders to yourself in the Speaker Notes pane (Figure 1-23). Then, before you put your presentation to bed, you can view your speaker notes and double-check that you've caught everything.
• While you're delivering your presentation. You can set up your presentation so that your audience sees your slideshow on the screen while you see your notes (on your own computer monitor). Or, if you're the tactile type, you may prefer to print out your speaker notes and keep them with your during your presentation.

Chapter 8 covers speaker notes in more detail.

To add speaker notes for a particular slide, click in the Speaker Notes pane (Figure 1-23) and type away.

Figure 1-23: Speaker notes are specific to individual slides, so when you select a new slide, PowerPoint displays a fresh, clean Speaker Notes pane. You can make the pane bigger by dragging the resize handle.

If you don't see the Speaker Notes pane, then click the Speaker Notes pane's resize bar at the bottom of the workspace and drag upward, as shown in Figure 1-24.

Figure 1-24: Depending on the view you choose, the Speaker Notes pane doesn't always appear automatically—and it's not obvious that you can drag the resize bar at the bottom of the workspace to display it. Fortunately, you can. The farther you drag, the larger the notes display (and the smaller the slide display).

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Creating and Printing Handouts

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You don't have to do anything special to create handouts in PowerPoint. That's because handouts in PowerPoint are nothing more than slides printed one or more to a page.

The value of handouts depends both on your presentation and your audience. If you think your audience will benefit from printouts of your slides, then by all means, go for it. Say, for example, that your presentation slides consist of graphic images accompanied by a few well-placed questions. What you want is a participatory, interactive presentation. Your audience should listen to you and jot down the answers to those questions—and what better way to encourage this interaction than to pass out hard copies of each slide?

But for some presentations, slide printouts are pretty worthless. Instead, you're going to want to give your audience printouts containing facts, figures, contact information, and other in-depth supporting information that you didn't have room for in your actual presentation.

One way to jump-start the process of creating truly useful handouts is to pull your PowerPoint presentation text into Word 2007 (assuming you have a copy installed on your computer). Using your presentation text as a starting point, you can add information until you've built handouts your audience will actually take back to their homes and offices.

To pull your slides into a Word document, click Office button → Publish → Create Handouts in Microsoft Office Word.

To print handouts:

1. Select Office button → Print → Print Preview.
   The Print Preview ribbon appears, and PowerPoint's best guess at how you want your handouts printed appears in the workspace.
   You can change the way your handouts print on a presentation-by-presentation basis, as described in this section. But if you find yourself making the same changes time after time, then you'll want to customize PowerPoint's printing assumptions. Chapter 13 shows you how.
2. Click the "Print what" drop-down box and then, from the menu that appears, choose how you want PowerPoint to print your handouts (Figure 1-25).

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Saving and Closing a Presentation

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Lightning storms hit, coffee cups spill, and power cords work themselves out of walls (especially if you have a dog who likes to chase squeaky toys). After you've created a new presentation file and spent some time working on it, you'll want to save it every so often so that when your system crashes, you can recover your work. And if you're like most folks, you'll also want to save and close your presentation each time you wrap up a work session.

Saving and closing a PowerPoint presentation are both straightforward tasks. If you're familiar with any other Windows programs, then you'll recognize most of the steps.

To save a newly created presentation:

1. Select Office button → Save.
   The Save As dialog box appears (Figure 1-26).
   Alternatively, you can press Ctrl+S or click the Save button (the little diskette icon) that appears in the Quick Access toolbar.
2. Click the "Save in" drop-down box to choose a directory to store your file in.
3. In the File name field, type a new name for your file.
   Shoot for short, unique, and memorable; you don't want to have to spend a lot of time hunting for your file a week from now.
4. Click the "Save as Type" drop-down box to select a file format. (The box explains your options.) Most of the time, you'll choose the .pptx format.
5. Click Save.
   The Save As dialog box disappears and PowerPoint saves the file in the format you specified.

Figure 1-26: Most of the time, you'll choose the .pptx file type (a plain-vanilla PowerPoint 2007 presentation) or .ppt (the old, pre-2007 PowerPoint format). But you've got about a dozen choices, including the template (.potx) and show (.ppsx) formats. (Chapter 7 discusses saving your presentation to these file formats and many others.)

You can set PowerPoint's AutoRecovery options so that the program saves your files automatically every few minutes—a boon for folks whose computers tend to crash frequently. Chapter 13 shows you how to customize PowerPoint's AutoRecovery options.

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Running a Presentation

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Chapter 7 shows you everything you need to know about setting up and running special types of presentations: for example, recording narration, hiding certain slides, and creating stand-alone presentations that run on kiosks.

But for running through a basic presentation on your very own computer, the process is simple:

1. Press F5 or click the Slideshow icon you see at the bottom of the screen, as shown in Figure 1-27.
   PowerPoint replaces your workspace with a full-screen version of your slideshow, beginning with the currently selected slide.
   

   Figure 1-27: Clicking the Slideshow icon at the bottom of your workspace is one of the easiest ways to run your presentation.
   PowerPoint 2007 (and Office 2007 more generally) introduces a slew of new file types, complete with unfamiliar file extensions. The Introduction describes these file types in more detail, and Chapter 7 describes why you'd want to choose one over the other. But here they are, in a nutshell:

   • .pptx (PowerPoint 2007 presentation). Most of the time, you want to save your file in this format.
   • .potx (PowerPoint 2007 template). Lets you save a presentation as a reusable design template.
   • .potm (PowerPoint 2007 macro-enabled design template). Lets programmers save a macro-filled presentation as a design template.
   • .ppsx (PowerPoint 2007 show). Lets you save this file as a PowerPoint show that folks can run using the PowerPoint viewer, as described in Chapter 7.
   • .ppsm (PowerPoint 2007 macro-enabled show). Lets programmers save a macro-filled presentation as a show.
   • .ppam (PowerPoint 2007 add-in). Lets programmers save presentations that actually add to PowerPoint's interface; see Chapter 13.
   • .pptm (PowerPoint 2007 macro-enabled presentation). Lets programmers save presentations that contain VBA macros; see Chapter 14.

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Chapter 2: Editing Slides

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Text is the heart and soul of an effective PowerPoint presentation. But coming up with just the right words—and organizing them in just the right way—isn't always easy. Just as you would if you were constructing a presentation using a flip chart or overhead transparencies, you jot down a few bullet points, read through what you've written, think of a few additional points, change your mind, and end up deleting, rearranging, and editing your material over and over again until you've got every word on every page (slide) exactly right.

Fortunately, PowerPoint can help. In addition to the standard cut, copy, and paste operations, this chapter shows you how to use PowerPoint's Search and Replace feature to find words and phrases buried in long presentations and change (or delete) them quickly.

You'll also see how to get on-the-spot editorial assistance using PowerPoint's spell check, thesaurus, and online research options, as well as how to save yourself time by turning on PowerPoint's automatic correction tools. If you find yourself giving a lot of presentations to non-English-speaking audiences, then you'll appreciate the section at the end of this chapter that describes how to incorporate Spanish, French, Japanese, and many other languages into your presentations.

When you change the text on a PowerPoint slide—when you cut it, copy it, replace it, or move it around—what you're doing is editing your text. To see most of the editing tools PowerPoint offers, all you have to do is take a look at the ribbon's Home tab (Figure 2-1). The following sections describe each editing tool in detail.

In contrast, when you change the way your text looks—when you make it bold, italicize it, choose a different font or background color for it, and so on—what you're doing is formatting. Chapter 3 tells you all you need to know about formatting text.

Figure 2-1: Clicking the Home tab shows you your editing options, but you can't actually use any of them until you click inside a text box. When you do, PowerPoint activates the text editing options (except Paste and Clipboard, which remain grayed out until you cut or copy text; in other words, until you have something to paste from the Clipboard) and the Drawing Tools | Format tab appears.

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Editing Text

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When you change the text on a PowerPoint slide—when you cut it, copy it, replace it, or move it around—what you're doing is editing your text. To see most of the editing tools PowerPoint offers, all you have to do is take a look at the ribbon's Home tab (Figure 2-1). The following sections describe each editing tool in detail.

In contrast, when you change the way your text looks—when you make it bold, italicize it, choose a different font or background color for it, and so on—what you're doing is formatting. Chapter 3 tells you all you need to know about formatting text.

Figure 2-1: Clicking the Home tab shows you your editing options, but you can't actually use any of them until you click inside a text box. When you do, PowerPoint activates the text editing options (except Paste and Clipboard, which remain grayed out until you cut or copy text; in other words, until you have something to paste from the Clipboard) and the Drawing Tools | Format tab appears.

Before you can do anything to the text on your slides, you first have to select it. Text can appear in any of three places on a slide: in one of the title or subtitle placeholder text boxes that PowerPoint automatically adds to your slide (Section 1.3); in a text box that you've added to a slide (Section 1.3.2), or in a shape that you've added to a slide (Section 9.2.9).

To select text:

1. Click anywhere in an existing text box, placeholder text box, or on a shape.
   PowerPoint highlights the outline of the text box you clicked in. In addition, PowerPoint displays the Drawing Tools/Format context tab and activates the text-related options in the Home tab—underlining, font size, alignment, and so on.
   When you click in a placeholder text box (one that says Click to add title or Click to add subtitle), PowerPoint erases the placeholder text. (Placeholder text doesn't appear in Slide Show view, nor does it appear when you run your slideshow; it's just there to remind you to type your own text.)

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Reversing an Action (Undo)

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Undo is great for recovering from those slip-of-the-finger goofs everyone makes from time to time. Clicking the Undo button you see in the Quick Access toolbar (Figure 2-5) tells PowerPoint to reverse the last action you told it to take. If you cut some text and then select Undo, for example, PowerPoint puts the cut text back where it was (and removes the cut text from the Clipboard). If you paste some text and then select Undo, then PowerPoint removes the pasted text.

Figure 2-5: As useful as Undo is, don't rely on it too much. Out of the box, PowerPoint only keeps track of the last 20 actions you took since the last time you opened your presentation, so you're out of luck if you want to undo the thing you did 21 keystrokes ago. (Chapter 13 shows you how to change the number of actions PowerPoint can undo.) Another reason not to rely on Undo is that, when you close your presentation, PowerPoint erases all record of the actions you took when the file was open.

If you don't see the Undo button in the Quick Access toolbar, or if you just prefer pressing keys to using the mouse, you can reverse the last action by pressing Ctrl+Z. (To see how to redisplay the Undo button in the Quick Access toolbar, see Section 13.1.3.)

If you click Undo and then change your mind, you can undo the effects of Undo and reapply your action. To do so, just head to the Quick Access toolbar and click Redo or press Ctrl+Y.

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Finding and Replacing Text Automatically

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Imagine you're just putting the finishing touches on your presentation when you decide to check your email. There, in your virtual inbox, you see it: a memo informing you that Marketing just renamed the product you referred to throughout your presentation as "Sunny's Tomato Juice" to "Sunny's All-Natural Lycopene Infusion."

Your first thought may be to eyeball each line of text on each slide to see if you can spot every occurrence of "Tomato Juice" and fix it by hand. But if you've got a whopping long presentation, that isn't a good idea. Not only would it take you forever, but you'd likely miss a few occurrences.

Fortunately, there's a better way. PowerPoint's Replace option can find all the occurrences of a particular word or phrase and replace them automatically with the text you specify.

If you want to use Find without Replace—for example, if all you want to do is check to make sure that you've included a specific phrase in your presentation and don't want PowerPoint to swap it out for you—check out Section 1.5.3.

To search for and replace text automatically:

1. Press Ctrl+H or select Home → Editing → Replace.
   The Replace dialog box shown in Figure 2-6 appears.
2. In the "Find what" box, type in the word or phrase you want to search for.
   For example, Tomato Juice.
3. In the "Replace with" box, type in the text you want PowerPoint to substitute for the occurrences of "Find what" text it may (or may not) find.
   All-Natural Lycopene Infusion, in this example.
   

   Figure 2-6: Be sure to turn on the "Match case" checkbox as shown here if you want PowerPoint to look for a phrase that matches your "Find what" text exactly, capitalization and all.
   PowerPoint doesn't find occurrences of text buried inside pictures, charts, or diagrams, because these occurrences aren't text at all (to PowerPoint, at least). Using PowerPoint's Find and Replace options only helps you find (and replace) text in text boxes and shapes.
   In addition to letting you replace text, PowerPoint also lets you swap the fonts you've applied to text. Replacing fonts is useful when you're trying to match a font you've used in your slideshow to the font you've used in an Excel chart, or to the font your company (or client) uses in its marketing materials.

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Spell Check and Other Editorial Tools

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It's one thing to know how to edit your slides, which is what the first half of this chapter focuses on: the mechanics of cutting, copying, pasting, and so on. It's another thing altogether to figure out if (and why) you need to edit your slides in the first place.

This section acquaints you with PowerPoint's virtual editorial staff: the options that check your text for spelling and capitalization errors, suggest synonyms, help you dig up background information, and translate words and phrases into other languages.

Spelling errors are never a good thing. At best, they can give your audience the impression that you don't pay attention to details. At worst, they can actually prevent your audience from understanding what you're talking about. And make no mistake about it: the typo that no one but the former English teacher noticed when it appeared on a hard-copy handout is obvious to everyone when it's four feet high and splashed across a projector screen.

Spell checkers' suggestions aren't always right, and they can miss errors, too. What's more, studies suggest that some folks actually make more mistakes when they use spell checkers than when they don't because they rely on the tool instead of their own proofreading skills. Bottom line: a spell checker can be a timesaver, but it's no substitute for carefully reading through your presentation.

PowerPoint gives you two choices when it comes to spell checking your presentation. You can check as you go, automatically, or wait until you're finished with your presentation and then run the check manually.

Section 2.4.1.1: Setting up spelling

Whether you choose automatic spell checking or manual, you want to give PowerPoint a heads-up on what kinds of special words to look out for—words like company-specific acronyms, passwords, or other non-words that you want PowerPoint to skip during a spell check. To set spelling options:

1. Select Office button → PowerPoint Options.
   The PowerPoint Options window appears.
2. On the left side of the PowerPoint Options window, click the Proofing category to select it.

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Adding Special Characters

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Because PowerPoint comes complete with a slew of fonts and character sets, you can add all kinds of special characters to your slides without having to have a souped-up keyboard. Mathematical signs, foreign currency symbols, umlauts, schwas, superscripted characters, and happy faces are just some of the special characters—or symbols—at your disposal. If for no other reason than to accent those e's in résumé, you want to familiarize yourself with inserting special characters.

Here's how you do so:

1. Click in a text box and position your cursor where you want to insert the special character. Select Insert → Text → Symbol.
   The Symbol dialog box appears (Figure 2-16).
2. From the Font drop-down menu, choose a font.
   The special characters you see vary depending on the font you choose, not just in appearance but in number.
3. From the Subset drop-down menu, choose the type of symbol you're interested in.
   Alternatively, you can scroll through the symbol window to find the symbol you're looking for.
4. Choose the symbol you want to insert, and then click Insert.
   PowerPoint inserts the selected symbol.
5. Click Close to dismiss the Symbol dialog box.
   

   Figure 2-16: Not all fonts are created equal. The Webdings and Wingdings dingbat fonts, for example, eschew the business, mathematical, and linguistic (shown here) in favor of vector art: telephones, hearts, buildings, and other stylized drawings you can enlarge to create clean, simple graphics. (Chapter 3 shows you how to change font size.)

To insert the current date and time, select Insert → Text → Date & Time; to insert the current slide number, select Insert → Text → Slide Number. You can find out more about both of these somewhat-symbol-related options on Section 5.6.

You're bilingual, trilingual, or quadrilingual, and you need to create presentations in each of the languages you speak. PowerPoint's got your back.

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Chapter 3: Formatting and Aligning Your Text

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Content may be king, but presentation is queen. You're going to spend a lot of time choosing just the right text to add to your slides, so don't blow all that hard work by ignoring the way your text looks. If your text is hard to read or conveys a message counter to the point you're trying to make—if you choose whimsical, candy-colored fonts for a presentation introducing your company's expanded line of funeral services, for example—you're going to confuse (or even lose) your audience.

This chapter shows you how to format your text effectively. You'll find out how to choose fonts, colors, and special effects (such as underlining, shadowing, bordering, and beveling) that support and strengthen your message (Figure 3-1), and how to avoid the effects that detract from it (Figure 3-2).

Figure 3-1: Effectively formatted text is easy to read and it subliminally reinforces the message you're trying to drive home. Here, a solid, "respectable" font, a sober blue-and-tan-and-white color scheme, and spare, businesslike layout all contribute to the seriousness of the message.

Figure 3-2: Anyone who's spent time in corporate America has suffered through at least one presentation like this. While it's true that your message (and your audience) should dictate the formatting choices you make, getting carried away is never a good idea. Too many formatting bells and whistles can affect your message more negatively than no formatting at all.

For tips on formatting non-text presentation elements such as pictures, spreadsheets, and other visuals, check out Chapter 9. If it's editing your overall slideshow you're interested in—shuffling slides or adding headers or footers, for example—head to Chapter 5.

PowerPoint gives you more options for formatting text than a normal human being will ever need—everything from the basic (bold, italics, underlining) to the wacky (beveling, stacking, 3-D rotation). And it gives you two ways to take advantage of these options: automatically, and manually.

• Automatic. If you haven't finished adding text to your slides, you can turn on one or more of PowerPoint's automatic formatting features to tell the program to catch basic formatting and punctuation goofs for you as you type.

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Automating Text Formatting

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PowerPoint gives you more options for formatting text than a normal human being will ever need—everything from the basic (bold, italics, underlining) to the wacky (beveling, stacking, 3-D rotation). And it gives you two ways to take advantage of these options: automatically, and manually.

• Automatic. If you haven't finished adding text to your slides, you can turn on one or more of PowerPoint's automatic formatting features to tell the program to catch basic formatting and punctuation goofs for you as you type.
• Manual. If you've already added text to your slides or want to apply fancy effects, you'll need to format your text manually—either by applying individual effects one at a time, or by applying one of PowerPoint 2007's predesigned styles.

In most cases, you'll want to use both automatic and manual formatting. The following sections show you how.

As you format your presentation, make sure you keep the following three goals in mind:

Readability.

Readability.

Readability.

Specialty formatting—like drop-shadows, bevels, and text that runs up and down instead of left to right—is the PowerPoint equivalent of swearing: If you use it sparingly and appropriately, it gets your audience's attention. Use it frequently or indiscriminately, and it'll turn your audience off and reflect poorly on your skills as a communicator.

One way to keep your slides readable is to remember that your slides should aid you in giving your presentation; they shouldn't be your presentation.

Instead of automatically typing out a bunch of bullet points, consider displaying something on your slide that grabs your audience's attention, such as a drawing, a photo (www.istockhpoto.com is a great source), or a provocative question. Then let your audience focus on this simple, powerful visual while you explain how it relates to your message—using as many words as you need to. (Chances are your audience will remember a striking photo or a single, stark, provocatively worded question much better than a bunch of text.)

If you do decide to go the text route, keep it readable by sticking to three or four bullet points per slide; try to limit each bullet point to five or six words; and size the text at 32 points or larger.

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Manually Formatting Text Appearance

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While PowerPoint's automatic formatting options (Section 3.1) help with the grunt work of formatting the text on your slides, you should do some of the formatting yourself. After all, the program has no way of knowing which words or phrases you want to emphasize—which, when you get right down to it, is what formatting is all about.

PowerPoint conveniently displays all of its text formatting options on the Home tab (Figure 3-7). A handful of the most commonly used formats also appear when you right-click text or when you select it, as shown in Figure 3-8.

If you're the kind of person who simply can't stand pop-ups, you can turn off the Mini Toolbar. To do so, select Office button → PowerPoint Options and then, in the PowerPoint Options window that appears, select Popular and turn off the "Show Mini Toolbar on selection" checkbox.

Figure 3-7: Most of PowerPoint's text formatting options appear on the Home tab.

Figure 3-8: As soon as you right-click or select text, PowerPoint pops up the semi-transparent, or ghosted, Mini Toolbar shown here. Mouse over the Mini Toolbar and it becomes active, giving you a quick way to apply the most common formatting options (bold, italics, and so on).

Using the options you find on the Home tab, you can format individual characters and words by changing their color, font size, font, underlining, shadowing, and so on. You can format paragraphs by indenting them, turning them into bulleted or numbered lists, and by applying effects to them, such as rotating them or turning them into diagrams. The following sections show you how.

I use PowerPoint at work, and my kids use PowerPoint on our home computer to create school reports. We've got the same version of PowerPoint installed on both computers, but my work version lists fonts that my home version doesn't. What gives?

PowerPoint can display only the fonts that are installed on your computer. So when you want to use a font that isn't listed in PowerPoint's font list (Figure 3-9), you have to do two things: Copy the font file to your computer, and then install the font. (Most fonts these days are

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Manually Aligning and Indenting Text

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To effectively convey your message on a slide, your text must above all be readable. After all, your audience may have to read it across a large conference room, or on a small laptop monitor. Make things easier on your audience's eyes by making sure your words are neatly and attractively lined up.

Neatly arranged text can mean the difference between an easy-to-read, professional-looking slide, and a jumbled mess.

PowerPoint gives you two ways to align text:

• You can align text with respect to its bounding placeholder box. For example, you can center heading text inside its box or position it flush left or flush right. If you've got a paragraph's worth of text, you can justify it (add spaces between the words so the ends of each line up) or turn it into two or more columns.
  If you're using PowerPoint to create a year-end postmortem for your civic club's fundraising efforts, you're probably not going to need any of the fancy text effects described in this chapter.

  But you might if you're using PowerPoint to mock up a computer program interface—a practice so common that Microsoft's own design team did just that while they were redesigning PowerPoint. Mock-ups, which often include clickable hyperlinks, sound clips, and animated effects, let folks explore different ways of designing a program interface. Mock-ups are relatively easy to put together in PowerPoint, and it's a lot easier to find out what works and what doesn't before a coding team spends six months actually writing the program.

  If you're mocking up a particularly tricky program interface, you'll appreciate the control that PowerPoint gives you over your special effects.

  To display the settings for effects:

  1. Right-click the text (or text box) you want to format.
  2. From the context menu that appears, choose either Format Shape or Format Text Effects.
  3. In the Format Shape or Format Text Effects dialog box, you can control every single aspect of your special effect, from the type of 3-D effect to how many degrees you want your text rotated. (Section 9.2.4 describes the Format Shape dialog box in detail.)

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Formatting Text Boxes

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In addition to formatting the text on your slides, you can also format the text boxes that surround the text by applying options such as visible borders, colored backgrounds, and 3-D effects. These options don't change the text inside the text boxes, just the text boxes themselves. Formatting a text box is a good way to draw your audience's attention to a specific bit of text.

To format a text box:

1. Click anywhere in the text box you want to format. Choose Home → Drawing → Quick Styles.
   The gallery of effects you see in Figure 3-43 appears. As you mouse over each effect, PowerPoint previews the effect for you on your slide.
   

   Figure 3-43: Clicking Home → Drawing → Quick Styles lets you turn an ordinary text box into a 3-D button with the click of a mouse—great for emphasizing headings or creating interactive presentations. (Chapter 12 has more on interactivity.) For a more subtle effect, choose one of the outline options.
2. Click to choose the effect you want.
   On your slide, PowerPoint automatically formats your text box.

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Chapter 4: Formatting and Laying Out Your Slides

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In the previous chapter, you learned how to massage text into perfectly indented paragraphs, columns, and lists. Now it's time for the big picture. This chapter shows you how to format slide using layouts, and how to reapply a theme (see Section 1.2) or color scheme (a list of coordinating font colors). Finally—and most important when you're in a time crunch—you'll learn how to turn on PowerPoint's automatic formatting options.

Each time you create a slide—by creating a new presentation (Section 1.1), or by adding a slide to an existing presentation (Section 1.4)—PowerPoint gives that slide a layout such as the Title Slide layout, with one title text placeholder near the top and one subtitle text placeholder near the middle of the slide. But you can change the layout of your slide at any time, either before you've added content to it or after. PowerPoint gives you several options for changing slide layout:

• Apply canned layouts to your slides. You can tell PowerPoint to put a title at the top of a slide and two content placeholders (for text, pictures, and so on) side-by-side in the body of the slide.
• Change orientation. You can change a landscape orientation (where the slide's wider than it is tall) to a portrait orientation (where the slide's taller than it is wide).
• Reposition elements. You can drag text boxes and other objects (such as pictures) around on your slide to reposition them.

PowerPoint offers nine canned layouts you can use. Most of the time, you're going to want to apply these layouts before you add text to your slides, but you can apply them after, as well.

If you have a very specific, custom layout in mind, you'll probably find it easier and more efficient to create a layout master, as described on Section 5.5.

To apply a canned layout to your slide:

1. Create a new slide (Section 1.4). Click any blank spot on your new slide.
   Make sure you don't click a text placeholder, picture, diagram, or other object.

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Changing Slide Layout

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Each time you create a slide—by creating a new presentation (Section 1.1), or by adding a slide to an existing presentation (Section 1.4)—PowerPoint gives that slide a layout such as the Title Slide layout, with one title text placeholder near the top and one subtitle text placeholder near the middle of the slide. But you can change the layout of your slide at any time, either before you've added content to it or after. PowerPoint gives you several options for changing slide layout:

• Apply canned layouts to your slides. You can tell PowerPoint to put a title at the top of a slide and two content placeholders (for text, pictures, and so on) side-by-side in the body of the slide.
• Change orientation. You can change a landscape orientation (where the slide's wider than it is tall) to a portrait orientation (where the slide's taller than it is wide).
• Reposition elements. You can drag text boxes and other objects (such as pictures) around on your slide to reposition them.

PowerPoint offers nine canned layouts you can use. Most of the time, you're going to want to apply these layouts before you add text to your slides, but you can apply them after, as well.

If you have a very specific, custom layout in mind, you'll probably find it easier and more efficient to create a layout master, as described on Section 5.5.

To apply a canned layout to your slide:

1. Create a new slide (Section 1.4). Click any blank spot on your new slide.
   Make sure you don't click a text placeholder, picture, diagram, or other object.
2. Choose Home → Slides → Layout.
   A layout gallery based on the template or theme you've applied to your slideshow appears. (You can also display the layout gallery by right-clicking the slide or the slide thumbnail you see in the Slides pane and then, from the context menu that appears, mousing over the Layout option.)
3. From the layout gallery, click to choose the layout thumbnail you want to apply to your slide (Figure 4-1).

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Changing Background Color

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