Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

How to Build a Slide

The outliner is an excellent tool for creating the text and the overall flow of your slideshow. But sooner or later, you’ll want to work on the slides themselves—to add charts or other graphics, modify text that doesn’t fit quite right—and perhaps edit your concluding slide when new data becomes available five minutes before your meeting.

Using Backgrounds

Creating a PowerPoint slide is much like creating a page in a page-layout program. In fact, it’s very similar to creating a page in Word 2008’s Publishing Layout View.

Starting off, PowerPoint lets you set a background color, gradient, pattern, or graphic for your slide or you can create a backdrop by adding shapes and importing graphics. Then on top of that background you’ll add text boxes, pictures, tables, charts, and other graphics—and possibly movies and sounds. PowerPoint shares many of the techniques for creating and manipulating layout objects with Word, as discussed in Chapter 8.

Changing backgrounds

Every slide begins life with a backdrop, courtesy of its slide master. If you’d like to override or enhance that backdrop on a particular slide, however, choose Format → Slide Background, or Control-click (or right-click) the slide and choose Format Background from the pop-up menu, to summon the Format Background dialog box (Figure 16-8). Click the Fill tab on the left and the Solid tab at the top to change the background color. Click the pop-up menu and choose any color variation from the palette of Theme ...