PowerPoint 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual

Adding More Slides

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 in Section 4.1.

   DESIGN TIME: Using Text Effectively

   If you choose to include text in your presentation, then keep these tips in mind:

   • Distill. Your audience's eyes will glaze over if you hit them with a barrage of text on every slide, so you want to distill your message into as few words as possible. (Three to six bullets and a dozen or so words per ...