style="font-size:15px;"> All the features described in the preceding list work together to control the appearance of your slides in much the same way that style sheets and templates control the appearance of Word documents. You can customize the appearance of individual slides by adding any of the following elements:
✔ Title and body text: Most slide layouts include placeholders for title and body text. You can type any text that you want into these placeholders. By default, PowerPoint formats the text according to the Slide Master, but you can easily override this formatting to use any font, size, styles like bold or italic, or text color that you want.
✔ Text boxes: You can add text anywhere on a slide by drawing a text box and then typing text. Text boxes enable you to add text that doesn’t fit conveniently in the title or body text placeholders.
✔ Shapes: You can use PowerPoint’s drawing tools to add a variety of shapes to your slides. You can use predefined AutoShapes, such as rectangles, circles, stars, arrows, and flowchart symbols. Alternatively, you can create your own shapes by using basic line, polygon, and freehand drawing tools.
✔ Illustrations: You can illustrate your slides by inserting clip art, photographs, and other graphic elements. PowerPoint comes with a large collection of clip art pictures you can use, and Microsoft provides an even larger collection of clip art images online. And, of course, you can insert photographs from your own picture library.
✔ Charts and diagrams: PowerPoint includes a slick diagramming feature called SmartArt that enables you to create several common types of diagrams, including organization charts, cycle diagrams, and others. In addition, you can insert pie charts, line or bar charts, and many other chart types.
✔ Video and Sound: You can add sound clips or video files to your slides. You can also add background music or a custom narration.
Starting PowerPoint
Here’s the procedure for starting PowerPoint in Windows 8, 8.1, or 10:
1. Get ready.
Light some votive candles. Take two Tylenol. Put on a pot of coffee. If you’re allergic to banana slugs, take an allergy pill. Sit in the lotus position facing Redmond, Washington, and recite the Windows creed three times:
Microsoft is my friend. Resistance is futile. No beer and no TV make Homer something something … .
2. Press the Windows key on your keyboard.
The Windows key is the one that has the fancy Windows flag printed on it. On most keyboards, it’s located between the Alt and Tab keys. When you press this button, Windows brings up the Start page, which lists your commonly used applications in large tiles.
3. Click the PowerPoint 2016 tile.
That’s all there is to it – PowerPoint starts up in a flash. (Note that you might have to scroll the Start screen to the right to find the PowerPoint 2016 tile.)
If you’re using Windows 7, the procedure is a little different:
1. Click the Start button.
The Start button is ordinarily found in the lower-left corner of the Windows display. When you click it, the Start menu appears. The Start menu works pretty much the same, no matter which version of Windows you're using.
2. Point to All Programs on the Start menu.
After you click the Start button to reveal the Start menu, move the cursor up to the words All Programs and hold it there a moment. Yet another menu appears, revealing a bevy of commands.
3. Choose Microsoft Office ⇒ Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2016.
Your computer whirs and clicks and possibly makes other unmentionable noises while PowerPoint comes to life.
Navigating the PowerPoint Interface
When you start PowerPoint, it greets you with the screen shown in Figure 1-1. This screen lets you create a blank presentation, open a recently used presentation, or create a new presentation based on a template. You can also take a video tour of PowerPoint.
Figure 1-1: PowerPoint’s opening screen.
For the purposes of this chapter, click Blank Presentation to get started with a new presentation. You will next be greeted with a screen that’s so cluttered with stuff that you’re soon ready to consider newsprint and markers as a viable alternative for your presentations. The center of the screen is mercifully blank, but the top part of the screen is chock-full of little icons and buttons and doohickeys. What is all that stuff?
Figure 1-2 shows the basic PowerPoint screen in all its cluttered glory. The following list points out the more important parts of the PowerPoint screen:
Figure 1-2: PowerPoint’s cluttered screen.
✔ Ribbon: Across the top of the screen, just below the Microsoft PowerPoint title, is PowerPoint’s main user-interface gadget, called the Ribbon. If you’ve worked with earlier versions of PowerPoint, you were probably expecting to see a menu followed by one or more toolbars in this general vicinity. After meticulous research, Microsoft gurus decided that menus and toolbars are hard to use. So they replaced the menus and toolbars with the Ribbon, which combines the functions of both. The Ribbon takes some getting used to, but after you figure it out, it actually does become easier to use than the old menus and toolbars. The deepest and darkest secrets of PowerPoint are hidden on the Ribbon. Wear a helmet when exploring it.
Note that the exact appearance of the Ribbon varies a bit depending on the size of your monitor. On smaller monitors, PowerPoint may compress the Ribbon a bit by using smaller buttons and arranging them differently (for example, stacking them on top of one another instead of placing them side by side).
For
