Office 2010: The Missing Manual

Chapter 21. Editing Slides

You could create a presentation, shovel in some text and images, and leave it at that. Lots of people do. You’ve probably sat through slideshows that were little more than one poorly formatted slide after another. But when PowerPoint makes it so easy to make your slides look good, why settle for boring or, worse, confusing?

In PowerPoint, whatever you put on a slide—text, photo, table, or chart—is an object. That means it lives inside a frame, such as a text box or a content box, and everything inside the frame comprises the object. So when you move a frame, you also move its contents. When you resize a frame, its contents automatically adjust to the new space. And when you delete a frame, you delete the whole object—not just the frame but everything inside it. Understanding objects makes it easier to make your slides look good.

This chapter shows you how to edit the objects on a slide, including text, tables, pictures, clip art, SmartArt diagrams, and more. If you’re familiar with Word, you’ll be happy to know that you work with many of these objects in PowerPoint just as you do in Word. As with Word, PowerPoint 2010 has better photo-editing capabilities, including background removal and the ability to take screenshots. Read on for the full scoop.

Editing Text

If you’re used to Word, editing text in PowerPoint is both familiar and a little different: familiar because the Mini Toolbar and the Font and Paragraph sections of the Home tab look pretty similar, ...