PowerPoint 2007: The Missing Manual

Chapter 13. Customizing PowerPoint

According to Microsoft usability studies, fewer than two percent of all the folks who used PowerPoint 2003 customized the way the program looked. Whether the other 98 percent loved the way PowerPoint looked out of the box or couldn’t figure out how to change it is anybody’s guess (although the smart money’s on the latter).

However, if you use PowerPoint regularly, setting a few options to make it look and behave the way you want it to can save you a heap of time and frustration. You can place the options you use most frequently front-and-center on the Quick Access toolbar, for example, or choose which options the status bar displays. You can give PowerPoint a basic list of instructions that describe how you want it to handle spell checking, whether or not you want the Mini Toolbar to pop up, which folder you want to save your presentations in, and much more.

You can even install third-party add-ins that extend PowerPoint by offering options that PowerPoint doesn’t. (The FlashPoint add-in, for example, lets you save your slideshow as a Flash animation—something PowerPoint can’t do on its own.) In short, this chapter shows you how to work faster and more effectively by making PowerPoint work the way you want it to, and not the other way around.

Note

PowerPoint won’t let you do anything rash. You can’t, for example, set up PowerPoint so that when you choose Office button → Save, it deletes the file instead of saving it. PowerPoint ...