Office 2007: The Missing Manual

Chapter 18.  Editing Slides

Text is the heart and soul of an effective PowerPoint presentation. But coming up with just the right words—and organizing them in just the right way—isn’t always easy. Just as you would if you were constructing a presentation using a flip chart or overhead transparencies, you jot down a few bullet points, read through what you’ve written, think of a few additional points, change your mind, and end up deleting, rearranging, and editing your material over and over again until you’ve got every word on every page (slide) exactly right.

Fortunately, PowerPoint can help. In addition to the standard cut, copy, and paste operations, this chapter shows you how to use PowerPoint’s Search and Replace feature to find words and phrases buried in long presentations and change (or delete) them quickly. And if spelling’s not your speciality, PowerPoint can help you check it.

Editing Text

When you change the text on a PowerPoint slide—when you cut it, copy it, replace it, or move it around—what you’re doing is editing your text. To see most of the editing tools PowerPoint offers, all you have to do is take a look at the ribbon’s Home tab (Figure 18-1). The following sections describe each editing tool in detail.

Note

In contrast, when you change the way your text looks—when you make it bold, italicize it, choose a different font or background color for it, and so on—what you’re doing is formatting. Chapter 19 tells you all you need to know ...