Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

chapter 15: basic powerpoint 569

chapter

15

W

hen you have a point to get across—to the boss, the board of directors, or

your spouse—PowerPoint is your program. PowerPoint lets you com-

bine graphics, text, sounds, and movies on a series of slides (or what

amounts to a series of drawing documents), which link together to form a slide

show. You use that slide show to get your point across in a powerful way. (So much

for our theory on the origins of the name PowerPoint.)

The Big Picture

PowerPoint makes it easy to create and organize your presentation’s outline, slides,

and speaking notes. In PowerPoint’s three-pane Normal view (Figure 15-1), you can

see these three major elements together and work with them simultaneously.

To construct a slide show, you generally start by writing an outline (in the Outline

pane). Here, you can type in the titles for your slides and then drag them around

into a logical order. You then do most of the nitty-gritty design work in the Slide

pane, in which you mix text, graphics, and backgrounds to create individual slide

designs. Finally, the Notes pane lets you type speaker’s notes and attach them to

individual slides, so that you have facts at your fingertips while giving a presenta-

tion.

Step 1: Specify a Design

Before you can get more than a single screen into the program, you must answer an

important question: What will your slides look like?

Basic P owerPoint

570 office x for macintosh: the missing manual

The slides in your show may display different kinds of information—one may show

some text statistics, another may display a diagram, a third may contain a chart, and

so on. Even so, however, you’ll probably want all of these slides to have a consistent

design, no matter what’s on them: the same fonts, background graphics, color scheme,

and so on.

That’s why, as soon as you launch PowerPoint, the first thing you see is the Project

Gallery, which should look familiar if you’ve used Word X or Excel X. In PowerPoint’s

case, the Project Gallery offers several templates that can get you started building

your slide show without having to waste a lot of time on the design elements—or

even composing the text on the slides.

Tip: If you, PowerPoint master, don’t need the Project Gallery intruding into your personal space at every

program launch, turn off the “Show Project Gallery at startup” checkbox at the bottom of the window. Or,

you can toggle the checkbox in PowerPoint→Preferences→View panel.

When project deadlines are looming and there are a million things that need to be

done (including creating a presentation), you’ll welcome these timesaving features.

Canned, Professionally Designed Templates

In the Project Gallery, open the Presentations category by clicking the flippy tri-

angle to its left (see Figure 15-2). Then click Designs. In the middle of the Project

Gallery window, you now see a huge selection of predesigned slide show templates—

Step 1:

Specify a Design

Figure 15-1:

You can see how the

different parts of your

presentation go together in

Normal view. This three-

paned window includes an

area for the slide show’s

outline, a smaller area for

notes, and an area in which

you actually build the slide.

Finally, PowerPoint’s view

controls sit in the lower-left

corner of the main window.

Outline pane Slide pane

View controls Notes pane

Drawing toolbar