Chapter at a Glance
In this chapter, you will learn how to | |
|---|---|
✓ | Change default program options. |
✓ | Customize the ribbon. |
✓ | Customize the Quick Access Toolbar. |
If you use Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 only occasionally, you might be perfectly happy creating new presentations with the wide range of tools we have already discussed in this book. And you might be comfortable with the default working environment options and behind-the-scenes settings. However, if you create a lot of presentations of various types, you might find yourself wishing that you could streamline the development process or change aspects of the program to make it more suitable for the kinds of presentations you create.
In this chapter, you’ll take a tour of the pages of the PowerPoint Options dialog box to understand the ways in which you can customize the program. Then you’ll manipulate the ribbon and the Quick Access Toolbar to put the tools you need for your daily work at your fingertips.
Practice Files
Before you can complete the exercises in this chapter, you need to copy the book’s practice files to your computer. The practice files you’ll use to complete the exercises in this chapter are in the Chapter15 practice file folder. A complete list of practice files is provided in Using the Practice Files at the beginning of this book.
In earlier chapters, we mentioned that you can change settings in the PowerPoint Options dialog box to customize the PowerPoint environment in various ways. After you work with PowerPoint for a while, you might want to refine more settings to tailor the program to the way you work. Knowing which settings are where in the PowerPoint Options dialog box makes the customizing process more efficient.
In this exercise, you’ll open the PowerPoint Options dialog box and explore several of the available pages.
Set Up
You don’t need any practice files to complete this exercise. With a blank presentation open and active, follow the steps.
Tip
As you work your way through this exercise, don’t worry if the settings in your Word Options dialog box are different from ours. Settings can vary depending on changes you might have made while working through the exercises and depending on which programs you have installed.
On the Home tab, in the Font group, point to the Bold button.
PowerPoint displays a ScreenTip.
By default, ScreenTips includes the button name, its keyboard shortcut, and a description of its purpose.
In a minute, we’ll change a setting in the PowerPoint Options dialog box that controls the display of ScreenTips.
Display the Backstage view, and click Options.
The PowerPoint Options dialog box opens, displaying the General page.
If having the Mini Toolbar appear when you select text is more of a hindrance than a help, you can disable that feature by clearing the Show Mini Toolbar On Selection check box. Similarly, you can disable the live preview of styles and formatting by clearing the Enable Live Preview check box.
Under User Interface options, display the Color scheme list, and click Black.
Display the ScreenTip style list, and click Don’t show feature descriptions in ScreenTips.
Under Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office, verify that the User name and Initials are correct, or change them to the way you want them to appear.
Click OK to close the PowerPoint Options dialog box.
The program window elements are now black and shades of gray.
In the Font group, point to the Bold button.
The ScreenTip now includes only the button name and its keyboard shortcut.
Open the PowerPoint Options dialog box, and in the left pane, click Proofing.
This page provides options for adjusting the AutoCorrect settings and for refining the spell-checking and grammar-checking processes.
See Also
For information about AutoCorrect and checking spelling, see Checking Spelling and Choosing the Best Words in Chapter 3.
On this page, you can change the default presentation format; the AutoRecover file save rate and location; the default location to which PowerPoint saves files you create; and the default location for files you check out from document management servers (such as Microsoft SharePoint) and drafts of those files saved while you are working offline.
Tip
Although we mention SharePoint in Collaborating with Other People in Chapter 12, a discussion of SharePoint is beyond the scope of this book.
The Save page also has options for specifying whether you want the fonts used within the current presentation to be embedded in the presentation, in the event that someone who opens the presentation doesn’t have those fonts on his or her computer.
Under Save presentations, display the Save files in this format list.
One of the format options is the PowerPoint Presentation 97-2003 format that creates .ppt files compatible with earlier versions of PowerPoint. If you have upgraded to PowerPoint 2010 but your colleagues are still working in an earlier version of the program, you might want to select this option so that they will be able to view and work with any presentation you create.
Click away from the list to close it, and then display the Language page.
If you create presentations for international audiences, you can make additional editing languages available on this page. You can also specify the Display, Help, and ScreenTip languages.
This page includes options related to editing presentation content; displaying presentations on-screen; printing, saving, and sharing presentations; and a variety of other options. Although these options are labeled Advanced, they are the ones you’re most likely to want to adjust to suit the way you work.
Skipping over Customize Ribbon and Quick Access Toolbar, which we discuss in later topics in this chapter, click Add-Ins.
This page displays all the active and inactive add-ins installed on your computer. You can add new ones and remove any you no longer need from this page.
See Also
For information about add-ins, see the sidebar Using Add-ins at the end of this topic.
Display the Trust Center page.
This page provides links to information about privacy and security. It also provides access to the Trust Center settings that control the actions PowerPoint takes in response to presentations that are provided by certain people or companies, that are saved in certain locations, or that contain ActiveX controls or macros.
Under Microsoft PowerPoint Trust Center, click Trust Center Settings, and then in the left pane of the Trust Center dialog box, click Trusted Locations.
On this page, you can specify locations from which PowerPoint won’t block content.
Explore the other pages of the Trust Center dialog box, and then click Cancel to return to the PowerPoint Options dialog box.
Even if PowerPoint 2010 is the first version of the program you have ever worked with, you will by now be accustomed to working with commands represented as buttons on the ribbon. The ribbon was designed to make all the commonly used commands visible, so that people could more easily discover the full potential of the program. But many people use PowerPoint to perform the same set of tasks all the time, and for them, the visibility of buttons (or even entire groups of buttons) that they never use is just another form of clutter.
See Also
For information about minimizing and expanding the ribbon, see Customizing the Quick Access Toolbar later in this chapter.
Would you prefer to see fewer commands, not more? Or would you prefer to see more specialized groups of commands? Well, you can. Clicking Customize Ribbon in the left pane of the PowerPoint Options dialog box displays the Customize Ribbon page, which is new in PowerPoint 2010.
On this page, you can customize the ribbon in the following ways:
If you rarely use a tab, you can turn it off.
If you use the commands in only a few groups on each tab, you can remove the groups you don’t use. (The group is not removed from the program, just from its tab.)
You can move a predefined group by removing it from one tab and then adding it to another.
You can duplicate a predefined group by adding it to another tab.
You can create a custom group on any tab and then add commands to it. (You cannot add commands to a predefined group.)
For the ultimate in customization, you can create a custom tab. For example, you might want to do this if you use only a few commands from each tab and you find it inefficient to flip between them.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with the ribbon to come up with the configuration that best suits the way you work. If at any point you find that your new ribbon is harder to work with rather than easier, you can always reset everything back to the default configuration.
Tip
If you have upgraded from PowerPoint 2003 or an earlier version, you might identify a few commands that no longer seem to be available. A few old features have been abandoned, but others that people used only rarely have simply been pushed off to one side. If you sorely miss one of these sidelined features, you can make it a part of your PowerPoint environment by adding it to the ribbon. You can find a list of all the commands that do not appear on the ribbon but are still available in PowerPoint by displaying the Customize Ribbon page of the PowerPoint Options dialog box and then clicking Commands Not In The Ribbon in the Choose Commands From list.
In this exercise, you’ll turn off tabs, remove groups, create a custom group, and add a command to the new group. Then you’ll create a tab and move predefined groups of buttons to it. Finally, you’ll reset the ribbon to its default state.
Set Up
You need the ColorNew_start presentation located in your Chapter15 practice file folder to complete this exercise. Open the ColorNew_start presentation, and save it as ColorNew. Then follow the steps.
Open the PowerPoint Options dialog box, and then click Customize Ribbon.
The Customize Ribbon page is displayed.
In the right pane, clear the check boxes of the Insert, Design, Transitions, Animations, and Slide Show tabs. Then click OK.
The ribbon now displays only the File, Home, Review, and View tabs.
Redisplay the Customize Ribbon page of the PowerPoint Options dialog box, and in the right pane, select the Design check box. Then click the plus sign to display the groups on this tab.
Above the left pane, display the Choose commands from list, and click Main Tabs. Then in the pane below, click the plus sign adjacent to Design to display the groups that are predefined for this tab.
In the right pane, click the Page Setup group, and then click Remove.
The group is removed from the Design tab on the ribbon (the pane on the right), but is still available in the pane on the left. You can add it back to the Design tab, or add it to a different tab, at any time.
If the Home group is not expanded in the right pane, click the plus sign adjacent to Home to displays its groups, and then click the word Home.
Below the right pane, click New Group. When the New Group (Custom) group is added to the bottom of the Home group list, click Rename, type Final in the Display name box, and click OK. Then click the Move Up button until the Final group is at the top of the groups list.
Because of its location in the hierarchy, the new group will appear at the left end of the Home tab.
Above the pane on the left, display the Choose commands from list, and click File Tab.
The available commands list changes to include only the commands that are available in the Backstage view, which you display by clicking the File tab.
In the available commands list, click Inspect Document, and click Add. Then repeat this step to add Mark as Final.
The two commands are added to the custom group.
In the pane on the right, remove the Font, Paragraph, and Drawing groups from the Home tab.
Click the word Home, and then below the pane, click New Tab.
A new tab is added to the right pane and is selected for display on the ribbon. It has automatically been given one custom group.
Remove the custom group from the New Tab (Custom).
Click New Tab (Custom), and then click Rename. In the Rename dialog box, type Formatting in the Display name box, and click OK.
Display Main Tabs in the pane on the left, and then expand the Home and Design tabs.
With the new Formatting (Custom) tab selected in the right pane, add the Font, Paragraph, and Drawing groups from Home in the left pane, and then add Page Setup from Design.
The right pane now shows the new configuration of the Home, Formatting, and Design tabs.
In the PowerPoint Options dialog box, click OK.
The Home tab displays the new Final group.
With the title of slide 1 selected, click the Formatting tab.
The formatting commands are now collected on the Formatting tab.
Display the Customize Ribbon page of the PowerPoint Options dialog box. In the lower-right corner, click Reset, and then click Reset all customizations. Then in the message box asking you to confirm that you want to delete all ribbon and Quick Access Toolbar customizations, click Yes.
The default ribbon configuration is restored.
By default, the Save, Undo, and Repeat/Redo buttons appear on the Quick Access Toolbar. If you regularly use a few buttons that are scattered on various tabs of the ribbon and you don’t want to switch between tabs to access the buttons or crowd your ribbon with a custom tab, you might want to add these frequently used buttons to the Quick Access Toolbar. They are then always visible in the upper-left corner of the program window.
Clicking Quick Access Toolbar in the left pane of the PowerPoint Options dialog box displays the page where you specify which commands you want to appear on the toolbar.
On this page, you can customize the Quick Access Toolbar in the following ways:
You can define a custom Quick Access Toolbar for all presentations, or you can define a custom Quick Access Toolbar for a specific presentation.
You can add any command from any group of any tab, including contextual tabs, to the toolbar.
You can display a separator between different types of buttons.
You can move buttons around on the toolbar until they are in the order you want.
You can reset everything back to the default Quick Access Toolbar configuration.
If you use only a few buttons, you can add those buttons to the Quick Access Toolbar and then hide the ribbon by double-clicking the active tab or by clicking the Minimize The Ribbon button. Only the Quick Access Toolbar and tab names remain visible. You can temporarily redisplay the ribbon by clicking the tab you want to view. You can permanently redisplay the ribbon by double-clicking any tab or by clicking the Expand The Ribbon button.
As you add buttons to the Quick Access Toolbar, it expands to accommodate them. If you add many buttons, it might become difficult to view the text in the title bar, or all the buttons on the Quick Access Toolbar might not be visible, defeating the purpose of adding them. To resolve this problem, you can move the Quick Access Toolbar below the ribbon by clicking the Customize Quick Access Toolbar button and then clicking Show Below The Ribbon.
In this exercise, you’ll add a couple of buttons to the Quick Access Toolbar for all presentations, and then you’ll test the buttons.
Set Up
You need the BuyersSeminar_start presentation located in your Chapter15 practice file folder to complete this exercise. Open the BuyersSeminar_start presentation, and save it as BuyersSeminar. Then follow the steps.
Open the PowerPoint Options dialog box, and then click Quick Access Toolbar.
A list of available commands appears in the pane on the left, and a list of the commands currently displayed on the Quick Access Toolbar appears in the pane on the right.
Tip
If you want to create a Quick Access Toolbar that is specific to the active presentation, on the right side of the PowerPoint Options dialog box, click the arrow at the right end of the box below Customize Quick Access Toolbar, and then click For <name of presentation>. Then any command you select will be added to that specific toolbar instead of the toolbar for all presentations.
At the top of the available commands list on the left, double-click Separator.
You can use separator lines to divide commands into groups, making them easier to find.
Scroll down the available commands list, click the Quick Print command, and then click Add.
Repeat step 3 to add the Text Box command.
The two commands have been added to the list of commands that will appear on the Quick Access Toolbar, with a separator between them and the default commands.
Click OK to close the PowerPoint Options dialog box.
The Quick Access Toolbar now includes the default Save, Undo, and Repeat/Redo buttons and the custom Quick Print and Text Box buttons, separated by a line.
To print a presentation with the default settings, you no longer have to click the File tab to display the Backstage view, click Print in the left pane, and then click the Print button. And to create a text box, you no longer need to switch to the Insert tab.
If you want to test printing from the Quick Access Toolbar, ensure that your printer is turned on, and then on the Quick Access Toolbar, click the Quick Print button.
Now let’s see how easy it is to create a text box when you are working primarily with the commands on a tab other than the Insert tab.
Display slide 4. Then with the Home tab active, on the Quick Access Toolbar, click the Text box button.
On the slide, click below the bulleted list, and type These steps are critical to a successful trip. Then select the text and format it any way you want by using the commands on the active Home tab.
You no longer have to switch tabs to add text box notes to slides.
Display the Quick Access Toolbar page of the PowerPoint Options dialog box, click Reset, and then click Reset only Quick Access Toolbar.
In the Reset Customizations message box, click Yes to return the Quick Access Toolbar to its default contents. Then click OK to close the PowerPoint Options dialog box.
The PowerPoint environment is flexible and can be customized to meet your needs.
Most of the settings that control the working environment are gathered on the pages of the PowerPoint Options dialog box.
You can customize the ribbon to put precisely the presentation development tools you need at your fingertips.
You can provide one-click access to any PowerPoint 2010 command by adding a button for it to the Quick Access Toolbar, either for all presentations or for one presentation.