Chapter at a Glance
For each slide to accomplish its purpose, it needs to present its content in the most effective way. The layout of individual slides and the order of slides in the presentation contribute significantly to the logical development of your message.
In this chapter, you’ll add slides with different layouts, delete slides, and change the layout of a slide. You’ll also divide a presentation into sections and collapse and expand sections. Finally, you’ll rearrange slides and sections in a presentation.
Note
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 Chapter13 practice file folder. A complete list of practice files is provided in Using the Practice Files at the beginning of this book.
When you create a presentation, you add a slide by clicking the New Slide button in the Slides group on the Home tab. By default in a new presentation, a slide added after the title slide has the Title And Content layout. Thereafter, each added slide has the layout of the preceding slide. If you want to add a slide with a different layout, you can select the layout you want from the New Slide gallery.
If you change your mind about including a slide, you can easily delete it by selecting it either on the Slides tab of the Overview pane or in Slide Sorter view and then pressing the Delete key. You can also right-click the slide in either the pane or the view and then click Delete Slide. To select a series of slides, click the first slide in the series and hold down the Shift key while you click the last slide. To select noncontiguous slides, click the first one and hold down the Ctrl key as you click additional slides.
If you change your mind about the layout of a slide, you don’t have to delete it and then add a new one with the layout you want. Instead, you can change the layout of an existing slide by selecting the new layout from the Layout gallery.
In this exercise, you’ll add a slide with the default layout and add slides with other layouts. You’ll delete first a single slide and then a series of slides. Then you’ll change the layout of a slide.
Note
SET UP You need the ServiceA_start presentation located in your Chapter13 practice file folder to complete this exercise. Open the ServiceA_start presentation, and save it as ServiceA. Then follow the steps.
With slide 1
displayed, on the Home tab, in the
Slides group, click the New Slide
button (not its arrow).PowerPoint adds slide 2 to the presentation with the default Title And Content layout.
Note
Troubleshooting The appearance of buttons and groups on the ribbon changes depending on the width of the program window. For information about changing the appearance of the ribbon to match our screen images, see Modifying the Display of the Ribbon at the beginning of this book.
In the gallery, click Two Content.
PowerPoint adds slide 3, which has a placeholder for a title and two placeholders for text or graphic content.
In the Slides group, click the New Slide button.
PowerPoint adds another slide with the Two Content layout.
Tip
You can also add new slides by pressing keyboard shortcuts while you’re entering text on the Outline tab. For more information, see Entering Text in Placeholders in Chapter 14.
Continue adding slides from the IO gallery, selecting a different layout each time so that you can see what each one looks like.
When you finish, the presentation contains 10 slides.
In the Overview pane, scroll to the top of the Slides tab. Then right-click slide 3, and click Delete Slide.
PowerPoint removes the slide from the presentation and renumbers all the subsequent slides.
On the Slides tab, click slide 5. Then scroll to the bottom of the tab, hold down the Shift key, and click slide 9.
With slides 5 through 9 selected, right-click the selection, and click Delete Slide.
The presentation now has four slides.
With slide 4
selected, on the Home tab, in the Slides group, click the Layout button.The Layout gallery appears. This gallery is the same as the New Slide gallery, but it applies the layout you choose to an existing slide instead of adding a new one.
In the gallery, click the Title and Content thumbnail.
If your presentation will contain information that already exists in a document created in Microsoft Word or another word processing program, you can edit that information into outline format and then import the outline into a PowerPoint presentation. The outline can be a Word document (.doc or .docx) or a Rich Text Format (RTF) file (.rtf).
For the importing process to work as smoothly as possible, the document must be formatted with heading styles. PowerPoint translates Heading 1 styles into slide titles, Heading 2 styles into bullet points, and Heading 3 styles into second-level bullet points, called subpoints.
If you often include a slide that provides the same basic information in your presentations, you don’t have to re-create the slide for each presentation. For example, if you create a slide that shows your company’s product development cycle for a new product presentation, you might want to use variations of that same slide in all new product presentations. You can easily tell PowerPoint to reuse a slide from one presentation in a different presentation. The slide assumes the formatting of its new presentation.
Note
See Also For information about using a slide library to store slides for reuse, see the sidebar Working with Slide Libraries following this topic.
Within a presentation, you can duplicate an existing slide to reuse it as the basis for a new slide. You can then customize the duplicated slide instead of having to create it from scratch.
In this exercise, you’ll add slides by importing a Word outline. Then you’ll reuse a slide from an existing presentation. Finally, you’ll duplicate an existing slide.
Note
SET UP You need the ServiceB_start and Projects presentations and the ServiceOrientation document located in your Chapter13 practice file folder to complete this exercise. Open the ServiceB_start presentation, and save it as ServiceB. Then follow the steps.
On the Home tab, in
the Slides group, click the New Slide arrow, and then below the gallery,
click Slides from Outline.The Insert Outline dialog box opens. This dialog box resembles the Open dialog box.
Navigate to your Chapter13 practice file folder, and then double-click the ServiceOrientation file.
PowerPoint converts the outline into 12 slides.
In the Overview pane, click the Outline tab.
On the Outline tab, each Heading 1 style from the ServiceOrientation document is now a slide title, each Heading 2 style is a bullet point, and each Heading 3 style is a subpoint.
Tip
You can start a new presentation from a Word outline. Click the File tab to display the Backstage view, and then click Open. In the Open dialog box, click All PowerPoint Presentations, and in the list of file types, click All Files. Then locate and double-click the outline document you want to use.
In the Overview pane, click the Slides tab, and then click the empty slide 1.
On the Home tab, in the Slides group, click the New Slide arrow, and then below the gallery, click Reuse Slides.
The Reuse Slides task pane opens on the right side of the window.
In the Reuse Slides task pane, click Browse, and then in the list, click Browse File.
PowerPoint displays the Browse dialog box, which resembles the Open dialog box.
If the contents of your Chapter13 practice file folder are not displayed, navigate to that folder now. Then double-click the Projects presentation.
Thumbnails of all the slides in the presentation appear in the Reuse Slides task pane.
Scroll to the bottom of the task pane to see all the available slides, and then point to the last thumbnail.
The thumbnail expands so that you can see the slide details, making it easier to select the slide you want.
Scroll back to the top of the task pane, and then click the first thumbnail.
PowerPoint inserts the selected slide from the Projects presentation as slide 2 in the ServiceB presentation. The slide takes on the design of the presentation in which it is inserted.
With slide 2 selected on the Slides tab, in the Slides group of the Home tab, click the New Slide arrow. Then click Duplicate Selected Slide.
PowerPoint inserts a new slide 3 identical to slide 2. You could now modify the existing slide content instead of creating it from scratch.
New in PowerPoint 2010 is the ability to divide slides into sections. Sections appear as bars across the Slides tab of the Overview pane in Normal view and across the workspace in Slide Sorter view. They do not appear in other views, and they do not create slides or otherwise interrupt the flow of the presentation.
Dividing a presentation into sections can be a great tool during content development. Because you can hide whole sections of slides, the sections make it easier to focus on one part of a presentation at a time. If you are working on a presentation with other people, you can name one section for each person to delineate who is responsible for which slides.
In this exercise, you’ll divide a presentation into two sections, adding one in Normal view and the other in Slide Sorter view. After naming the sections, you’ll hide their slides and then display first one section and then both sections.
Note
SET UP You need the ServiceC_start presentation located in your Chapter13 practice file folder to complete this exercise. Open the ServiceC_start presentation, and save it as ServiceC. Then follow the steps.
With slide 1
displayed, on the Home tab, in the
Slides group, click the Section button, and then click Add Section.On the Slides tab of the Overview pane, PowerPoint adds a section bar before slide 1.
On the View
Shortcuts toolbar, click the Slide
Sorter button.Click slide 4, click the Section button, and then click Add Section.
Right-click the second Untitled Section bar, and click Rename Section.
In the Section name box, type Process, and then click Rename.
On the Slides tab of the Overview pane, click the Untitled Section bar above slide 1.
The section bar and all the slides in the section are selected.
In the Slides group, click the Section button, and click Rename Section. Then in the Rename Section dialog box, type Introduction as the section name, and click Rename.
In the Slides group, click the Section button, and then click Collapse All.
The slides are hidden under their section bars.
On the Slides tab, click the arrow to the left of Introduction to display only the slides in that section.
In the Slides group, click the Section button, and then click Expand All.
All the slides are now displayed.
After you have created several slides, whether by adding them and entering text or by importing them from another presentation, you might want to rearrange the order of the slides so that they effectively communicate your message. You can rearrange a presentation in three ways.
On the Slides tab, you can drag slides up and down to change their order.
On the Slides tab, you can move entire sections up or down in a presentation.
To see more of the presentation at the same time, you can switch to Slide Sorter view. You can then drag slide thumbnails or sections into the correct order.
In this exercise, you’ll work on the Slides tab and in Slide Sorter view to logically arrange the slides in a presentation. You’ll also delete a section you no longer need.
Note
SET UP You need the ServiceD_start presentation located in your Chapter13 practice file folder to complete this exercise. Open the ServiceD_start presentation, and save it as ServiceD. Then follow the steps.
In the Overview pane, on the Slides tab, click the slide 2 thumbnail, and then drag it downward to the space above the thumbnail for slide 4, but don’t release the mouse button yet.
The thumbnail itself remains in place, but a bar indicates where the slide will move to when you release the mouse button.
Release the mouse button.
PowerPoint moves the slide to its new location in the Process section and switches the numbers of slides 2 and 3.
To the left of Introduction in the first section bar, click the black
Collapse Section button. Then repeat this step
for the Process section.Even with these two sections collapsed, you can’t see all the slides.
On the View
Shortcuts toolbar, click the Slide
Sorter button.Use the Zoom Slider at the right end of the status bar to adjust the zoom percentage so that you can see all the slides.
We set the zoom percentage to 80%.
In the Selling section, click slide 7, and then drag it to the left until its bar sits to the left of slide 5.
Point to the Planning section bar, right-click it, and then click Move Section Up.
The Planning section bar and all its slides move above the Selling section. PowerPoint renumbers the slides in both sections.
Switch to Normal view.
Click the white Expand
Section button to
expand the Introduction and Process
sections.These two sections could easily be combined into one section.
- Click the Process
section bar. Then in the Slides
group, click the Section button, and
click Remove Section.
You can add as many slides as you want. Most templates provide a variety of ready-made slide layouts to choose from.
If you change your mind about a slide or its layout, you can delete it or switch to a different layout.
You can create slides with content already in place by importing an outline or reusing existing slides. Both methods save time and effort.
Grouping slides into sections makes it easy to focus on specific parts of the presentation.
If you need to change the order of slides or sections, you can rearrange them on the Slides tab in Normal view or in Slide Sorter view.