Chapter 21

Creating a Presentation, Slides, and Text

IN THIS CHAPTER

Starting a new presentation

Saving your work

Setting passwords for file access

Closing and reopening presentations

Creating new slides

Inserting content from external sources

Managing slides

Using content placeholders

Creating text boxes manually

Working with text boxes

If you’re an experienced Windows and PowerPoint user, starting new presentations and saving files may be second nature to you. If so — great! You may not need this chapter. On the other hand, if you aren’t entirely certain about some of the finer points, such as saving in different formats or locations, stick around.

Even people who consider themselves “advanced” users may benefit from this chapter because it looks at some of the unique advanced saving features of Office applications and explains how to secure files with passwords.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to build a simple text-based presentation by creating new slides and entering text on them. You’ll learn how to import content from other programs, and how to create, size, and position text boxes to hold the text for your presentation.

Starting a New Presentation

You can start a blank presentation, or you can base the new presentation on a template or on another presentation. Using a template or existing presentation can save you some time. However, if you have a specific vision you’re going for, starting a presentation from scratch gives you a clean canvas to work from.

Starting a blank presentation

When you open PowerPoint, a Start screen appears. From here you can click Blank Presentation, as shown in Figure 21.1, or you can just press Esc at the Start screen to access a blank presentation.

FIGURE 21.1 Use the Blank Presentation tile on the Start screen to start a new presentation.

If you want to start a blank presentation at some time other than when you start up PowerPoint, you can do the following:

A new blank presentation begins automatically with one slide. Just add your content to it, add more slides if needed, change the formatting (as you’ll learn in upcoming chapters), and go for it.

Starting a presentation from a template

A template is a file that contains starter settings — and sometimes starter content — on which you can base new presentations. Templates vary in their exact offerings but can include sample slides, a background graphic, custom color and font themes, and custom positioning for object placeholders.

The sample templates stored on your computer (such as the Welcome to PowerPoint template shown in Figure 21.1) appear as tiles on the Start screen along with tiles for the themes and on the New screen when you choose File ⇒ New, as in the preceding section. You can click whichever one you want to use.

Only a few sample templates are stored on your hard disk because Microsoft assumes that most people have an always-on Internet connection these days. When you are connected to the Internet, you can access the complete Office.com library of template files. Use the Search for online templates and themes box to search for templates in a particular category or with certain keywords associated with them.

Follow these steps to locate a template and use it to start a new presentation:

1. Choose File ⇒ New.

2. In the Search for online templates and themes box, type a keyword or phrase to search for and press Enter, or click one of the category links on the Suggested searches line below the Search box. See Figure 21.2. A list of templates appears that match your criteria.

FIGURE 21.2 Search for templates by keyword or click a category.

3. Click a template to see a preview of it, as shown in Figure 21.3.

FIGURE 21.3 Preview a template before selecting it.

4. Click Create. A new presentation is created based on that template.

Using a personal template

In the section, “Saving in a different format,” later in this chapter, you will learn how to save a presentation file in template format so you can use it as a basis for new presentations. These are called personal templates in PowerPoint 2013.

When you specify a default location for personal templates or download or create and save a template, the New screen has two categories below the suggested searches: Featured and Personal (or Custom). Personal appears if you have not specified a Workgroup Templates location (covered later in this chapter), and Custom appears instead if you have done so.

You can click Personal or Custom to see the locations that hold your own personal templates and themes. The Document Themes folder appears here (you’ll learn more about it in Chapter 22, “Working with Layouts, Themes, and Masters”) and also whatever folder you specified as the default personal templates location (see the preceding note). In addition, if you have specified a Workgroup Templates location, that folder appears here too.

To access your personal templates, follow these steps:

1. Choose File ⇒ New.

2. Click Personal or click Custom. An icon appears for the location you have defined as your personal template folder as well as an icon for Document Themes. There may also be a Workgroup Templates folder shown. See Figure 21.4.

FIGURE 21.4 Choose Personal or Custom to see your personal template location.

3. Click the icon for your personal template folder (My Templates). Thumbnails appear for your personal templates.

4. Click the desired personal template. A new presentation opens based on that template.

Basing a new presentation on existing content

If you already have a presentation that’s similar to the new one you need to create, you can base the new presentation on the existing one. To do so, open the existing presentation and then use Save As (covered in the next section, “Saving Your Work”) to save it under a new name.

PowerPoint can open files in several formats other than its own, so you can start a new presentation based on some work you have done elsewhere. For example, you can open a Word outline in PowerPoint. The results might not be very attractive, but you can fix that later with some text editing, slide layouts, and design changes.

To open a file from another application, do the following:

1. Choose File ⇒ Open. The Open screen appears.

2. Click Computer.

3. Click Browse. The Open dialog box appears.

4. Click the File Type button (currently set to All PowerPoint Presentations) and choose the file type. For example, to open a text file, choose All Outlines, as shown in Figure 21.5.

FIGURE 21.5 By changing the file type you can select a file of another supported type, such as an outline document.

5. Navigate to the location containing the file you want to open.

6. Select the desired file, and then click Open.

7. Save your work as a PowerPoint file by choosing File ⇒ Save As.

See the next section for more information about saving.

Saving Your Work

PowerPoint is typical of most Windows programs in the way that it saves and opens files. The entire PowerPoint presentation is saved in a single file incorporating any graphics, charts, or other elements. The first time you save a presentation, PowerPoint prompts you for a name and location. Thereafter, when you save that presentation, PowerPoint uses the same settings and does not prompt you for them again.

Understanding save locations

Where can you save your files? You can save files in any location on your local hard disk, on a removable drive such as a USB flash drive, to a network location, to your SkyDrive, or to a SharePoint server, just to name a few. A more pertinent question is, where should you save your files? That depends on your situation.

In most Office 2013 apps, the default save location is your SkyDrive. Your SkyDrive is a free online storage location that Microsoft provides to anyone who wants it. (You don’t even have to be a Windows or Office user.) Your SkyDrive is available no matter what computer you are logged into, as long as you have an Internet connection, so it’s a good choice for people who have multiple PCs that they alternate between. See Chapter 39 for more information about saving to your SkyDrive.

The main drawback to using your SkyDrive is that if your Internet connection isn’t available, neither are your files. People with intermittent or inconsistent Internet service may want to store files on the local hard drive, where they are always available. Saving to your Documents library is a safe bet, but you can also create your own folders on your hard drive and save there.

If you have a local network in your home or office, you might have a central file storage location on that network. For example, all the people in your department might save their files to the same network share so that the files are available to everyone at all times. Some companies maintain SharePoint servers for file sharing; others just make network drives and folders available to all the users who need them.

If you want local portability, consider saving to a removable drive such as a USB flash drive or an external hard drive. You can then plug the storage device into some other computer whenever you need file transport, and you don’t have to worry about a network or Internet connection being available.

Saving for the first time

If you haven’t previously saved the presentation you are working on, Save and Save As do the same thing: They open the Save As screen. From there, you can specify a name, file type, and file location. Follow these steps:

1. Choose File ⇒ Save. The Save As screen appears. Your SkyDrive is selected by default, as shown in Figure 21.6.

FIGURE 21.6 The Save As screen

2. (Optional) If you want to save to your Documents library, click Computer.

---

Tip

Each user has a Documents library, which is a composite location that represents multiple actual folders. If you save to the Documents library, the file is actually saved in the default storage location for the library, which is C:Usersuser nameMy Documents.

---

3. Click the Browse button. The Save As dialog box opens.

---

Note

To save in a different location than your SkyDrive or computer, see the section “Changing drives and folders” later in this chapter. To save in a different format, see the section “Saving in a different format.”

---

4. In the File name box, type the name you want to use for the presentation, replacing the placeholder name that appears there. See Figure 21.7.

FIGURE 21.7 The Save As dialog box

5. Click Save. The file is saved.

File names can be up to 255 characters. For practical purposes, however, keep the names short. You can include spaces in the file names and most symbols except <, >, ?, ∗, /, and . However, if you plan to post the file on a network or the Internet at some point, you should avoid using spaces; use the underscore character instead to simulate a space, if necessary. File names that include exclamation points also cause problems, so beware of that. Generally, it is best to avoid punctuation marks in file names.

Saving subsequent times

After you have saved a presentation once, you can resave it with the same settings (same file type, name, and location) in any of the following ways:

• Choose File ⇒ Save.
• Press Ctrl+S.
• Click the Save button on the Quick Access Toolbar.

If you need to save your presentation under a different name, as a different file type, or in a different location, use the Save As command instead. This reopens the Save As screen, as in the preceding steps, so that you can save differently. The originally saved copy will remain under the original name, type, and location.

Changing drives and folders

The Office applications enable you to save files to other locations besides your SkyDrive or the Documents library. These other locations can include local hard disk folders, USB flash drives and other flash media, other hard disks in the same PC, hard disks on other PCs in a network, hard disks on web servers on the Internet, or writeable CDs or DVDs.

The Navigation pane on the left side of the Save As dialog box is home to several collapsible/expandable categories. Double-click a category to open it and then make selections from within it (see Figure 21.8). You can choose from the following categories:

• Favorites: Shortcuts for popular locations such as Downloads and Desktop appear in the Favorites list, and you can also add your own shortcuts here.
• Libraries: Libraries are virtual folders that organize locations by the types of files they contain. Double-click Libraries and then click through a category such as Documents or Pictures.

FIGURE 21.8 The Save As dialog box contains a number of shortcuts for navigation in the left pane.

• Homegroup: Windows 7 and 8 have a home networking feature called Homegroup; if you use it to set up your network, you can browse other network computers by clicking here.
• Computer: Browse the complete drive and folder listing for your local PC here.
• Network: Browse to local network locations such as the folders on a networked external hard disk.

You can also navigate via the Address bar. The Address bar shows the path to the currently displayed location. You can jump directly to any of those levels by clicking the name there. You can also click the right-pointing arrow to the right of any level to see a menu of other folders within that location and jump to any of them from the menu, as shown in Figure 21.9.

FIGURE 21.9 Click an arrow on the Address bar to see a menu of locations at the chosen level within the current path.

Saving in a different format

All PowerPoint 2007, 2010, and 2013 files save by default in an XML-based file format called PowerPoint Presentation (*.pptx). eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is a text-based coding system similar to HTML that describes formatting by using inline bracketed codes and style sheets. XML-based data files are smaller than the data files from earlier PowerPoint versions, and they support all of the latest PowerPoint features. For best results, use this format whenever you don’t have a reason to use some other format.

There are also several variants of this format for specialty uses. For example, there’s a macro-enabled version with a .pptm filename extension. There are also “show” variants (.ppsx and .ppsm) that open in Slide Show view by default and template variants (.potx and .potm) that function as templates.

Not everyone has PowerPoint 2007 or higher; you might sometimes need to share files with people who have some earlier version of PowerPoint. Users of PowerPoint 2003 can download a compatibility pack that will allow them to accept the new files, but you can’t assume that everyone who has an earlier version of PowerPoint will download it. Therefore, you might need to save presentations in other file formats to share files with other people.

The available formats are shown in Table 21.1. In the Save As dialog box, open the Save as type drop-down list and select the desired format, as shown in Figure 21.10.

TABLE 21.1 PowerPoint Save As Formats

FIGURE 21.10 Choose a different format, if necessary, from the Save As Type drop-down list.

Table 21.1 lists a lot of choices, but don’t let that overwhelm you. You have three main decisions to make:

• PowerPoint 2007–2013 format or backward compatible with PowerPoint 97–2003: Unless compatibility is essential, go with the newer format because you get access to all of the new features. (See Table 21.2 to learn what you’ll lose with backward compatibility.) If you use a backward-compatible format, some of the features described in this book work differently or aren’t available at all.

  TABLE 21.2 PowerPoint 2013 Features Not Supported in the PowerPoint 97–2003 File Format

  Feature	Issues
  SmartArt graphics	Converted to uneditable pictures
  Charts (except Microsoft Graph charts)	Converted to editable OLE objects, but the chart might appear different
  Custom slide layouts	Converted to multiple masters
  Drop shadows	Soft shadows converted to hard shadows
  Equations	Converted to uneditable pictures
  Heading and body fonts	Converted to non-theme formatting
  Effects: 2-D or 3-D WordArt text Gradient outlines for shapes or text Strikethrough and double-strikethrough Gradient, picture, and texture fills on text Soft edges, reflections, some types of shadows Most 3-D effects	Converted to uneditable pictures
  Themes	Converted to non-theme formatting
  Theme colors	Converted to non-theme colors
  Theme effects	Converted to non-theme effects
  Theme fonts	Converted to non-theme fonts

• Macro enabled or not: If you plan to create and store macros, use a macro-enabled format; if not, use a file format that does not include macro support, for a slightly safer file (because a file cannot carry viruses if it can’t carry macro code).
• Regular presentation or PowerPoint Show: The “show” variant starts the presentation in Slide Show view when it is loaded in PowerPoint; that’s the only difference between it and a regular presentation. You can build your presentation in a regular format and then save in show format right before distribution. PowerPoint shows can be opened and edited in PowerPoint the same as any other file.

Most of the other choices from Table 21.1 are special-purpose formats and not suitable for everyday use. The following sections explain some of those special file types.

Saving slides as graphics

If you save your presentation in one of the graphic formats shown in the Graphics/other section of Table 21.1, the result is a series of individually named graphic files, one per slide. (The original presentation continues to exist as a separate file.) If you choose one of these formats, you’re asked whether you want to export the current slide only or all slides. If you choose to export all slides, PowerPoint creates a new folder in the selected folder with the same name as the original presentation file and places the graphics files in it.

Saving slide text only

If you want to export the text of the slides to some other application, consider the Outline/RTF format, which creates an outline similar to what you see in the Outline pane in PowerPoint. This file can then be opened in Word or any other application that supports Rich Text format (RTF) text files. Only text in placeholders is exported, though, not text in manually inserted text boxes. If you aren’t sure which text will be included, view the presentation in the Outline pane; any text that doesn’t appear there will not be exported.

Specifying save options

The save options enable you to fine-tune the saving process for special needs. For example, you can employ save options to embed fonts, to change the interval at which PowerPoint saves AutoRecover information, and more.

There are two ways to access the Save options:

• Choose File ⇒ Options ⇒ Save.
• From the Save As dialog box, click Tools ⇒ Save Options.

The PowerPoint Options dialog box appears (Figure 21.11). Set any of the options you want to set and click OK when you are finished.

FIGURE 21.11 Set save options to match the way you want PowerPoint to save your work.

Table 21.3 summarizes the save options. One of the most important features described in Table 21.3 is AutoRecover, which is turned on by default. This means if a system error or a power outage causes PowerPoint to terminate unexpectedly, you do not lose all of your work. The next time you start PowerPoint, it opens the recovered file and asks if you want to save it.

TABLE 21.3 Save Options

Setting Passwords for File Access

If a presentation contains sensitive or confidential data, you can encrypt the file and protect it with a password. Encryption is a type of “scrambling” done to the file so that nobody can see it, either from within PowerPoint or with any other type of file-browsing utility.

You can enter two separate passwords for a file: the Open password and the Modify password. Use an Open password to prevent unauthorized people from viewing the file at all. Use a Modify password to prevent people from making changes to the file.

You can use one, both, or neither of the password types. For example, suppose you have a personnel presentation that contains salary information. You might use an Open password and distribute that password to a few key people in the human resources department who need access to it. But then you might use a Modify password to ensure that none of those people make any changes to the presentation as they are viewing it.

For the Open password, you can specify an encryption method and strength. Many encryption codes are available, and the differences between them are significant mostly to high-end technical users. However, if you do have a preference, you can choose it when you choose the Open password.

To manage a file’s passwords and other security settings, follow these steps:

1. Begin to save the file as you normally would from the Save As dialog box.

2. In the Save As dialog box, click Tools, and choose General Options. The General Options dialog box opens (Figure 21.12).

FIGURE 21.12 Set a password to prevent unauthorized access.

3. If you want an Open password, enter it in the Password to open box.

4. If you want a Modify password, enter it in the Password to modify box. (You don’t have to use both an Open and a Modify password; you can use just one or the other if you like.)

5. (Optional) If you want your personal information stripped from the file, such as your name removed from the Author field of the Properties box, select the Remove automatically created personal information from this file on save check box.

6. (Optional) If desired, adjust the macro security level for PowerPoint (all files, not just this one) by clicking the Macro Security button and making changes to the settings in the Trust Center; then click OK to return to the General Options dialog box.

7. Click OK. If you specified a password in step 3, a confirmation box appears for it.

8. If the confirmation box appears, retype the same password and click OK. If you specified a password in step 4, a confirmation box appears for it.

9. If the confirmation box appears, retype the same password and click OK.

10. Continue saving as you normally would.

When you (or someone else) open the file, a Password prompt appears. The Open password must be entered to open the presentation file. The Modify password will not work. After that hurdle, if you have set a separate Modify password, a prompt for that appears. Your choices are to enter the Modify password, to cancel, or to click the Read-Only option to open the presentation in Read-Only mode.

Closing and Reopening Presentations

You can have several presentation files open at once and switch freely between them, but this can bog down your computer’s performance somewhat. Unless you are doing some cut-and-paste work, it’s best to have only one presentation file open — the one you are actively working on. It’s easy to close and open presentations as needed.

Closing a presentation

When you exit PowerPoint, the open presentation file automatically closes and you’re prompted to save your changes if you have made any. If you want to close a presentation file without exiting PowerPoint, follow these steps:

Opening a presentation

To open a recently used presentation, choose File ⇒ Open and click one of the presentations on the Recent Presentations list on the right. Up to 25 can appear by default (see Figure 21.13).

FIGURE 21.13 Recently opened presentations appear when you select Open from the File menu.

If the presentation you want to open does not appear on the Recent Presentations list, follow these steps to find and open it:

To open more than one presentation at once, hold down the Ctrl key as you click each file you want to open. When you click the Open button, they all open in their own windows. For more information, see the sidebar “Working with Multiple Presentations” later in this chapter.

The Open button in the Open dialog box has its own drop-down list from which you can select commands that open the file in different ways. See Figure 21.14, and refer to Table 21.4 for an explanation of the available options.

FIGURE 21.14 The Open button’s menu contains several special options for opening a file.

TABLE 21.4 Open Options

Opening a file from a different program

Just as you can save files in various program formats, you can open files from various programs. PowerPoint can detect the type of file and convert it automatically as you open it, so you do not have to know the exact file type. (For example, if you have an old PowerPoint file with a .ppt filename extension, you don’t have to know what version it came from.) The only problem is with files that have filename extensions that PowerPoint doesn’t automatically recognize. In that case, you must change the File Type setting in the Open dialog box to All Files so that the file to be opened becomes available on the file list, as shown in Figure 21.15. The change is valid for only this one use of the Open dialog box; the file type reverts to All PowerPoint Presentations, which is the default, the next time you open the dialog box.

FIGURE 21.15 To open files from different programs, change the File Type setting to All Files.

Working with Multiple Presentations

You will usually work with only one presentation at a time. But occasionally you may need to have two or more presentations open at once — for example, to make it easier to copy text or slides from one presentation to another.

To open another presentation, choose File ⇒ Open and select the one you want, the same as usual.

When more than one presentation is open, you can switch among them by selecting the one you want to see from the taskbar in Windows. Alternatively, you can click the Switch Windows button in the Window group on the View tab and select any open presentation from there, as shown in the following screen shot.

Switch between open windows of all applications — not just PowerPoint — by pressing Alt+Esc repeatedly to cycle through them or by holding down the Alt key and pressing Tab to browse through thumbnails of open windows.

---

Finding a presentation file to open

If you have forgotten where you saved a particular presentation file, you’re not out of luck. The Open dialog box includes a Search box that can help you locate it, as shown in Figure 21.16.

FIGURE 21.16 Use the Search box in the Open dialog box to look for a file.

To search for a file, follow these steps:

Setting File Properties

File properties are facts about each file that can help you organize them. If you have a lot of PowerPoint files, using file properties can help you search intelligently for them using the Search feature you learned about in the preceding section. For example, you can specify an author, a manager, and a company for each file and then search based on those values.

You can set a file’s properties by doing the following:

1. Choose File ⇒ Info.

2. Click the Properties heading (on the right side of the Info screen), and on the menu that appears, click Show Document Panel. The Document Panel appears above the presentation window.

3. Fill in any information you want to store about the presentation, as shown in Figure 21.17.

FIGURE 21.17 Enter information to store in the file’s properties.

4. Click the down arrow to the right of Document Properties in the Document Panel, and choose Advanced Properties. The Properties dialog box for the file appears.

5. Click the Summary tab, and confirm or change any information there. This is the same information that you entered in the Properties Ribbon, with the addition of a couple of other fields, as shown in Figure 21.18.

FIGURE 21.18 The Summary tab has many of the same fields as the Ribbon.

6. Click the Custom tab, choose any additional fields you need, and set values for them. For example, click the Client field on the Name list, and type a value for it in the Value text box. Repeat this for any of the other custom fields.

7. Review the information on the Statistics and Contents tab if desired. (You can’t change that information.)

8. Click OK.

Now you can use the contents of the properties fields when performing a search.

Creating New Slides

Different templates start a presentation with different numbers and types of slides. A blank presentation has only a single slide, and you must create any others that you want.

There are several ways to create new slides. For example, you can type new text in the outline and then promote it to slide status, or you can add slides with the New Slide button that is on the Home tab. You can also copy existing slides, either within the same presentation or from other sources. The following sections outline these procedures in more detail.

Creating new slides from Outline view

As discussed in Chapter 20, Outline view shows the text from the presentation’s slides in a hierarchical tree, with the slide titles at the top level (the slide level) and the various levels of bulleted lists on the slides displaying as subordinate levels. Text that you type in the Outline pane appears on the slide, and vice versa, as shown in Figure 21.19.

FIGURE 21.19 When you type text into the Outline pane, it automatically appears on the current slide.

Follow these steps to create a new slide from Outline view:

You can also create a new slide by starting a new line in the Outline pane and then promoting it to slide level by pressing Shift+Tab. Follow these steps to insert a new slide in this way:

After creating the slide, you can continue creating its content directly in the Outline pane. Press Enter to start a new line, and then use Tab to demote, or Shift+Tab to promote, the line to the desired level. You can also right-click the text and choose Promote or Demote. Promoting a line all the way to the top level changes the line to a new slide title.

Creating a slide from the Thumbnails pane

Here’s a very quick method for creating a new slide, based on the default layout. It doesn’t get much easier than this:

The drawback to creating a slide in any of the ways you have learned about so far in this chapter is that you cannot specify the layout. You have to change the layout afterwards if you don’t get the kind you want. To choose a layout other than the default one, see the next section.

Creating a slide from a layout

A slide layout is a layout guide that tells PowerPoint what placeholder boxes to use on a particular slide and where to position them. Although slide layouts can contain placeholders for text, they also contain graphics, charts, tables, and other useful elements. After you create a new slide with placeholders, you can click a placeholder to open whatever controls you need to insert that type of object.

When you create new slides using one of the methods described in the preceding sections, the new slides use the Title and Content layout, which consists of a slide title and a single, large placeholder box for content. If you want to use another layout, such as a slide with two adjacent but separate frames of content, you must either switch the slide to a different layout after its creation (using the Layout button’s menu on the Home tab), or you must specify a different layout when you initially create the slide.

To specify a certain layout as you are creating a slide, follow these steps:

Copying slides

Another way to create a new slide is to copy an existing one in the same presentation. This is especially useful when you are using multiple slides to create a progression because one slide is typically identical to the next slide in a sequence, except for a small change.

There are several ways to copy one or more slides. One way is to use the Windows Clipboard, as in the following steps:

PowerPoint also has a Duplicate Selected Slides command that does the same thing as a copy and paste. Although it may be a little faster, it gives you less control as to where the pasted copies will appear. PowerPoint pastes the slides immediately after the last slide in the selection. For example, if you selected slides 1, 3, and 6 and issued the Duplicate Selected Slides command, then the copies are placed after slide 6.

Follow these steps to try out the Duplicate Selected Slides command.

Inserting Content from External Sources

Many people find that they can save a lot of time by copying text or slides from other programs or from other PowerPoint presentations to form the basis of a new presentation. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel each time! The following sections look at various ways to bring in content from external sources.

Copying slides from other presentations

There are several ways to copy slides from other presentations. You can:

• Open the presentation, save it under a different name, and then delete the slides that you don’t want, leaving a new presentation with the desired slides ready for customization.
• Open two PowerPoint windows side-by-side and drag-and-drop slides between them.
• Open two PowerPoint presentations, copy slides from one of them to the Clipboard (Ctrl+C), and then paste them into the other presentation (Ctrl+V).
• Use the Reuse Slides feature in PowerPoint, as described next.

To reuse slides from other presentations with the Reuse Slides feature, follow these steps:

1. On the Home tab in the Slides group, click the lower portion of the New Slide button to open its menu.

2. Click Reuse Slides. The Reuse Slides pane appears at the right.

3. Click the Open a PowerPoint File hyperlink. Or, click the Browse button and then click Browse File.

4. In the Browse dialog box, select the presentation from which you want to copy slides, and click Open. Thumbnail images of the slides in the presentation appear in the Reuse Slides pane, as shown in Figure 21.21.

FIGURE 21.21 Choose individual slides to copy to the current presentation.

5. (Optional) If you want to keep the source formatting when copying slides, select the Keep source formatting check box at the bottom of the task pane.

6. (Optional) To see an enlarged image of one of the slides, move the mouse pointer over it.

7. Do any of the following:

• To insert a single slide, click it.
• To insert all slides at once, right-click any slide and choose Insert All Slides.
• To copy only the theme (not the content), right-click any slide in the Reuse Slides pane and choose Apply Theme to All Slides, or Apply Theme to Selected Slides.

Inserting new slides from an outline

All of the Microsoft Office applications work well together, so it’s easy to move content between them. For example, you can create an outline for a presentation in Microsoft Word and then import it into PowerPoint. PowerPoint uses the heading styles that you assigned in Word to decide which items are slide titles and which items are slide content. The top-level headings (Heading 1) form the slide titles.

To try this out, open Word, switch to Outline view (View ⇒ Views ⇒ Outline), and then type a short outline of a presentation. Press Tab to demote, or Shift+Tab to promote, a selected line. Then save your work, go back to PowerPoint, and follow these steps to import it:

If there were already existing slides in the presentation, they remain untouched. (This includes any blank slides, and so you might need to delete the blank slide at the beginning of the presentation after importing.) All of the Heading 1 lines from the outline become separate slide titles, and all of the subordinate headings become bullet points in the slides.

Tips for better outline importing

Although PowerPoint can import any text from any Word document, you may not always get the results that you want or expect. For example, you may have a document that consists of a series of paragraphs with no heading styles applied. When you import this document into PowerPoint, it might look something like Figure 21.22.

FIGURE 21.22 A Word document consisting mainly of plain paragraphs makes for an unattractive presentation.

Figure 21.22 is a prime example of what happens if you don’t prepare a document before you import it into PowerPoint. PowerPoint makes each paragraph its own slide and puts all of the text for each one in the title placeholder. It can’t tell which ones are actual headings and which ones aren’t because there are no heading styles in use. The paragraphs are too long to fit on slides, and so they overrun their placeholders. Extra blank lines are interpreted as blank slides. Quite a train wreck, isn’t it? Figure 21.22 also illustrates an important point to remember: Regular paragraph text does not work very well in PowerPoint. PowerPoint text is all about short, snappy bulleted lists and headings. The better that you prepare the outline before importing it, the less cleanup you will need to do after importing. Here are some tips:

• Apply heading styles to the text that you want to import. Paragraphs formatted using non-heading styles in Word do not import into PowerPoint unless you use no heading styles at all in the document (as in Figure 21.22).
• Stick with basic styles only in the outline: for example, just Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on.
• Delete all blank lines above the first heading. If you don’t, you will have blank slides at the beginning of your presentation.
• Strip off as much manual formatting as possible from the Word text, so that the text picks up its formatting from PowerPoint. To strip off formatting in Word, select the text and press Ctrl+spacebar.
• Do not leave blank lines between paragraphs. These will translate into blank slides or blank bulleted items in PowerPoint.
• Delete any graphic elements, such as clip art, pictures, charts, and so on. They will not transfer to PowerPoint anyway and may confuse the import utility.

Importing from other text-based formats

In addition to Word, PowerPoint also imports from plain text files, from WordPerfect (5.x or 6.x), from Microsoft Works, from Rich Text Format, and from web pages. The procedure is the same as in the preceding steps. By default, the file type in the Insert Outline dialog box is set to All Files, so you should see all usable files automatically, provided they have the correct extensions.

If you are setting up a plain text file for import, you obviously won’t have the outlining tools from Word at your disposal. Instead, you must rely on tabs. Each line that should be a title slide should start at the left margin; first-level bullet paragraphs should be preceded by a single Tab; second-level bullets should be preceded by two Tabs, and so on.

Post-import cleanup

After importing text from an outline, there will probably be a few minor corrections that you need to make. Run through this checklist:

• The first slide in the presentation might be blank. If it is, then delete it.
• The Title Slide layout may not be applied to the first slide; apply that layout, if necessary. You can use the Layout list in the Slides group of the Home tab.
• A theme may now be applied; choose one from the Design tab, if necessary, or format your slide masters and layouts as desired. See Chapter 22 for more information about working with themes.
• Some of the text might contain manual formatting that interferes with the theme formatting and creates inconsistency. Remove any manual formatting that you notice. One way to do this is to switch to Outline view, select all of the text in the Outline pane by pressing Ctrl+A, and then strip off the manual formatting by pressing Ctrl+Spacebar or by clicking the Reset button in the Slides group on the Home tab.
• If some of the text is too long to fit comfortably on a slide, change to a different slide layout, such as a two-column list, if necessary. You might also need to split the content into two or more slides.
• There might be some blank bullet points on some slides (if you missed deleting all of the extra paragraph breaks before importing). Delete these bullet points.

Opening a Word document as a new presentation

Instead of importing slides from a Word document or other text-based document, as described in the preceding section, you can simply open the Word document in PowerPoint. PowerPoint starts a new presentation file to hold the imported text. This saves some time if you are starting a new presentation anyway, and you don’t have any existing slides to merge with the incoming content.

To open a Word document in PowerPoint, follow these steps:

Importing text from web pages

PowerPoint accepts imported text from several web-page formats, including HTML and MHTML (Single File Web Page). It is helpful if the data is in an orderly outline format, or if it was originally created from a PowerPoint file, because there will be less cleanup needed.

There are several ways to import from a web page:

• Open a web-page file as you would an outline (see the preceding section), but set the file type to All Web Pages.
• Insert the text from the web page as you would a Word outline (in the Home tab, click Slides ⇒ New Slide ⇒ Slides from Outline).
• Reuse slides from a web presentation as you would from any other presentation (in the Home tab, click Slides ⇒ New Slide ⇒ Reuse Slides).

When importing from a web page, don’t expect the content to appear formatted the same way that it was on the web page. We’re talking strictly about text import here. The formatting on the web page comes from HTML tags or from a style sheet, neither of which you can import. If you want an exact duplicate of the web page’s appearance, take a picture of the page with the Shift+PrintScreen command, and then paste it into PowerPoint (Ctrl+V) as a graphic.

If you are importing an outline from an MHTML-format web page that contains pictures, the pictures are also imported into PowerPoint. If importing from a regular HTML file, you cannot import the pictures.

Managing Slides

After inserting a few slides into a presentation, and perhaps building some content on them, you might decide to make some changes, such as rearranging, deleting, and so on. The following sections explain how to manage and manipulate the slides in a presentation.

Selecting slides

Before you can issue a command that acts upon a slide or a group of slides, you must select the slides that you want to affect. You can do this from either Normal or Slide Sorter view, but Slide Sorter view makes it easier because you can see more slides at once. From Slide Sorter view, or from the Thumbnails pane in Normal view, you can use any of these techniques to select slides:

• To select a single slide, click it.
• To select multiple slides, hold down the Ctrl key as you click each one. Figure 21.23 shows slides 1, 3, and 6 selected, as indicated by the shaded border around the slides.

  FIGURE 21.23 Select slides in Slide Sorter view by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking each slide.

  
• To select a contiguous group of slides (for example, slides 1, 2, and 3), click the first slide, and then hold down the Shift key as you click the last one. All of the slides in between are selected as well.

To cancel the selection of multiple slides, click anywhere outside of the selected slides.

To select slides from Outline view, click the slide icon to the left of the slide’s title; this selects the entire slide, as shown in Figure 21.24. It’s important to select the entire slide and not just part of its content before issuing a command such as Delete, because otherwise, the command only affects the portion that you selected.

FIGURE 21.24 Select slides in the Outline pane by clicking the slide icon to the left of the slide title.

Deleting slides

You may want to get rid of some of the slides, especially if you created your presentation using a template that contained a lot of sample content. For example, the sample presentation may be longer than you need, or you may have inserted your own slides instead.

Select the slide or slides that you want to delete, and then do either of the following:

• Right-click the selection and choose Delete Slide.
• Press the Delete key on the keyboard.

Undoing mistakes

Here’s a command that can help you in almost all of the other chapters in this book: undoing. The Undo command allows you to reverse past actions. For example, you can use it to reverse all of the deletions that you made to your presentation in the preceding section. The easiest way to undo a single action is to click the Undo button on the Quick Access Toolbar or press Ctrl+Z. You can click it as many times as you like; each time you click it, you undo one action.

You can undo multiple actions at once by opening the Undo button’s drop-down list, as shown in Figure 21.25. Just drag the mouse across the actions that you want to undo (you don’t need to hold down the mouse button). Click when the desired actions are selected, and presto, they are all reversed. You can select multiple actions to undo, but you can’t skip around. For example, to undo the fourth item, you must undo the first, second, and third ones, as well.

FIGURE 21.25 Use the Undo button to undo your mistakes and the Redo button to reverse an Undo operation.

The Redo command is the opposite of Undo. If you make a mistake with the Undo button, you can fix the problem by clicking the Redo button. Like the Undo button, it has a drop-down list, and so you can redo multiple actions at once.

The Redo command is available only immediately after you use the Undo command. If Redo isn’t available, a Repeat button appears in its place. The Repeat command enables you to repeat the last action that you performed (and it doesn’t have to be an Undo operation). For example, you can repeat some typing, or some formatting. Figure 21.26 shows the Repeat button.

FIGURE 21.26 The Repeat button appears when Redo is not available, and enables you to repeat actions.

Rearranging slides

The best way to rearrange slides is to do so in Slide Sorter view. In this view, the slides in your presentation appear in thumbnail view, and you can move them around on the screen to different positions, just as you would manually rearrange pasted-up artwork on a table. Although you can also do this from the Thumbnails pane in Normal view, you are able to see fewer slides at once. As a result, it can be more challenging to move slides around, for example, from one end of the presentation to another. To rearrange slides, use the following steps:

1. Switch to Slide Sorter view or Normal view.

2. Select the slide that you want to move. You can move multiple slides at once if you like (which is a lot easier in Slide Sorter view than in Normal view).

3. Drag the selected slide to the new location. The slide moves as you drag, as shown in Figure 21.27.

FIGURE 21.27 As you drag a slide, its new position is indicated by slides shifting in the view.

4. Release the mouse button. The slide moves to the new location.

You can also rearrange slides in Outline view. This is not quite as easy as using Slide Sorter view, but it’s more versatile. Not only can you drag entire slides from place to place, but you can also move individual bullets from one slide to another.

Follow these steps to move content in Outline view:

There are also keyboard shortcuts for moving a slide up or down in the Outline pane that may be faster than clicking the toolbar buttons. You can press the Alt+Shift+Up Arrow keys to move a slide up, and the Alt+Shift+Down Arrow keys to move a slide down.

These shortcuts work equally well with single bullets from a slide. Just click to the left of a single line to select it, instead of clicking the Slide icon in step 3.

Using Content Placeholders

Now that you know something about inserting and managing entire slides, let’s take a closer look at the content within a slide. The default placeholder type is a multipurpose content placeholder, as shown in Figure 21.28.

FIGURE 21.28 A content placeholder can contain a variety of different elements.

Inserting content into a placeholder

To type text into a content placeholder, click inside the placeholder box and start typing. You can enter and edit text as you would in any word-processing program. To insert any other type of content into a placeholder, click one of the icons shown in Figure 21.28. A dialog box opens to help you select and insert that content type.

A content placeholder can hold only one type of content at a time. If you click in the placeholder and type some text, the icons for the other content types disappear. To access them again, you must delete all of the text from the placeholder.

Placeholders versus manually inserted objects

You can insert content on a slide independently of a placeholder by using the Insert tab’s buttons and menus. This technique allows you to insert an item in its own separate frame on any slide, to coexist with any placeholder content. You can learn how to insert each content type in the chapters in which they are covered.

Creating Text Boxes Manually

The difference between a placeholder-inserted object and a manually inserted one is most significant with text boxes. Although you might think that text boxes are all alike, there are actually some significant differences between placeholder text boxes and manually inserted ones.

Here are some of the characteristics of a text placeholder:

• You cannot create new text placeholder boxes on your own, except in Slide Master view.

  ---

  Note

  You learn how to use Slide Master view to create your own layouts that contain custom text placeholders in Chapter 22. If you move or resize any type of placeholder on a slide in Normal view, that may disconnect it from future formatting changes you make in the slide master. The best practice is to make design and layout changes in the slide master rather than on individual slides.

  ---

• If you delete all of the text from a text placeholder, the placeholder instructions return (in Normal or Outline view).
• A text placeholder box has a fixed size on the slide, regardless of the amount or size of text that it contains. You can resize it manually, but if you reapply the layout, the placeholder box snaps back to the original size.
• AutoFit is turned on by default in a text placeholder, so that if you type more text than will fit, or resize the frame so that the existing text no longer fits, the text shrinks in size.
• The text that you type in a text placeholder box appears in the Outline pane in Outline view.

A manual text box, on the other hand, is one that you create yourself using the Text Box tool in the Text group of the Insert tab. Here are some characteristics of a manual text box:

• You can create a manual text box anywhere, and you can create as many as you like, regardless of the layout.
• If you delete all of the text from a manual text box, the text box remains empty or disappears completely. No placeholder instructions appear.
• A manual text box starts out small vertically, and expands as you type more text into it.
• A manual text box does not use AutoFit by default; the text box simply becomes larger to make room for more text.
• You cannot resize a manual text box so that the text that it contains no longer fits; PowerPoint refuses to make the text box shorter vertically until you delete some text from it. (However, you can decrease its horizontal width.)
• Text typed in a manual text box does not appear in the Outline pane in Outline view.

Figure 21.29 shows two text placeholders (one empty) and a text box in Outline view. Notice that the empty placeholder contains filler text to help you remember that it is there. Notice also that only the text from the placeholder appears in the Outline pane; the text-box text does not. Empty text boxes and placeholders do not show up in Slide Show view, so you do not have to worry about deleting any unneeded ones.

FIGURE 21.29 Two text placeholders and a text box

When should you use a manual text box?

Graphical content such as photos and charts can work well either in placeholders or as manually inserted objects. However, when it comes to text, you should stick with placeholders as often as possible. Placeholder text appears in the Outline pane in Outline view, whereas text in a manually inserted text box does not. When the bulk of a presentation’s text is in manually created text boxes, Outline view becomes less useful because it doesn’t contain the complete presentation text. In addition, when you change to a different formatting theme that includes different positioning for placeholders — for example, to accommodate a graphic on one side — the manual text boxes do not shift. As a result, they might end up overlapping the new background graphic with unattractive results. In a case such as this, you would need to manually go through each slide and adjust the positioning of each text box.

However, there are times when a manually created text box is preferable or even necessary. For example, suppose that you have a schematic diagram of a machine and you need to label some of the parts. Manually placed text boxes are perfect for these little snippets of text that are scattered over the surface of the picture. Manual text boxes are also useful for warnings, tips, and any other information that is tangential to the main discussion. Finally, if you want to vary the placement of the text on each slide (consciously circumventing the consistency provided by layouts), and you want to precisely position each box, then manual text boxes work well because they do not shift their position when you apply different themes or templates to the presentation.

Creating a manual text box

To manually place a text box on a slide, follow these steps:

Working with Text Boxes

Text boxes (either placeholder or manual) form the basis of most presentations. Now that you know how to create them, and how to place text in them, let’s take a look at how to manipulate the boxes themselves.

Selecting text boxes

On the surface, this topic might seem like a no-brainer. Just click it, right? Well, almost. A text box has two possible “selected” states. One state is that the box itself is selected, and the other is that the insertion point is within the box. The difference is subtle, but it becomes clearer when you issue certain commands. For example, if the insertion point is in the text box and you press Delete, PowerPoint deletes the single character to the right of the insertion point. However, if you select the entire text box and press Delete, PowerPoint deletes the entire text box and everything in it.

To select the entire text box, click its border. You can tell that it is selected because the border appears as a solid line. To move the insertion point within the text box, click inside the text box. You can tell that the insertion point is there because you can see it flashing inside.

In the rest of this book, when you see the phrase “select the text box,” it means the box itself should be selected, and the insertion point should not appear in it. For most of the upcoming sections it does not make any difference, although in a few cases it does.

You can select more than one text box at once by holding down the Shift key as you click additional text boxes. This technique is useful when you want to select more than one text box, for example, so that you can format them in the same way, or so that you can resize them by the same amount.

Sizing a text box

The basic techniques for sizing text boxes in PowerPoint are the same for every object type (for that matter, they are also the same as in other Office applications). To resize a text box, or any object, follow these steps:

You can also set a text box’s size from the Size group on the Drawing Tools ⇒ Format tab. When the text box is selected, its current dimensions appear in the Height and Width boxes, as shown in Figure 21.30. You can change the dimensions within these boxes.

FIGURE 21.30 You can set an exact size for a text box from the Format tab’s Size group.

You can also set the size of a text box from the Size and Position task pane:

1. Click the dialog box launcher in the Size group on the Drawing Tools ⇒ Format tab, as shown in Figure 21.30. The Format Shape pane opens with the Size options displayed. See Figure 21.31.

FIGURE 21.31 You can adjust the size of the text box from the Size controls in the Format Shape pane.

2. Set the height and width for the text box in the Height and Width boxes, respectively. To keep the size proportional, select the Lock Aspect Ratio check box in the Scale section before you start adjusting the height or width.

3. (Optional) Click the Close (X) button in the upper right corner of the task pane to close it.

Positioning a text box

To move an object, drag it by any part of its border other than a selection handle. Select the object, and then position the mouse pointer over a border so that the pointer turns into a four-headed arrow. Then drag the object to a new position. With a text box, you must position the mouse pointer over a border and not over the inside of the frame; with all other object types, you don’t have to be that precise; you can move an object by dragging anywhere within it.

You can also set an exact position by using the Format Shape task pane:

1. Click the dialog box launcher in the Size group on the Drawing Tools ⇒ Format tab, as shown in Figure 21.30. The Format Shape dialog box opens with the Size controls displayed, as in Figure 21.31.

2. Click the Size heading to collapse the Size section, and then click the Position heading to expand the Position section. The Position controls appear, as shown in Figure 21.32.

FIGURE 21.32 You can adjust the position with the Position controls.

3. Set the horizontal and vertical position, and the point from which it is measured. By default, measurements are from the top-left corner of the slide.

4. (Optional) Click the Close (X) button in the upper right corner of the task pane to close it.

Changing a text box’s AutoFit behavior

When there is too much text to fit in a text box, there are three things that may happen:

• Do not AutoFit. The text and the box can continue at their default sizes, and the text can overflow out of the box or be truncated.
• Shrink text on overflow. The text can shrink its font size to fit in the text box. This is the default setting for placeholder text boxes.
• Resize shape to fit text. The text box can enlarge to the size needed to contain the text. This is the default setting for manual text boxes.

Whenever there is too much text in a placeholder box, the AutoFit icon appears in the bottom-left corner. Click that icon to display a menu, as shown in Figure 21.33. From that menu, you can turn AutoFit on or off. Depending on the text-box type, you might not have all the menu items shown in Figure 21.33.

FIGURE 21.33 You can use the AutoFit icon’s menu to change the AutoFit setting for a text box.

With a manual text box, the AutoFit icon does not appear, and so you must adjust the AutoFit behavior in the text box’s properties. The following method works for both manual and placeholder boxes:

1. Right-click the border of the text box and choose Format Shape. The Format Shape task pane opens.

2. Click Text Options. Three icons appear: Text Fill & Outline, Text Effects, and Text Box.

You can point at an icon to see a ScreenTip containing its name.

3. Click the Text Box icon. Controls appear that pertain to the text box itself. See Figure 21.34.

FIGURE 21.34 Click the Text Box icon to change text box options, including AutoFit behavior.

4. Click one of the AutoFit options, as shown in Figure 21.34.

5. (Optional) Click the Close (X) button in the upper right corner of the task pane to close it.

One other setting that also affects AutoFit behavior is the Wrap Text in Shape option. This on/off toggle, which appears as a check box in Figure 21.34, enables text to automatically wrap to the next line when it reaches the right edge of the text box. By default, this setting is On for placeholder text boxes and for manual text boxes that you create by dragging. However, it is Off by default for manual text boxes that you create by clicking.

Table 21.5 summarizes the various AutoFit behaviors and how they interact with one another.

TABLE 21.5 AutoFit and Resize Shape to Fit Text Behaviors

Summary

In this chapter, you mastered core skills such as how to create presentations and add textual content to slides. You can now confidently:

• Create new presentations from scratch and from templates.
• Save, open, close, and delete PowerPoint presentation files.
• Save files in different formats and search for missing presentations.
• Create a new slide with the desired layout.
• Select, rearrange, and delete slides.
• Add text content on a slide and use content from outside sources.
• Understand the difference between a content placeholder and a manually inserted object such as a text box.
• Create and work with your own text boxes.