How Things Work Each presentation is divided into slides. Each slide shows a different screen to your audience. If you use the Sidebar, you can rearrange your slides:
You can also arrange slides in the Slide Sorter View:
Everything you put on a PowerPoint slide is considered an object. Objects include:
- Text boxes
- Word Art
- Shapes (and Autoshapes)
- Photos
- Clip Art
- Charts
- Tables
- Movies & Sounds
Each object can be selected, moved, an changed via commands and buttons.
When you select an object, you will see a Placeholder.
This placeholder has four corener resize handles, four edge resize handles, and a rotation handle (the green one on top). You can resize or rotate the placeholder by clicking and dragging on any one of these.
Some placeholders can contain media; you might see something that looks like this:
The six ghost-like icons in the center are buttons. If you click on one, it will bring up a selection menu for that kind of media:
The six media types are:
- Tables
- Charts
- SmartArt
- Pictures
- Clip Art
- Media Clip (movie or sound)
Each object on a slide has its own layer.
Think of every object being an image on a clear plastic sheet. If you have many objects (many sheets), you can see the objects underneath the clear plastic, but the objects on top cover the objects below. Two objects cannot be on the same layer.
Every object is either above or below another object.
In the image below, you can see a rounded rectangle, a star, and a Word Art. The Word Art is on top, the star is in the middle, and the rectangle is at the bottom.
If we select the Word Art, we can then Arrange it up or down.
After we "Send" it "Backward" (or "down"), it will appear between the two colored shapes:
A new feature in Office 2007 that you may notice is that when you select something and then are choosing from a list of effects or styles, the effects and styles are previewed live in the window.
For example, create a paragraph of text in a text box (hit Enter, and then type =rand(1,12) and then hit Enter again). Select the paragraph. Then go to the Font area of the Home Ribbon and open a list of Fonts or Font Sizes. As you move the mouse over the choices, you will see the selected paragraph change as you go up and down.
One dialog box that appears many times is the Format... dialog box. You can have Format Text, Format Picture, Format SmartArt, and so on.
This dialog box is very similar between the different objects to format; small changes will appear, case by case.
Another new feature in Office 2007 is the popup feature palette. This is a small toolbar that appears whenever you select text. It will appear just above and to the right of the text. It allows you to do quick and easy format changes, such as font, font size, font color, alignment, indents, and so on.
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