Exploring PowerPoint’s Views

Quick reference

• 00:04 All of the views in PowerPoint are really about making sure that you’ve got the right tool for the job so your tasks can happen quickly and
• 00:11 painlessly, and so views really can make a difference. And even though I’ve used PowerPoint for a number of years, I have to
• 00:18 admit that I’ve never really appreciated the various views that were available at first, and so I was stuck in a bit of a rut. But then I started
• 00:25 using all of PowerPoint’s views and they’re well worth getting to know and use because they change the arrangement of the PowerPoint
• 00:31 application for you to perform different functions. And that helps with you with your design, your production of a show or a document, or when
• 00:39 you need to present a particular slideshow. Now concepts of the outline pane and the notes pane will be covered more extensively in other videos.
• 00:48 In this presentation that I’ve already created, I’ve already accessed the view tab, and as you can see from the highlighted button, the current view
• 00:56 that I’ve got selected is normal view. The button shows a thumbnail of the application arrangement. We have our slide thumbnails on
• 01:04 the slide pane, and I can click on a thumbnail to change the active slide, and even though we can’t add content to the slides themselves
• 01:12 within the slide pane, we certainly can do so on the slide itself. Now what we see is a classic, 3 pane editing view that we’re all so familiar with
• 01:24 and other than the slides pane and the slides area the third part is the notes pane that we can see below the active slide. In slide sorter
• 01:33 view we can see the slide itself and this is an area where we can add slides and sections; sections will be covered in another video. We
• 01:41 can duplicate slides, add slides or quickly move them around. It’s well worth getting to know keyboard shortcuts such as CTRL D, which is
• 01:49 duplicate, or we can click and drag with the mouse while holding the CTRL key and drop to duplicate as well. Another presentation view is
• 02:00 the notes page, for example when we add text to the notes area, and then we move to the notes view we can see a preview of the text as
• 02:08 well as our slide and this output is excellent to produce slides with notes to be printed and handed out. But it also allows us to cut down on
• 02:17 the amount of text that’s on our slides. It’s also very handy in presenter view, we can see this when I press F5 on the keyboard, and even
• 02:25 though we can’t see the actual presentation because it’s on another monitor, we can see here the text of the notes, which allows us to
• 02:33 present with confidence. The reading view is where you can preview the presentation with animations and transitions without switching to
• 02:42 full screen view; notice that the slideshow is constrained by the application window. At the bottom of our program window we can see the
• 02:52 status bar and there are various buttons on the status bar that allow us to select the various views such as normal, slide sorter, and
• 03:01 importantly, our slideshow view. If you go into the slideshow or the reading views you can get out of them again by hitting the ESC key on
• 03:09 your keyboard. And finally there’s this handy little zoom slider where we can change the size of our slide as well as a button to fit the slide to
• 03:19 the size of the current window. So PowerPoint’s presentation views are a very effective way to help us control our content and present it
• 03:26 effectively to the audience. It’s well worth the investment of your time exploring these within PowerPoint.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.