The Content Placeholder and Bullet Levels

Quick reference

• 00:04 When you build a presentation, something that will drive your audience absolutely crazy is to have various objects on slides that jump around
• 00:11 in location. I’ve seen presenters at conferences with material on their slides that jumps around like that and I feel like yelling out to them
• 00:18 “layouts and placeholders”! An underutilized feature of PowerPoint is what is called layouts, and layouts govern the placeholders that are
• 00:26 contained within them. So let’s switch to Reading View, which allows us to run the presentation in a slideshow mode in a
• 00:32 contained window. Notice as I scroll through these slides, that where they contain one or more images on the slide, the image locations
• 00:41 change? And if I didn’t have a fade transition between slides, it would look even jumpier. Now fortunately there are some very easy ways to fix
• 00:49 this. So let's first of all explore what a layout is and the placeholders that are contained within them. On this blank slide, right click on the
• 00:57 slide, select layout and here are the various layouts that are available. The current layout is a blank layout and it’s highlighted. So let's go to a
• 01:07 title and content layout and select that. Now immediately the slide updates with a content placeholder on the slide in which we can add
• 01:15 some title text, as well as a content placeholder where we can also add one of seven items-text, or click one of the six little icons to insert a
• 01:25 table, or a chart, a SmartArt graphic, a picture from the computer, a picture from online, or insert a video. So, let me insert some text in
• 01:38 this content placeholder- I click within it and the blinking cursor tells me now that it’s ready to receive my text. So I'll add in the text
• 01:47 venue one, press enter, venue two, press enter and venue three. Now typing in this placeholder we can also use keyboard shortcuts to
• 01:58 manipulate the text further, so, for example, select the start of the sentence or the line, TAB demotes the text and SHIFT TAB promotes it.
• 02:09 But also (and this also works in Microsoft word) SHIFT ALT together with the down arrow moves the bullet point or the line down, SHIFT ALT
• 02:20 right arrow demotes it, SHIFT ALT up moves it up, and SHIFT ALT left promotes it; and that's a fast way of editing text in PowerPoint. So
• 02:31 TAB to demote, shift TAB to promote, as well as those SHIFT ALT and arrow keys. So let’s quickly pop over to the outline pane and see that
• 02:41 again. Select the start of the line or the sentence, TAB demotes and SHIFT TAB promotes. Now that’s a very simple way to use
• 02:50 your keyboard to not only enter text throughout your presentation, but to build your entire storyboard, and it’s my favorite shortcut. So let's
• 02:59 go back to our previous view and look at fixing those images that jump around! So where we have a slide with one picture on it. If we right
• 03:08 click, layout and select “title and content”, select the picture, control X cuts the picture and places the picture on the clipboard. Select the
• 03:21 placeholder, control V and the picture is resized and constrained within that placeholder. On a slide where there are two pictures, we’ll select a
• 03:30 two content layout, cut the picture with control x, select the placeholder, paste which is control V, cut that picture, paste and we can do exactly
• 03:47 the same for our next slide as well. So, cut that picture, paste, cut that picture, paste, and now when we view our slideshow, even though the
• 04:04 pictures aren't perfectly the same size, they still fit very well on that slide and that's a fantastic feature. So for some final, really good news-say
• 04:15 for example, we wanted to manipulate this image for some reason and we move it around, and we could apply various effects to it, and
• 04:26 then we think to ourself, well, it doesn't really balance the rest of our presentation. We can simply right click on the slide, go to reset slide
• 04:33 and there it is back to our original and we can commence again without destroying the whole slide. In fact, you can even go to the slide pane
• 04:42 here, select all of the slides with control A, and fix all of those slides together as well! It’s such a powerful feature of PowerPoint. Layouts and
• 04:53 placeholders to hold your content, the various types of content that you you can add, as well as using those keyboard shortcuts to
• 05:00 manipulate text. It’s really an investment well spent of your time to explore these features and use them.

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