Get To Know the PowerPoint Interface

Quick reference

• 00:04 So now we've seen how the start screen works,
• 00:06 it's time to dive into the PowerPoint interface.
• 00:09 Because really, this your main work space, and it's where you're going to spend
• 00:13 most of your time when you're working on your slides.
• 00:16 So let's make sure that we fully understand each part of the interface,
• 00:20 how it works, and why it's useful.
• 00:22 So starting right at the top of this screen,
• 00:26 you can see we have an orange bar, and this is your title bar.
• 00:30 It will contain the title of whatever PowerPoint presentation you have open at
• 00:35 the time.
• 00:35 So currently, I don't have anything open, which is why it just says PowerPoint.
• 00:40 It also contains a search bar to help you search for different commands and
• 00:45 also access help.
• 00:46 And on the left-hand side, we have something called the Quick Access toolbar.
• 00:51 Now I'm going to go into the Quick Access toolbar in a lot more detail in another
• 00:55 lesson.
• 00:56 But for the time being,
• 00:57 just understand that this Quick Access toolbar is customizable.
• 01:01 And it allows you to access commands that you use frequently quickly.
• 01:06 And then over on the right-hand side of that title bar,
• 01:09 it shows the account that you're logged in as.
• 01:12 And we also have some options there to minimize the screen,
• 01:15 maximize the screen, and close down PowerPoint.
• 01:18 Just underneath there, we have the ribbon.
• 01:21 And this is really where all of the action happens in PowerPoint.
• 01:24 Now, the ribbon structure was introduced in PowerPoint 2007,
• 01:29 so quite a few years ago now.
• 01:31 And I will say, it took people a little while to get used to it,
• 01:35 because previously, you would access your commands using menu drop-downs.
• 01:40 In 2007, we switched to the ribbon, which now runs horizontally across the screen.
• 01:44 And the ribbon contains different tabs.
• 01:46 So you can see that currently, I'm clicked on the Home tab.
• 01:50 We also have an Insert tab, Draw, Design, Transitions, so on, and so forth.
• 01:56 And on each of these tabs, we have a number of different groups, and
• 02:00 within those groups, we have our commands.
• 02:04 The first group is called Clipboard, the second group called Slides, and
• 02:08 we have Font, Paragraph, Drawing, Editing, Voice, and Designer.
• 02:12 And within each of those groups, we have different commands,
• 02:16 that we can click on to execute an action.
• 02:18 And what you might notice is, at the moment, all of my commands are grayed out.
• 02:23 And that's because I don't have a document open right now.
• 02:26 So I can't actually utilize any of these commands until I have something to
• 02:30 work with.
• 02:31 So let's do that first, let's open up a document.
• 02:34 And as soon as I do, you should see a lot of these commands now become active.
• 02:39 So I'm going to jump up to File, and I'm just going to open a blank presentation.
• 02:44 And there we go, we now have a few more elements appear on the screen.
• 02:47 And if you look at my Home ribbon, you can see that more commands are now active.
• 02:53 Now, the ones that are still inactive,
• 02:55 that just means that they're not currently useful to me at this moment in time.
• 02:59 So for some of these, it requires me to click on something within my presentation
• 03:04 in order for those buttons to become active.
• 03:07 And you can see, if I click on that first text box,
• 03:10 all of my font commands are now active.
• 03:12 So just be aware of that, they'll change depending on what you're doing.
• 03:16 Now that I have something open, you'll see on the left-hand side,
• 03:20 I have the thumbnail pane, and this is going to show me my slides.
• 03:24 So as I start to add more slides, I can see those slides build.
• 03:28 And I can use these to switch between my different slides and work on them.
• 03:32 And if you don't like this pane or you want to minimize it,
• 03:36 you can hover over the divider and just drag in to minimize that down.
• 03:40 Which gives you a little bit more real estate on the screen
• 03:44 where you can design your slides.
• 03:46 Now I in general tend to have this open all of the time.
• 03:49 All the way over on the right-hand side, we have the Design Ideas pane.
• 03:54 I'm going to talk about this a little more later on.
• 03:57 But what you'll find is that when you create a new document, whether it's
• 04:01 a blank one or from a template, or even if you insert a picture, this Design Ideas
• 04:07 pane is going to pop up if you have it enabled within your PowerPoint options.
• 04:11 And it's there just to help you give you somewhere to start when it comes to
• 04:15 designing your slides.
• 04:17 Now for the time being, I'm going to close this design pane down by clicking on
• 04:21 the cross in the top right-hand corner.
• 04:23 And then finally, running all the way across the bottom of our screen,
• 04:27 we have our status bar.
• 04:29 And the status bar shows us useful information as we're working
• 04:32 in PowerPoint.
• 04:33 So on the left-hand side, you can see that mine says Slide 1 of 1.
• 04:37 It's telling me that my language is English United States.
• 04:41 And then over on the right-hand side, I have some options for
• 04:45 switching between different PowerPoint views, and also a zoom slider.
• 04:50 Now, this terminology might not mean a great deal to you at the moment.
• 04:53 But trust me, we're going to get into all of this and
• 04:56 what these things do as we go through this course.
• 04:59 One thing I will say is that you can customize this status bar so
• 05:03 that it shows information that's useful to you.
• 05:07 So if I right-click my mouse on the status bar, you'll see I get a little
• 05:11 menu pop-up, and certain items in this menu have ticks next to them.
• 05:16 So that means they are enabled, and it means that that information is going to
• 05:20 display on my status bar when I start working.
• 05:23 So for example, at the bottom of this list,
• 05:25 you can see I have zoom slider, zoom, and zoom to fit ticked.
• 05:29 And if you look over on the right-hand side of the status bar,
• 05:32 I have those icons sitting there.
• 05:34 And we're going to dip in and out and customize this status bar as we go.
• 05:38 For the time being, I'm fairly happy with what I have toggled on just there.
• 05:42 So the final thing I'm going to do here before we leave this lesson and
• 05:45 move on to the next one is, I'm going to save this PowerPoint presentation.
• 05:48 Because currently, it just has the default name of Presentation 1.
• 05:53 So let's jump up to File and into the backstage area, let's select Save As.
• 05:59 I'm going to browse for a folder to save this file into, and
• 06:04 I'm just going to name this My First Presentation.
• 06:08 I'm saving it as a regular PowerPoint file,
• 06:11 the file extension is .pptx, and click on Save.
• 06:15 And now if you take a look in the title bar at the top,
• 06:18 it's reflecting its new name.
• 06:20 So that's a very quick whistlestop tour of the PowerPoint interface.
• 06:24 Please join me in the next lesson where we're going to talk more about
• 06:27 the Quick Access toolbar.
• 06:28 And I'm going to show you how you can increase your efficiency by
• 06:31 adding commands that you use frequently.

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