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About this lesson
Get familiar with the different areas that make up the PowerPoint Interface. This includes the ribbon structure, groups, commands, dialog launchers, scroll bars and the status bar. This lesson is also designed to familiarize you with important PowerPoint terminology.
Exercise files
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ PowerPoint presentations from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Get To Know the PowerPoint Interface50.5 KB Get To Know the PowerPoint Interface - Solution
181.4 KB 03-02-The PowerPoint Interface.pptx
2.6 MB
Quick reference
Get To Know the PowerPoint Interface
In this lesson we will familiarize ourselves with the layout and functionality of the PowerPoint Interface.
When to use
The PowerPoint interface includes the Title Bar, the Ribbon, the Quick Access Toolbar, the Slides Pane, the Slide Window and the Status Bar. It's important to understand each element of the interface as it's the main window we will be working with when creating presentations in PowerPoint.
Instructions
The Title Bar
The Title Bar runs horizontally across the top of the PowerPoint window. It displays the name of the file, the search box, your account information and buttons to minimise and maximise the PowerPoint window. We can also close down the application by clicking on the cross in the top-right hand corner.
The Ribbon
The Ribbon is where all the action happens. Introduced in PowerPoint 2007, the horizontal ribbon is where we find our commands. The Ribbons consists of several tabs. Each tab is split into several groups. Each group contains commands organised by similar type and we use these commands to execute specific actions.
Commands that are greyed out are not currently active.
The Quick Access Toolbar (QAT)
The Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) is a customizable toolbar that sits in the the top left-hand corner of the PowerPoint window. It contains a set of commands that are independent to the ribbon. We can customize the QAT and add commands that we use frequently for easy one-click access.
The Slides Pane
The Slides Pane is displayed on the left-hand side of the PowerPoint Interface. It shows a thumbnail view of all slides in the presentation. We can use the Slides Pane to navigate through the deck and organize slides.
The Slide Window
The active slide is displayed in the main Slide Window and it's where we go to edit our slides.
The Status Bar
The status bar is a customizable area that runs horizontally across the bottom of the PowerPoint window. It displays useful messages and information about the view such as slide number, language, magnification and the current theme template used.
To customize the status bar and choose which information to display, right-click in a blank area of the status bar and place a tick next to the relevent menu item.
Hints & tips
- To give the Slide Window more room, we can collapse up the Slides Pane by dragging the divider line to the left.
- The QAT can be displayed above or below the ribbon.
- Not all tabs are displayed by default on the ribbon. You can turn tabs off and on through PowerPoint Options.
- 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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