PowerPoint® 2016 For Dummies®

Visit www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/powerpoint2016 to view this book's cheat sheet.

Introduction

Welcome to PowerPoint 2016 For Dummies, the book written especially for people who are lucky enough to use this latest and greatest version of PowerPoint and want to find out just enough to finish that presentation that was due yesterday.

Do you ever find yourself in front of an audience, no matter how small, flipping through flip charts or shuffling through a stack of handwritten transparencies? You need PowerPoint! Have you always wanted to take your notebook computer with you to impress a client at lunch, but you haven’t known what to do with it between trips to the salad bar? You really need PowerPoint!

Or maybe you’re one of those unfortunate folks who bought Microsoft Office because it was such a bargain and you needed a Windows word processor and spreadsheet anyway, and hey, you’re not even sure what PowerPoint is, but it came with the software you purchased, so it didn’t cost extra. Who can resist a bargain like that?

Whichever circumstance you find yourself in, you’re holding the perfect book right here in your formerly magic-marker-stained hands. Help is here, within these humble pages.

This book talks about PowerPoint in everyday — and often irreverent — terms. No lofty prose here; the whole thing checks in at about the fifth-grade reading level. I have no Pulitzer expectations for this book. My goal is to make an otherwise dull and lifeless subject at least tolerable, and maybe even kind of fun.

About This Book

This isn’t the kind of book that you pick up and read from start to finish as though it were a cheap novel. If I ever see you reading it at the beach, I’ll kick sand in your face. This book is more like a reference — the kind of book you can pick up, turn to just about any page, and start reading. It has 22 chapters, each one covering a specific aspect of using PowerPoint — such as printing, animating your slides, or using clip art.

You don’t have to memorize anything in this book. It’s a need-to-know book: You pick it up when you need to know something. Need to know how to create an organization chart? Pick up the book. Need to know how to override the Slide Master? Pick up the book. After you find what you’re looking for, put it down and get on with your life.

I use a few conventions to communicate information:

Foolish Assumptions

I make only three assumptions about you:

Nothing else. I don’t assume that you’re a computer guru who knows how to change a controller card or configure memory for optimal use. These types of computer chores are best handled by people who like computers. My hope is that you’re on speaking terms with such a person. Do your best to stay there.

Icons Used in This Book

As you’re reading all this wonderful prose, you occasionally see the following icons. They appear in the margins to draw your attention to important information. They’re defined as follows:

Watch out! Some technical drivel is just around the corner. Read it only if you have your pocket protector firmly attached.

Pay special attention to this icon — it tells you that some particularly useful tidbit is at hand, perhaps a shortcut or a way of using a command that you might not have considered.

Danger! Danger! Danger! Stand back, Will Robinson!

Did I tell you about the memory course I took? Paragraphs marked with this icon simply point out details that are worth committing to memory.

Beyond the Book

I couldn’t fit everything about PowerPoint 2016 in these pages, so you can go online to find even more information:

Where to Go from Here

Yes, you can get there from here. With this book in hand, you’re ready to charge full speed ahead into the strange and wonderful world of desktop presentations. Browse through the table of contents and decide where you want to start. Be bold! Be courageous! Be adventurous! Above all else, have fun!

Part I

Getting Started with PowerPoint 2016

Visit www.dummies.com for great Dummies content online.

In this part …

Get a bird’s-eye view of PowerPoint 2016 and what you can do with it.

Find out how to edit the content on PowerPoint slides, from the text itself to text objects to other types of objects, such as clip art pictures or drawn shapes.

Understand how to work in Outline View so you can focus on your presentation’s main points and subpoints without worrying about appearance.

Learn to proof your presentation with PowerPoint and avoid embarrassing mistakes.

Discover how to create speaker notes to help you get through your presentation.

Know how to finish the final preparations by printing copies of your slides, notes, and handouts, as well as how to set up a projector and actually deliver your presentation.

Chapter 1

Welcome to PowerPoint 2016

In This Chapter

Discovering PowerPoint

Firing up PowerPoint

Making sense of the PowerPoint screen and the Ribbon

Visiting backstage

Creating a presentation

Viewing presentation outlines

Saving and closing your work

Retrieving a presentation from the hard drive

Getting help

Getting out of PowerPoint

This chapter is a grand and gala welcoming ceremony for PowerPoint 2016, Microsoft’s popular slide-presentation program.

This chapter is sort of like the opening ceremony of the Olympics, in which all the athletes parade around the stadium and people make speeches in French. In much the same way, this chapter marches PowerPoint 2016 around the stadium so you can get a bird’s-eye view of what the program is and what you can do with it. I might make a few speeches, but not in French (unless, of course, you’re reading the French edition of this book).

What in Sam Hill Is PowerPoint?

PowerPoint is a program that comes with Microsoft Office (although you can buy it separately, as well). Most people buy Microsoft Office because it’s a great bargain: You get Word, Excel, and Outlook all together in one inexpensive package. And PowerPoint is thrown in for good measure. Of course, depending on which edition of Office you buy, you might get other goodies as well, such as Access, Publisher, a complete set of Ginsu knives, and a Binford VegaPneumatic Power Slicer and Dicer. (Always wear eye protection.)

You know what Word is — it’s the world’s most loved and most hated word processor, and it’s perfect for concocting letters, term papers, and great American novels. I’m thinking of writing one as soon as I finish this book. Excel is a spreadsheet program used by bean counters the world over. Outlook is that program you use to read your email. But what the heck is PowerPoint? Does anybody know or care? (And as long as I’m asking questions, who in Sam Hill was Sam Hill?)

PowerPoint is a presentation program, and it’s one of the coolest programs I know. It’s designed to work with a projector to display presentations that will bedazzle your audience members and instantly sway them to your point of view, even if you’re selling real estate on Mars, season tickets for the Oakland Raiders, or a new tax increase to a congressman in an election year. If you’ve ever flipped a flip chart, you’re going to love PowerPoint.

Here are some of the many uses of PowerPoint:

Introducing PowerPoint Presentations

PowerPoint is similar to a word processor such as Word, except that it’s geared toward creating presentations rather than documents. A presentation is kind of like those Kodak Carousel slide trays that your grandpa filled up with 35mm slides of the time he took the family to the Grand Canyon in 1965. The main difference is that with PowerPoint, you don’t have to worry about dumping all the slides out of the tray and figuring out how to get them back into the right order.

Word documents consist of one or more pages, and PowerPoint presentations consist of one or more slides. Each slide can contain text, graphics, animations, videos, and other information. You can easily rearrange the slides in a presentation, delete slides that you don’t need, add new slides, or modify the contents of existing slides.

You can use PowerPoint both to create your presentations and to actually present them.

You can use several different types of media to actually show your presentations:

Your presentations will be much more interesting if you show them using one of the first four methods (computer monitor, TV, projector, or webcast) because you can incorporate animations, videos, sounds, and other whiz-bang features in your presentation. Printed pages, overheads, and 35mm slides can show only static content.

Presentation files

A presentation is to PowerPoint what a document is to Word or a worksheet is to Excel. In other words, a presentation is a file that you create with PowerPoint. Each presentation that you create is saved on your computer’s hard drive as a separate file.

PowerPoint 2016 presentations have the special extension .pptx added to the end of their filenames. For example, Sales Conference.pptx and History Day.pptx are both valid PowerPoint filenames. When you type the filename for a new PowerPoint file, you don’t have to type the .pptx extension, because PowerPoint automatically adds the extension for you. Windows may hide the .pptx extension, in which case a presentation file named Conference.pptx often appears as just Conference.

I recommend you avoid the use of spaces and special characters, especially percent signs (%), in your filenames. If you want the effect of a space in a filename, use an underscore character instead. Spaces and percent signs in filenames can cause all kinds of problems if you post your presentation files to the Internet, either on a web page or even as a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) upload.

Versions of PowerPoint prior to 2007 save presentations with the extension .ppt instead of .pptx. The x at the end of the newer file extension denotes that the new file format is based on an open XML standard data format that makes it easier to exchange files among different programs. PowerPoint 2016 can still save files in the old .ppt format, but I recommend you do so only if you need to share presentations with people who haven’t yet upgraded to PowerPoint 2007 or later.

PowerPoint is set up initially to save your presentation files in the Documents folder, but you can store PowerPoint files in any folder of your choice on your hard drive or on any other drive. You can also save your presentation to online file storage, such as Microsoft’s OneDrive. And, if you wish, you can write a presentation to a USB flash drive or to cloud storage.

What’s in a slide?

PowerPoint presentations comprise one or more slides. Each slide can contain text, graphics, and other elements. A number of PowerPoint features work together to help you easily format attractive slides:

  • Slide layouts: Every slide has a slide layout that controls how information is arranged on the slide. A slide layout is simply a collection of one or more placeholders, which set aside an area of the slide to hold information. Depending on the layout that you choose for a slide, the placeholders can hold text, graphics, clip art, sound or video files, tables, charts, graphs, diagrams, or other types of content.
  • Background: Every slide has a background, which provides a backdrop for the slide’s content. The background can be a solid color; a blend of two colors; a subtle texture, such as marble or parchment; a pattern, such as diagonal lines, bricks, or tiles; or an image file. Each slide can have a different background, but you usually want to use the same background for every slide in your presentation to provide a consistent look.
  • Themes: Themes are combinations of design elements such as color schemes and fonts that make it easy to create attractive slides that don’t look ridiculous. You can stray from the themes if you want, but you should do so only if you have a better eye than the design gurus who work for Microsoft.
  • Slide Masters: Slide Masters are special slides that control the basic design and formatting options for slides in your presentation. Slide Masters are closely related to layouts — in fact, each layout has its own Slide Master that determines the position and size of basic title and text placeholders; the background and color scheme used for the presentation; and font settings, such as typefaces, colors, and sizes. In addition, Slide Masters can contain graphic and text objects that you want to appear on every slide.

    You can edit the Slide Masters to change the appearance of all the slides in your presentation at once. This helps to ensure that the slides have a consistent appearance.

All the features described in the preceding list work together to control the appearance of your slides in much the same way that style sheets and templates control the appearance of Word documents. You can customize the appearance of individual slides by adding any of the following elements:

  • Title and body text: Most slide layouts include placeholders for title and body text. You can type any text that you want into these placeholders. By default, PowerPoint formats the text according to the Slide Master, but you can easily override this formatting to use any font, size, styles like bold or italic, or text color that you want.
  • Text boxes: You can add text anywhere on a slide by drawing a text box and then typing text. Text boxes enable you to add text that doesn’t fit conveniently in the title or body text placeholders.
  • Shapes: You can use PowerPoint’s drawing tools to add a variety of shapes to your slides. You can use predefined AutoShapes, such as rectangles, circles, stars, arrows, and flowchart symbols. Alternatively, you can create your own shapes by using basic line, polygon, and freehand drawing tools.
  • Illustrations: You can illustrate your slides by inserting clip art, photographs, and other graphic elements. PowerPoint comes with a large collection of clip art pictures you can use, and Microsoft provides an even larger collection of clip art images online. And, of course, you can insert photographs from your own picture library.
  • Charts and diagrams: PowerPoint includes a slick diagramming feature called SmartArt that enables you to create several common types of diagrams, including organization charts, cycle diagrams, and others. In addition, you can insert pie charts, line or bar charts, and many other chart types.
  • Video and Sound: You can add sound clips or video files to your slides. You can also add background music or a custom narration.

Starting PowerPoint

Here’s the procedure for starting PowerPoint in Windows 8, 8.1, or 10:

  1. Get ready.

    Light some votive candles. Take two Tylenol. Put on a pot of coffee. If you’re allergic to banana slugs, take an allergy pill. Sit in the lotus position facing Redmond, Washington, and recite the Windows creed three times:

    Microsoft is my friend. Resistance is futile. No beer and no TV make Homer something something … .

  2. Press the Windows key on your keyboard.

    The Windows key is the one that has the fancy Windows flag printed on it. On most keyboards, it’s located between the Alt and Tab keys. When you press this button, Windows brings up the Start page, which lists your commonly used applications in large tiles.

  3. Click the PowerPoint 2016 tile.

    That’s all there is to it — PowerPoint starts up in a flash. (Note that you might have to scroll the Start screen to the right to find the PowerPoint 2016 tile.)

If you’re using Windows 7, the procedure is a little different:

  1. Click the Start button.

    The Start button is ordinarily found in the lower-left corner of the Windows display. When you click it, the Start menu appears. The Start menu works pretty much the same, no matter which version of Windows you're using.

    If you can’t find the Start button, try moving the cursor all the way to the bottom edge of the screen and holding it there a moment. With luck on your side, you see the Start button appear. If not, try moving the cursor to the other three edges of the screen: top, left, and right. Sometimes the Start button hides behind these edges.

  2. Point to All Programs on the Start menu.

    After you click the Start button to reveal the Start menu, move the cursor up to the words All Programs and hold it there a moment. Yet another menu appears, revealing a bevy of commands.

  3. Choose Microsoft Office ⇒ Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2016.

    Your computer whirs and clicks and possibly makes other unmentionable noises while PowerPoint comes to life.

If you use PowerPoint frequently, it might appear in the Frequently Used Programs list directly on the Start menu so you don’t have to choose All Programs ⇒ Microsoft Office to get to it. If you want PowerPoint to always appear at the top of the Start menu, choose Start ⇒ All Programs ⇒ Microsoft Office. Then, right-click Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2016 and choose the Pin to Start Menu command.

If you hate clicking through menus but don’t mind typing, another way to start PowerPoint is to press your keyboard’s Windows key (usually found between the Ctrl and Alt keys), type the word powerpoint, and press the Enter key. (Note that this trick works only in Windows 7.)

Navigating the PowerPoint Interface

When you start PowerPoint, it greets you with the screen shown in Figure 1-1. This screen lets you create a blank presentation, open a recently used presentation, or create a new presentation based on a template. You can also take a video tour of PowerPoint.

Figure 1-1: PowerPoint’s opening screen.

For the purposes of this chapter, click Blank Presentation to get started with a new presentation. You will next be greeted with a screen that’s so cluttered with stuff that you’re soon ready to consider newsprint and markers as a viable alternative for your presentations. The center of the screen is mercifully blank, but the top part of the screen is chock-full of little icons and buttons and doohickeys. What is all that stuff?

Figure 1-2 shows the basic PowerPoint screen in all its cluttered glory. The following list points out the more important parts of the PowerPoint screen:

Figure 1-2: PowerPoint’s cluttered screen.

You’ll never get anything done if you feel that you have to understand every pixel of the PowerPoint screen before you can do anything. Don’t worry about the stuff that you don’t understand; just concentrate on what you need to know to get the job done and worry about the bells and whistles later.

Unraveling the Ribbon

The Ribbon is Microsoft’s primary user interface gadget. Across the top of the Ribbon is a series of tabs. You can click one of these tabs to reveal a set of controls specific to that tab. For example, the Ribbon in Figure 1-2 (earlier in the chapter) shows the Home tab. Figure 1-3 shows the Ribbon with the Insert tab selected.

Figure 1-3: The Ribbon with the Insert tab selected.

Initially, the Ribbon displays the tabs described in Table 1-1.

Table 1-1 Basic Tabs on the Ribbon

Tab

Actions You Can Perform

File

Open, close, print, and share presentations

Home

Create and format slides

Insert

Insert various types of objects on slides

Design

Tweak the layout of a slide

Transitions

Change the transition effects that are applied when you switch from one slide to the next

Animations

Add animation effects to your slides

Slide Show

Present your slide show

Review

Proof and add comments to your presentations

View

Change the view

Besides these basic tabs, additional tabs appear from time to time. For example, if you select a picture, a Picture Tools tab appears with commands that let you manipulate the picture.

The commands on a Ribbon tab are organized into groups. Within each group, most of the commands are simple buttons that are similar to toolbar buttons in previous versions of PowerPoint.

Telling PowerPoint What to Do

The Ribbon contains scores of buttons that enable you to use any of PowerPoint’s many features for creating and formatting slides. Unfortunately, the Ribbon can sometimes be difficult to navigate, and if you’re like me, you’ll often find yourself unsure of which Ribbon tab contains the button you’re looking for.

That’s where the Tell Me What to Do box comes in. This search box is located above the right side of the Ribbon. Type what you want to do in this box and PowerPoint will take you directly to the Ribbon button that lets you do it. For example, if you type Open, the Open button from the File menu appears. This feature can be a great timesaver when you know what you want to do but you aren’t sure exactly where in the Ribbon the correct button is located.

The View from Here Is Great

Near the right edge of the status bar is a series of four View buttons. These buttons enable you to switch among the various views, or ways of looking at your presentation. Table 1-2 summarizes what each View button does.

Table 1-2 View Buttons

Button

What It Does

Switches to Normal View, which shows your slide, outline, and notes all at once. This is the default view for PowerPoint.

Switches to Slide Sorter View, which enables you to easily rearrange slides and add slide transitions and other special effects.

Switches to Reading View, which displays your slide show within a window.

Switches to Slide Show View, which displays your slides in full-screen mode. This is the view you use when you’re actually giving your presentation.

Taking the Backstage Tour

Every summer, I attend plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon. A few years ago, I took the special backstage tour, which revealed all kinds of nifty secrets worthy of a Dan Brown novel.

This section takes a brief look at PowerPoint’s Backstage View feature, which provides access to document management features previously found on the File menu. When you click the File tab in the top-left corner of the PowerPoint window, PowerPoint switches to Backstage View, as shown in Figure 1-4.

Figure 1-4: Backstage View.

Initially, Backstage View displays information about the current presentation. However, the menu on the left — which bears a striking resemblance to what used to be called the File menu back in the day when programs had plain menus instead of fancy ribbons — provides access to the hidden features of PowerPoint available only to those who venture backstage.

You find out how to use the most important of these commands later in this chapter, and several of the more advanced commands on this menu are presented in later chapters.

Okay, the only secret I learned on the backstage tour at Ashland that was really worthy of a Dan Brown novel is the one about Psalm 46 in the King James translation of the Bible, which was published in 1611 — when William Shakespeare turned 46. If you count 46 words from the start of the Psalm, you get the word Shake. And if you count 46 words backwards from the end of the Psalm, you get the word Spear. Which clearly means that there’s a treasure buried directly beneath the stage in Ashland’s outdoor theater. Next year I’m taking a shovel.