PowerPoint^® 2016 For Dummies^®

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015950487

ISBN 978-1-119-07705-3 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-07734-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-07710-7 (ebk)

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:

• Keyboard shortcuts: On occasion, this book directs you to use specific keyboard shortcuts to get things done. When you see something like Ctrl+Z, this instruction means to hold down the Ctrl key while pressing the Z key and then release both together. Don’t type the plus sign.
• Commands: Sometimes I tell you to use a command that resides on the new Ribbon interface like this: Choose Home ⇒ Editing ⇒ Find. That means to click the Find button, which you can find in the Editing group on the Home tab.
• Onscreen messages: Whenever I describe a message or information that you see onscreen, it looks like this:

  Are we having fun yet?

• Buttons in the margin: Whenever I discuss a certain button that you need to click in order to accomplish the task at hand, the button appears either in the margin or in a helpful table that summarizes the buttons that apply to a particular task. This way, you can easily locate it on your screen.
• Bold text: Type bold text just as it appears in the book. The exception is when you’re working through a steps list: Because each step is bold, the text to type is not bold.
• Monofont: Web addresses and programming code appear in monofont. If you’re reading a digital version of this book on a device connected to the Internet, you can click the web address to visit that website, like this: www.dummies.com.

Foolish Assumptions

I make only three assumptions about you:

• You use a computer.
• It’s a Windows computer — not a Mac. (PowerPoint 2016 requires at least Windows 7.)
• You use or are thinking about using PowerPoint 2016.

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:

• Cheat Sheet: Go to www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/powerpoint2016 to find a variety of shortcuts for everything from formatting and editing to slide shows and more.
• Web Extras: Go to www.dummies.com/extras/powerpoint2016 to access articles on how to add recurring text, how to create a hyperlink to another slide, how to add comments to presentations, and more.

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:

• Business presentations: PowerPoint is a great timesaver for anyone who makes business presentations, whether you’ve been asked to speak in front of hundreds of people at a shareholders’ convention, a group of sales reps at a sales conference, or your own staff or co-workers at a business meeting.
• Sales presentations: If you’re an insurance salesperson, you can use PowerPoint to create a presentation about the perils of not owning life insurance and then use your laptop or tablet computer to show it to hapless clients.
• Lectures: PowerPoint is useful for teachers or conference speakers who want to reinforce the key points in their lectures with slides.
• Homework: PowerPoint is a great program to use for certain types of homework projects, such as those big history reports that count for half your grade.
• Church: People use PowerPoint at churches to display song lyrics on big screens so everyone can sing or to display sermon outlines so everyone can take notes. If your church still uses hymnals or prints the outline in the bulletin, tell the minister to join the 21st century.
• Information stations: You can use PowerPoint to set up a computerized information kiosk that people can walk up to and use. For example, you can create a museum exhibit about the history of your town or set up a tradeshow presentation to provide information about your company and products.
• Internet presentations: PowerPoint can even help you to set up a presentation that you can broadcast over the Internet so people can join in on the fun without having to leave the comfort of their own homes or offices.

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:

• Computer screen: Your computer screen is a suitable way to display your presentation when you’re showing it to just one or two other people.
• Big-screen TV: If you have a big-screen TV that can accommodate computer input, it’s ideal for showing presentations to medium-sized audiences — say 10 to 12 people in a small conference room.
• Computer projector: A computer projector projects an image of your computer monitor onto a screen so large audiences can view it.
• Webcast: You can show your presentation over the Internet. That way, your audience doesn’t all have to be in the same place at the same time. Anyone with a web browser can sit in on your presentation.
• Printed pages: Printed pages enable you to distribute a printed copy of your entire presentation to each member of your audience. (When you print your presentation, you can print one slide per page, or you can print several slides on each page to save paper.)
• Overhead transparencies: Overhead transparencies can be used to show your presentation using an overhead projector. It’s a little old-school to be sure, but some people still do it this way.

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.

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.

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:

• Ribbon: Across the top of the screen, just below the Microsoft PowerPoint title, is PowerPoint’s main user-interface gadget, called the Ribbon. If you’ve worked with earlier versions of PowerPoint, you were probably expecting to see a menu followed by one or more toolbars in this general vicinity. After meticulous research, Microsoft gurus decided that menus and toolbars are hard to use. So they replaced the menus and toolbars with the Ribbon, which combines the functions of both. The Ribbon takes some getting used to, but after you figure it out, it actually does become easier to use than the old menus and toolbars. The deepest and darkest secrets of PowerPoint are hidden on the Ribbon. Wear a helmet when exploring it.

  Note that the exact appearance of the Ribbon varies a bit depending on the size of your monitor. On smaller monitors, PowerPoint may compress the Ribbon a bit by using smaller buttons and arranging them differently (for example, stacking them on top of one another instead of placing them side by side).

  For more information about working with the Ribbon, see the section “Unraveling the Ribbon,” later in this chapter.

• File tab: The first tab on the Ribbon is called the File tab. You can click it to switch the program into a special mode called Backstage View, which provides access to various functions such as opening and saving files, creating new presentations, printing, and other similar chores. For more information, see the section “Taking the Backstage Tour,” later in this chapter.

• Quick Access toolbar: Just above the Ribbon is the Quick Access toolbar, also called the QAT for short. Its sole purpose in life is to provide a convenient resting place for the PowerPoint commands you use the most often.

  Initially, this toolbar contains just three: Save, Undo, and Redo. However, you can add more buttons if you want. To add any button to the QAT, right-click the button and choose Add to Quick Access Toolbar. You can also find a pull-down menu at the end of the QAT that lists several frequently used commands. You can use this menu to add these common commands to the QAT.

• Current slide: Right smack in the middle of the screen is where your current slide appears.
• Slides pane: To the left of the slide is an area that shows thumbnail icons of your slides. You can use this area to easily navigate to other slides in your presentation.
• Task pane: To the right of the slide is an area called the task pane. The task pane is designed to help you complete common tasks quickly. When you first start PowerPoint, the task pane isn’t visible, so you can’t see it in Figure 1-1. However, it appears whenever it’s needed, and you can see plenty of examples of it throughout this book.

• Status bar: At the very bottom of the screen is the status bar, which tells you the slide that is currently displayed (for example, Slide 1 of 1).

  You can configure the status bar by right-clicking anywhere on it. This right-click reveals a list of options that you can select or deselect to determine which elements appear on the status bar.

• Zoom control: PowerPoint automatically adjusts its zoom factor so that Slide View displays each slide in its entirety. You can change the size of your slide by using the zoom control slider that appears at the bottom right of the window.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.