Technology Training Home > Microsoft Office > PowerPoint > PowerPoint Basics

PowerPoint Basics
by Andy Rush

Microsoft PowerPoint is an excellent program for making classroom presentations that can be presented from a computer with an LCD panel or a computer projector. This document is intended to give you a basic introduction to using PowerPoint 2002.

Starting PowerPoint

In Windows XP, go to the Start menu and highlight the All Programs menu and select (click) Microsoft PowerPoint.

Open or Create a Presentation

PowerPoint 2002 by default opens with a blank presentation and the task pane is on the right side of the window. The task pane is a powerful new way to give you control of the presentation that you will create.

There are several sections to the task pane. By default, the New Presentation task pane appears when PowerPoint is first opened. Open a presentation is first on the list and it is pretty self explanatory. You will open a presentation that you have already begun working on or that someone else has created. If you are creating a new presentation you have three choices under the New section. Blank Presentation - Start with a blank slate and build everything yourself (for users who are very familiar with PowerPoint). From Design Template - Choose from colorful templates then add you own text, graphics, etc. From AutoContent Wizard - Asks you a series of questions to automatically build a presentation that is then able to be modified.

For most users the From Design Template choice is preferable. Simply choose a design, and your slides will be instantly formatted using the new design.

Adding Slides

To add slides to your presentation, click the new slide button . You may also select New Slide from the Insert menu. By default, PowerPoint creates a bulleted list slide. You can use this layout or you can choose from different combinations of text and content layouts. Simply click one of the layouts in the task pane and it will change the slide to that format.

Edit Your Page (working with objects)

Depending on which type of slide you have chosen, you'll probably see, in various places, text asking you to "click to add" something. You might add a title or plain text or it might ask you to "double-click to add clip art". Whatever it says, by clicking or double-clicking, you can add many different types of elements to the slide. Each element will be inside a box, and clicking on the elements, the text or the clip art, activates the box.

Below are two examples. On the left is a text box. You can click down anywhere on the line of text to place the cursor. You can then add text or delete text using the keyboard. You can also click down and "drag" across the text to select it. From here you can change the Font or text size. On the right is some clip art. Notice that both the text box and the clip art are surrounded by small circles in the corners and on each side. These mark the boundaries of an object. Each element, whether it is a text box, clip art, title, or chart, is an object.

Any object can be manipulated on the slide. One way is moving an object around the screen. When you move the mouse over an object, the mouse cursor will change slightly. Attached to the mouse will be directional arrows which indicate if you click down and then move the mouse, the object will move. In the case of clip art, the directional arrows appear when you move the mouse anywhere on top of it. In the case of a text box you need to move the mouse on the edge of the box surrounding the text.

The other way to manipulate an object is to resize it. Objects like clip art and charts can be resized by moving the mouse over one of the eight small circles around the object. By moving the mouse to one of the right or left side circles, a horizontal resize arrow appears. Moving the mouse to a top or bottom side circle changes it to a vertical resize arrow . Moving the mouse over one of the corner circles changes the cursor to a diagonal arrow . Click down while any of these directional arrows appear and move the mouse in the direction that you want to resize. Note: By resizing a text box, you only resize the area of the text box, not necessarily the text itself.

Sorting Your Slides

Normally you will view your slides one at a time and work with the text and other objects to design your slide. The standard view of PowerPoint 2002 allows you to see the slide in the main part of the screen, thumbnails of all the slides on the left (you can switch to outline view as well), and notes for the slide at the bottom. The view toolbar, which is located in the lower left of the PowerPoint screen, is set to Normal View by default. It should look like this:

There is another view, however, that will aid you in working with all the slides in your presentation. The slide sorter view will display "thumbnails" of all of your slides. You get the this view by clicking the middle button like this:

The slide sorter will appear. You click on and move any slide to anywhere in your presentation. Move the first slide to the middle, the last slide to the beginning, etc. Think of it as having 35mm slides on a light table and moving them around. You can also delete slides easily from the sorter by clicking on a slide and either pressing the delete key on the keyboard or selecting the Edit menu and choosing Delete slide. Shown below is the slide sorter with slide 1 selected (blue border around it).

Inserting Elements into Slides

There is much to cover when it comes to what types of elements can go into a slide, and this document will not go into too much depth. To add elements to the slide, select the Insert menu. There are many elements that you can select: Pictures (clip art or files on your computer, shapes, organization charts, or "word art"); Text boxes; Movies and Sounds; Charts; and even Hyperlinks (you have to select text or objects before you can insert a Hyperlink).

Start Your Slide Show!

Make sure that you are either viewing the slide you want to start with or you have it selected in the slide sorter view and click the button in the illustration below:

Now by clicking the left mouse button, you will advance the slides! We haven't even gotten into animating your text and objects. That's the subject for a more advanced document. Play around with PowerPoint, and even attend a training session offered by Instructional Technology. PowerPoint is a very capable program that should assist you in getting your point across.

This Page Last Modified on: March 28, 2003