 My name is Debbie Fierst, and I'll be your instructor for this course. I've been teaching Microsoft PowerPoint since version one. In addition, I've built and delivered hundreds of PowerPoint presentations, so I look forward to sharing my knowledge with you. In this lesson, Getting Started with PowerPoint, we're going to learn how to navigate the PowerPoint environment, create and save a PowerPoint presentation, and how to use PowerPoint help. In this topic, we're going to focus on navigating the PowerPoint environment. We'll talk about what PowerPoint is, we'll learn about slides and the start screen. We'll examine the PowerPoint 2013 user interface, including the ribbon, screen tips, dialog box launchers, the quick access toolbar, the left pane, the status bar, contextual tabs, and also the backstage view. I first want to define PowerPoint and help you understand what it is inside of the entire suite of Microsoft Office products. PowerPoint 2013 is a presentation tool. It's designed for you to create graphical, fascinating presentations to give to people in meetings or in training contexts. If you look at an example here, we've got someone who's giving a project status report update, but instead of it just being a plain old boring list of text, they've got some interesting visuals. Okay, so PowerPoint is meant to be a visual environment. It allows audio, charts, graphics of all kinds. It makes your presentations sing. A key element to all presentations in PowerPoint is the slide. You can think of a slide as almost a page in a book, okay? The presentation is the entire book, and the slides are the individual pages of that book. So they are represented as squares inside of Microsoft PowerPoint. And on a slide, you can place all kinds of objects. You can have text, you can have images, you can have headings. You can also place other types of elements like videos or audio clips. When you first launch Microsoft PowerPoint, you're taken to something called the start screen. The start screen allows you to quickly open up files that you've been working in recently or go and open up other presentations that are saved. You also can search for templates. Templates are existing presentations that have been put together and are available for you to use as a starting point for your own presentation. Or you can start with a blank. Now, one term you should get familiar with rather quickly is something called a theme. A theme is basically a look and feel, an overall design concept for a presentation. And Microsoft has put together some very nice themes that you can use as a starting point to make your presentation look nice. Once you've entered Microsoft PowerPoint, you need to get familiar with the user interface. These are the parts of the screen that you'll be using as you build and use your presentation. Let's start in the upper left-hand corner with something called the quick access toolbar. This is a feature that is available in every Microsoft Office product. And basically what they've done is they've given you a few icons there of commonly used features. The big one here is save. So as you're working on your presentation, you want to save what you're doing. You can access the save button quickly from the quick access toolbar. There's also an undo, a redo, and an ability to quickly play your presentation from the beginning. You can use this little icon at the end of the quick access toolbar to add icons there that you think you might use frequently. So it can be customized. The key component to using Microsoft PowerPoint is the ribbon. The ribbon consists of tabs. And as you click on these individual tabs, you're taken to a new ribbon of features based on the category. So for instance, if I am in the view tab, I will switch to a ribbon related to viewing my presentation, changing the perspective. All right, and after the ribbon, you have what is called the left pane. And the left pane is where you can see small thumbnails of the slides that are currently in your presentation. You can navigate those. Okay, so this left pane is what modifies a little bit depending on the view that you're in. So you may or may not even have a left pane. Some perspectives of your presentation don't even show this left pane. And then you've got your slide pane, and that's your central area where you do the heavy lifting, where you see the slide you're working on at a focal point, and you make your changes. You modify your text to add your objects and so on. So you'll be working in the slide pane most of the time. And then finally, in the bottom, you have what's called the status bar, and there's some nifty stuff down here. In the lower left, it tells you what number slide you're on. Also, you can quickly get into a notes area where you can add some notes related to each slide that you might want to utilize when you're giving a presentation. You can also place comments. Maybe you want to remind yourself to do something. And then you can switch to different perspectives of your presentation and zoom in and out so you can see more or less of your slide at any given time. Also, please note that on the right-hand side here, you do have a scroll bar allowing you to scroll through your presentation. We want to take a moment to focus on the ribbon and understand the terminology related to the ribbon. At the top of the ribbon, these are called tabs. And again, as you click on different tabs, the commands that are available under that category switch. So for instance, right now, we are on the home tab, so we're seeing all of the home-related ribbon commands. Now what they've done is they've grouped these commands. Now for instance, everything related to fonts are in a little area called font. Everything related to paragraphs, paragraph, and so on. Now this ribbon can take up some valuable screen real estate. And so what some people like to do is use this button in the lower right to unpin the ribbon, meaning it won't show all of the time on your screen while you're working. When you want to see the ribbon, clicking on a tab is going to bring that back down. And you can always re-pin the ribbon if you want to see it all the time. When you hover your mouse over a command button on the ribbon, like you see here in the new slide command, what happens is a screen tip comes up automatically telling you what that command will do for you, what the shortcut keystroke combination is, and it gives you a way to get into the help system if you need additional information about how that command works. We talked about the fact that the command buttons on the ribbon are categorized into groups. So for instance, we have the font group. Well, in the lower right-hand corner of some of these groups, you will see something called the dialog box launcher. It's really just a little arrow. What that will allow you to do is click and bring up a dialog box that will then show you all of the features related to that category. So for instance, there's much more related to fonts than what we see here. Microsoft just chose to put the command buttons that are used most frequently on the ribbon. If we want to see everything related to our font options, we need to hit the dialog box launcher for that category and then see all of our choices. When I was talking about the parts of the screen, I showed you the quick access toolbar in the upper left-hand corner. Let's just review that and make sure you understand your choices there. By default, you get a save button. You get an undo button that undoes your last step. You get a repeat, basically a redo. And then this particular button is very specific to Microsoft PowerPoint. It allows you, when giving your presentation, to start over from the beginning. Going to slide one. If I want to add any command options to this quick access toolbar, I do it by clicking this down arrow button, and it'll take me into an area where I can add these buttons. Now you might be thinking, why would I want to customize the quick access toolbar? I've got this great ribbon with all the options. Well remember, as you flip to different tabs on the ribbon, you can't see the commands from the other categories. The beauty of the quick access toolbar is it is visible on your screen all the time. So if there's a button you think you might want available to you, regardless of where you're at on the ribbon, add it to the quick access toolbar. The left pane of the Microsoft PowerPoint window is visible in certain views, not all views. For instance, by default, you go into the normal view of a PowerPoint presentation, and in the normal view, we see in the left pane little thumbnails of all of the slides that currently reside in our presentation. There's some neat information here, visual information. I not only can see the slide, but over to the left in the upper left-hand corner of each slide, as I do certain things like apply transitions or apply animations, I get little visuals there letting me know what I've done to that slide. If I, for instance, decide to hide a slide, I'll see a little symbol over the number letting me know that that slide is currently hidden. So you'll learn some little visual cues to watch for in this left pane area. Now the status bar is at the bottom of your screen, and this is a very valuable area because it allows you to see at a glance what number slide you're on. If you've got 100 slides and you're on slide 80, for instance. It also gives you a quick way to get into spell check. Notes are something that you add to prompt yourself as you're giving the presentation what you want to say in that particular slide. And so if you want to add a note to the slide that you're on, you can just click on notes in the status bar down there, and it will bring up a little window for you to type in the corresponding notes. You can also put in comments. Those are meant just to be little ticklers to yourself about maybe what you should be remembering to do on a particular slide, or maybe you're sharing this presentation with another designer, and you want to be communicating back and forth with each other. Comments are a good area for that. You also have four different views or perspectives you can take on your presentation that you can get to quickly from the status bar, and you have the capacity to zoom in and out by hitting the plus and minus sign here. You can zoom in and out of your current slide showing more or less of the slide. If you want to make the slide that you're on right now automatically fit to the current window, which could vary greatly. If you go to give a presentation somewhere where they've got a smaller or larger screen resolution, suddenly you might find yourself in a situation where your slide isn't fitting the screen. This button is fantastic because it just makes the decision for you how big can this slide be based on the window I'm in at the moment. All right, so we've talked about the fact that the ribbon has tabs, right? So I click on the design tab, for instance, I'm going to see the design-related commands in the ribbon. But sometimes when you've added certain elements to your presentation, in this example, they're assuming we've added some sort of chart. Let's pretend we've got a little bar chart that we've added, column chart to our presentation. Certain elements that you add will cause a contextual tab to come up. In other words, it's a tab that's normally not there, but in this particular context, having a chart, we need it. And so you will see contextual tabs appear. In this case, when I'm on a chart, and I have my chart selected, the chart tools contextual tab comes up and underneath that has two sub tabs, design and format, that bring up commands related to modifying my chart. All of the Microsoft Office 2013 products have what is called the Backstage View. This area is accessed under the File tab. When you click on File, you don't go to a ribbon. You are transported to this different perspective, a completely new window called the Backstage View. On the left-hand side of the Backstage View, you've got some menus. And these are your common file management features, things like opening files, saving files, printing, and so on. Under here, you can also go in and set some options related to Microsoft PowerPoint.