 Hello, my name is Debbie Fierst, and I'll be your instructor. Not only have I developed and presented many presentations using Microsoft PowerPoint, but I've been teaching this product since version one. I look forward to teaching you. In this lesson, Modifying the PowerPoint Environment, we'll learn how to customize the user interface, and we'll also examine the PowerPoint 2013 options. In this topic, we're going to learn how to customize the user interface. We'll look at the PowerPoint Options dialog box. We'll learn how to customize the ribbon tab, customize the ribbon pane hierarchy, and customize the status bar menu. And then we'll focus on the window group. As you work with Microsoft PowerPoint, you will come up with modifications that you would like to make to the user interface. For instance, things that irritate you. You might want to turn off items that you use frequently. You might want to move to a different location. And so all of this work is done in the PowerPoint Options dialog box. You achieve this box by going up to the File menu and down to Options in the Backstage area. There are many options that you can modify. They're categorized for you in the left-hand side. And so for instance, right now I've selected General, and I can see some of the things that I can change in the General tab. For instance, if I don't like that mini toolbar showing up when I select text on one of my slides, I might want to disable that from here. I can modify my ribbon and my Quick Access toolbar. And there's just a variety of things that I can do to modify the user interface. One of the most frequently desired modifications people make to Microsoft PowerPoint is the ribbon. They want to change commands. They want to modify what shows up under different tabs. And this is where you do it. We're under File Options, and we've selected Customize Ribbon in the left-hand side. And you'll notice that what you have in the left are all of the possible commands that you can choose from. And in the right, you're seeing the existing tabs that are on your ribbon. If you expand these tabs, you see the groups. If you expand the groups, you see the commands. And so this gives me the capacity to modify the existing ribbon or even go down here to the bottom and create completely new tabs and new groups of commands that I use all the time. On this slide, I've drilled down into the Customize Ribbon pain hierarchy. And I'm showing you how it looks to modify the tabs in your ribbon. So for instance, here I'm on my home tab. It's been expanded, and you can see the groups that make up my home tab. If I want to modify what is in the clipboard group, then I go down and modify the individual commands. If one of them happens to be a drop-down list, like paste is, where I have a lot of different options, you expand yet one more time, and you can see all of the commands that are in that drop-down menu. So this shows you that the ribbon is really considered kind of an outline or a hierarchy that you need to modify. Another common modification people want to make to their user interface is the status bar. And in order to modify this status bar, you right-click down on the status bar and you see this menu. And basically, there are all sorts of different features that are currently turned on in your status bar. All you have to do to turn those off is click on the option which will uncheck this box and turn that feature off. Many times in PowerPoint, you will want to have multiple windows up on your screen at one time. Perhaps you're comparing two different presentations. And so what they've done is they've given you a window group with some options for dealing with multiple windows. For one thing, if you have multiple files up at one time, you can use the switch windows area to drop down this arrow and just simply switch back and forth between presentations that are open currently. If you want to see them all on your screen at one time, you've got a couple of options. You can pick a range all and that will show them in their own window all at the same time. They'll be rather small sometimes. For instance, if I have three, it might show me my presentations like this. So two of them would be in rather small windows. Cascade actually fans them like a deck of cards. It shows you the three windows in a cascade. You can then click on the title bars and switch back and forth between them. Another thing that you can do that's kind of interesting, though, is you can take one presentation. You only have one file open and you can select this option, New Window, and that will take the same exact presentation and put it in a second window. Maybe you want to compare two different parts of your presentation side by side. So over here, I might want to be on slide five and here, I might want to be on slide 10 in the same presentation. So this is the option for creating a new window and showing the same presentation. One of the things you can do at any time is click Move Split and move the bar that splits your window left, right, up, down by using your arrow keys.