Basic Concepts in PowerPoint

Hello Again:

I'm sure y'all thought that I had fallen off the face of the Internet earth or earth itself...or maybe worse, gone out of business!  Despite some challenging economic times, I'm still kick'n (a little of my Texan is coming out).

I don't believe, actually I'm sure, that I haven't blogged anything about PowerPoint, Microsoft's "presentation graphics" software.  So here's my chance...

As with other software, but particularly with PPT (yep, PowerPoint) many people tell me it is very easy to use (and therefore no need for a class) and quite "obvious".

I agree for the most part that PPT is easy to use, but there are several important concepts associated with PPT that may not be so obvious, overlooked, or not understood.  And there are quite a few important details associated with such features as the Masters and Animations (maybe talk about these items in later blogs).

For now though, I would like to address one important basic concept about PPT;  default layouts.

I guess I'd better start at the beginning...

The file created within PPT is called a "Presentation" (*.pptx) for 2007 and later.  The presentation is made of slides that contain various elements such as text boxes, pictures, tables, graphs, etc (objects).

Upon opening PPT a new, unsaved presentation (Presentation1) is created with a single slide.  This slide is considered the Title Slide and has a specific layout called "Title Slide" (what-da-ya-know).  This can be observed by clicking the Layout button in Slides group and seeing the selected layout in the list.

Each slide that is added to a presentation (after slide 1) by clicking the "New Slide" button in the Slides command group on the Home Ribbon has a default "layout" of "Title and Content".  Of course a layout other than "Title and Content" can be chosen.  As a matter of fact, after slide 2, a new slide added to the presentation adopts the layout of the previous slide.  If it hasn't been changed, the layout of all slides after slide 1 will be "Title and Content".

For those of you have "messed" with PPT enough, you have probably figured this out, otherwise you may now understand 'how it is' with slides and layouts.

Whew, I feel better now, I was all blogged up not having said anything in awhile.  Hope I got it all laid out on the layout.

Have fun in the meantime until next time, Joel