Creating Your First Slide

When you first open PowerPoint you’ll see a large square in the middle of the screen. This square represents your new presentation’s first slide. Ignore everything else in the window for now.

The slide should contain two rectangles marked by dotted lines. There’s also some text inside. These rectangles are calledplaceholders because they’re places where you’ll type.

The top placeholder is meant to contain your presentation’s title and the bottom its subtitle. Thus, this slide is called the Title Slide. You’re not required to start your presentation with a title slide. You can actually begin with any slide type you want. This is just Microsoft’s suggestion.

The text in the slide’s top placeholder says “Click to add title.” Go ahead and click anywhere in the rectangle. The text should disappear and leave a blinking black line, the cursor, in the rectangle’s center. The cursor represents where your text will appear when you start typing and is used in the other Microsoft office programs.

Type the title of your presentation. As you do you’ll see the text center perfectly inside the placeholder. The border will disappear.

Title Slide

Next, click in the box below and type the subtitle if you have one. Let’s say, though, you don’t want to have a subtitle for your presentation. We can delete that placeholder then. Here’s how:

1. Move your mouse arrow on top of the box’s dotted border until it turns into a black, four pointed arrow. You make have to fiddle a bit to see it. Then click.2. Hit the Delete key on your keyboard.

Adding New Slides

Let’s insert a couple more slides. There are several ways to do this.

The first way is to click on one of the two New Slide buttons on the Home tab. The buttons are located in the Slides group near the left-hand side of the tab.

It looks like there’s only one New Slide button, but there are actually two. The one on top looks like a white square (or rectangle). The one below says “New Slide,” and has a tiny black triangle beside it. These triangles are actually called dropdown arrows. Click on the white square.

New Slide Square Button

Doing this inserts a new “Title and Content” slide into your presentation. This slide type is the default. In other words, if you don’t specifically choose what type of new slide you want to insert, you’ll automatically insert a “Title and Content” slide.

Inserting Other Types of New Slides

However, if you click on the bottom button you’ll get a whole array of new slide formats to choose from. The format you choose depends on what you’re planning to put on your next slide. For instance, you could insert a content slide, which lets you easily insert pictures, tables, charts, and other visuals. There’s also a blank format that acts as a clean slate you could do anything with.

Normal View

When you first opened PowerPoint your slide appeared in Normal view. Your slides should still appear that way because Normal view is the default, and you haven’t changed it.

You’ll notice there are a couple parts to Normal view. The slide itself is located in the Slides Pane. There’s also a white strip below that says “Click to add notes.” This strip is called the Notes Pane. This pane can be enlarged, and is where you can type notes about the slides for either yourself or your audience.

On the left-hand side of the window is the Overview Pane. This pane contains two tabs, the Slides tab and the Outline tab.

The Slides tab shows thumbnails of the slides in your presentation. Clicking on a thumbnail will make that slide show up in a larger view on the right (in the Slides pane).

On the Outline tab you can type text for all the slides and also see what text is on them. Personally, though, I hardly ever use the Outline tab. I’d rather just click on the thumbnails on the Slides tab. That way I can see a larger view in the Slides Pane of what I’ve written on each slide.

Normal View

Try it!

OK, time to get hands-on. Please insert five new slides, each a different type. Afterward you should have enough slides in your presentation to work with.

Now type some text on each one. Click the thumbnails on the Slides tab to move from one slide to another.

Please don’t skip the exercise because you’ll need these slides to follow the next instructions! (You thought you could get away without doing it, huh. J)

Other Views

Looking at your slides in other views besides Normal makes creating certain aspects of your presentation easier. There are two ways to change views. One method is to click on the View tab on the Ribbon (the last tab on the right). You’ll see several view choices on the left-hand side.

The second way, and in my mind the quickest, is to click on the view buttons in the lower right-hand corner of your screen.

View Buttons

Slide Sorter View

The leftmost view button is Normal view, the view you’re in now. The next one over, made of four little squares, is Slide Sorter view. The third and fourth buttons are for Reading view (not very useful), and Slide Show view (very useful)!

Click on the Slide Sorter view button to see what your slides look like. When you’re in Slide Sorter view it’s easy to move slides around, as well as add transitions or animation.

Reading View

Reading view is new to PowerPoint and wasn’t available in the 2007 version. This view is supposed to provide you a way to look at the slides exactly as when you play your slide show. My personal opinion is that this view isn’t necessary, and I myself don’t plan on using it. There are enough ways to preview slide shows without causing more confusion. So, for the sake of this tutorial, we’re going to skip Reading View.

Slide Show View

The last icon to the right is the Slide Show button. I think it looks like a trophy cup. You click on this button to actually play the slide show.

You can play your nascent presentation using the slides you created in the exercise. Here’s how to do it:

1. Click on the thumbnail of your first slide.
2. Click on the Slide Show button.
3. Click your left mouse button to advance to each slide.
4. Press the Escape (Esc) key on your keyboard when the slide show ends.

There you have it. You’ve just played your first, very basic, slide show!

If you’d like to learn more about PowerPoint or the other Microsoft Office programs, I teach remotely all over the world. There’s only a 15-minute minimum. For more information please click here.