Section 1.5. Moving Around Inside a Presentation

1.5. Moving Around Inside a Presentation

Moving around your presentation when you only have one slide isn't much of an issue. But once you start adding slides, you'll want a way to hop quickly from your first slide to your last. You'll also want to jump to specific slides in the middle of your presentation; for example, to tweak a particular slide's layout, to add content, or to delete it.

PowerPoint gives you several ways to flip through your presentation. This section acquaints you with the easiest and most useful options: using your workspace scroll bar, using the View pane on the left side of the screen, and using the Home ribbon's Find function.

1.5.1. Navigating with the Scroll Bar

In PowerPoint, you see a scroll bar on the right side of your workspace similar to the one in Figure 1-19.

Figure 1-19. If you've got more than one slide, the vertical scroll bars always appear in PowerPoint, no matter which tab you select or which ribbon appears at the top of your workspace. Scrolling tells PowerPoint to display slides not just in the main workspace, but also to display thumbnail versions in the Slides pane.

To scroll through your presentation, all you need to do is click the scroll bar and drag up (to scroll toward the beginning of your presentation) or down (to scroll toward the end). As you go, PowerPoint displays each slide in turn .

Tip: To flip forward (or back) through your presentation one slide at a time, click the Next Slide (or Previous Slide) arrow shown in Figure 1-19.

1.5.2. Navigating with the Slides and Outline Tabs

Slides and Outline tabs are not views (they both appear in Normal view) but are tabs that let you see slide thumbnails or an outline of your slideshow, respectively, in the Slides (Figure 1-20) or Outline (Figure 1-21) pane.

Figure 1-20. Here, the Slides tab is selected. You're viewing the contents of the first (selected) slide.

Figure 1-21. Here's the same presentation in outline form. To banish the View pane altogether, click the X in the upper-right corner. To resize it, simply drag the resize handle on the right side of the pane. (In keeping with its new-and-improved design philosophy, PowerPoint doesn't let you make the View pane larger than one-quarter of the total interface.)

PowerPoint assumes you want to use Slides view until you tell it otherwise . To change views, click the Outline tab shown in Figure 1-21. To switch back to Slides view, click the Slides tab (Figure 1-20).

Note: If you don't see the View pane at all, select View

Normal (or click the Normal icon shown in Figure 1-20) to display it.

Note: The View ribbon offers you a bunch of additional ways to view your presentation, including Slide Sorter (Chapter 5) and Notes Page (page 43).

1.5.3. Using Find

When you've got a lot of slides and you're looking for one containing a specific word or phrase, you'll want to bypass Views in favor of the Find function. Similar to the Find feature in other Windows programs, PowerPoint's Find function lets you search for specific words quickly and easily. Here's how to use it.

Press Ctrl+F.

The Find dialog box appears (Figure 1-22).

Figure 1-22. Another way to display this Find box is to head to the Editing section of the Home tab and then click the Find button. Chapter 2 shows you how to use the more advanced Find functions, including Replace, which lets you automatically replace the text you find with different text.

In the "Find what" box, type in the text you want to find (in Figure 1-22, the text is marshmallow ).

If you like, you can click to turn on the "Match case" checkbox (which tells PowerPoint to look for marshmallow but not Marshmallow, MARSHMALLOW , or MaRsHmAlLoW ) or the "Find whole words only" checkbox (which tells PowerPoint to look for marshmallow but not chocolatemarshmallowgraham ). When you finish, click Find Next.

PowerPoint displays the slide containing your text. If it doesn't find a match, it shows this message: "PowerPoint has finished searching the presentation. The search item wasn't found."