Managing Slides


After inserting a few slides into a presentation, and perhaps building some content on them, you might decide to make some changes, such as rearranging, deleting, and so on. The following sections explain how to manage and manipulate the slides in a presentation.

Selecting Slides

Before you can issue a command that acts upon a slide or a group of slides, you must select the slides that you want to affect. You can do this from either Normal or Slide Sorter view, but Slide Sorter view makes it easier because you can see more slides at once. From Slide Sorter view, or from the Slides pane in Normal view, you can use any of these techniques to select slides:

  • To select a single slide, click it.

  • To select multiple slides, hold down the Ctrl key as you click each one. Figure 4.5 shows slides 1, 3, and 6 selected, as indicated by the shaded border around the slides.

    image from book
    Figure 4.5: Select slides in Slide Sorter view by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking each slide.

  • To select a contiguous group of slides (for example, slides 1, 2, and 3), click the first slide, and then hold down the Shift key as you click the last one. All of the slides in between are selected as well.

To cancel the selection of multiple slides, click anywhere outside of the selected slides.

To select slides from the Outline pane in Normal view, click the slide icon to the left of the slide's title; this selects the entire slide, as shown in Figure 4.6. It's important to select the entire slide and not just part of its content before issuing a command such as Delete, because otherwise, the command only affects the portion that you selected.

image from book
Figure 4.6: Select slides in the Outline pane by clicking the slide icon to the left of the slide title.

Deleting Slides

You may want to get rid of some of the slides, especially if you created your presentation using a template that contained a lot of sample content. For example, the sample presentation may be longer than you need, or you may have inserted your own slides instead.

Select the slide or slides that you want to delete, and then do any of the following:

  • On the Home tab, click Delete.

  • Right-click the selection and choose Delete Slide.

  • Press the Delete key on the keyboard.

Undoing Mistakes

Here's a command that can help you in almost all of the other chapters in this book: undoing. The Undo command allows you to reverse past actions. For example, you can use it to reverse all of the deletions that you made to your presentation in the preceding section. The easiest way to undo a single action is to click the Undo button on the Quick Access toolbar or press Ctrl+Z. You can click it as many times as you like; each time you click it, you undo one action.

EXPERT TIP 

By default, the maximum number of Undo operations is 20, but you can change this. Choose Office image from book PowerPoint Options, then click Advanced, and in the Editing Options section, change the Maximum Number of Undos setting. Keep in mind that if you set the number of undos too high, it can cause performance problems in PowerPoint.

You can undo multiple actions at once by opening the Undo button's drop-down list, as shown in Figure 4.7. Just drag the mouse across the actions that you want to undo (you don't need to hold down the mouse button). Click when the desired actions are selected, and presto, they are all reversed. You can select multiple actions to undo, but you can't skip around. For example, to undo the fourth item, you must undo the first, second, and third ones, as well.

image from book
Figure 4.7: Use the Undo button to undo your mistakes and the Redo button to reverse an Undo operation.

The Redo command is the opposite of Undo. If you make a mistake with the Undo button, you can fix the problem by clicking the Redo button. Like the Undo button, it has a drop-down list, and so you can redo multiple actions at once.

The Redo command is available only immediately after you use the Undo command. If Redo isn't available, a Repeat button appears in its place. The Repeat command enables you to repeat the last action that you performed (and it doesn't have to be an Undo operation). For example, you can repeat some typing, or some formatting. Figure 4.8 shows the Repeat button.

image from book
Figure 4.8: The Repeat button appears when Redo is not available, and enables you to repeat actions.

Rearranging Slides

The best way to rearrange slides is to do so in Slide Sorter view. In this view, the slides in your presentation appear in thumbnail view, and you can move them around on the screen to different positions, just as you would manually rearrange pasted-up artwork on a table. Although you can also do this from the Slides pane in Normal view, you are able to see fewer slides at once. As a result, it can be more challenging to move slides around, for example, from one end of the presentation to another. To rearrange slides, use the following steps:

  1. Switch to Slide Sorter view.

  2. Select the slide that you want to move. You can move multiple slides at once if you like.

  3. Drag the selected slide to the new location. The mouse pointer changes to a little rectangle next to the pointer arrow as you drag. A vertical line also appears where the slide will go if you release the mouse button at that point, as shown in Figure 4.9.

    image from book
    Figure 4.9: As you drag a slide, its new position is indicated by a vertical line.

  4. Release the mouse button. The slide moves to the new location.

You can also rearrange slides in the Outline pane in Normal view. This is not quite as easy as using Slide Sorter view, but it's more versatile. Not only can you drag entire slides from place to place, but you can also move individual bullets from one slide to another.

Follow these steps to move content in the Outline pane:

  1. Switch to Normal view and display the Outline pane.

  2. Position the mouse pointer over the slide's icon. The mouse pointer changes to a four-headed arrow.

  3. Click on the icon. PowerPoint selects all of the text in that slide.

  4. Drag the slide's icon to a new position in the outline. As you drag, a horizontal line appears to indicate where the slide will go, as shown in Figure 4.10.

    image from book
    Figure 4.10: Drag a slide's icon to move it up or down in the Outline pane.

  5. Release the mouse button when the horizontal line is in the right place. All of the slide's text moves with it to the new location.

There are also keyboard shortcuts for moving a slide up or down in the Outline pane that may be faster than clicking the toolbar buttons. You can press the Alt+Shift+Up arrow keys to move a slide up, and the Alt+Shift+Down arrow keys to move the slide down.

These shortcuts work equally well with single bullets from a slide. Just click to the left of a single line to select it, instead of clicking the Slide icon in step 3.




Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Bible
Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 Bible
ISBN: 0470144939
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 268
Authors: Faithe Wempen

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