Editing Individual Slides

In most instances, the templates and individual slide layouts and color schemes provide ample variability and style. Rarely do you have to make substantial design edits to your presentation slides; usually you'll change only the text. Unlike most PowerPoint tutorials, this book does not go into great detail about slide editing. You don't need to edit the design of individual slides in most cases because of the detailed layouts that PowerPoint provides.

The major change you must make to the slides for a presentation created with the AutoContent Wizard is to add and edit text on the slides. All the spell-checking and AutoCorrect features that are so important in Word and Excel also work for text you place in a presentation; a red wavy line beneath a word indicates that the Office 2003 spell-checker does not recognize the word. Correct the word, or add it to PowerPoint's dictionary by right-clicking the word.

You can create your presentation's slide text in Word and take advantage of Word's advanced word-processing capabilities. For example, you can import a Word document into PowerPoint. You must, while creating the Word document, use the standard Word styles (such as Heading 1 and Heading 2) and not create your own because PowerPoint uses these standard styles to determine what text converts to slide headings and to bulleted items beneath the headings on the slides. Use Word's File, Send To, Microsoft PowerPoint option to send the Word document to PowerPoint and convert the document to a presentation. You can then select styles that you want to change to add flair to the presentation. Therefore, if you are planning to turn a report into a presentation, save yourself some trouble and use some of the built-in styles in Word, such as the Heading styles, for any headings in your presentation.

Word documents aren't the only documents you can import into a presentation. You can import an Excel worksheet, HTML-based Web page, chart, or just about any other kind of file (including multimedia files) into a presentation. Beginning with Office 2003, you can insert files with XML content. Select Insert, Object to display the dialog box shown in Figure 13.3, click the Create from File option, and click Browse to locate the document that you want to import.

Figure 13.3. You can insert almost anything into a presentation.

Given that PowerPoint 2003 makes quick work of modifying your overall presentation's design and colors, you need to spend some time concentrating on how to edit individual slides. The individual slides take a generic presentation that the AutoContent Wizard generated and turns that presentation into your unique presentation that performs the work you need done.

The Contents of the Master Style

The Master style is a collection of headings, colors, and fonts that give a presentation its personality. By selecting View, Master, Slide Master, you can see, and edit, every element defined in your current Master style. Figure 13.4 shows the screen that appears when you display your Slide Master.

Figure 13.4. Change the Slide Master to change elements of your own presentation.

You can edit a Slide Master's title style, text styles, and level styles. In addition, you can give your presentation a uniform header and footer appearance from the Master style window. When you change something within the Master style, that element of your presentation changes everywhere it appears.

The following section describes the kinds of edits that you might want to make on individual slides when you need to hone a presentation.

Putting Comments in Your Presentations

The Insert, Comment menu option enables you to insert comments on a slide. The comments appear as small yellow Post-It notes and automatically display your name and the date when you insert the note. After you enter a comment, close the note by clicking outside of it. When you do, it becomes a small box with your initials in it. Later, to read the note, you point to the small comment's icon box to read or edit the comment.

You can add as many comments to a slide or to a presentation as you want. After you add a comment, you can drag the comment to any place on the slide. The comment will not display in the final presentation's slide show.

Comments provide you with a simple annotation tool. You can add to-do notes to yourself for later modifications to the presentation. If you work in a group that is presenting this presentation, each member of the group can add comments for the rest of the group to read as the presentation is passed from worker to worker. This group annotation is perhaps the primary reason why PowerPoint automatically adds the user 's name and date to the top of each new comment.

To Do: Add Text and Text Boxes

To add text to a slide, such as text that describes artwork you've placed, you can use a text (or bulleted list) placeholder on a slide. Text placeholders are automatically included as part of some slide layouts. In addition, you can add a text box. A text box holds text that you can format. To add a text box, follow these steps:

1. Click the Text Box button on the Drawing toolbar. (The Drawing toolbar is located toward the bottom of your screen. If the Drawing toolbar is not there, select View, Toolbars, Drawing. The ScreenTips that pop up tell you what each tool on the Drawing toolbar does.)

2. Drag your mouse from the text box location's upper-left corner to the text box's lower-right corner. When you release the mouse, PowerPoint draws the text box, as shown in Figure 13.5.

   Figure 13.5. You can type and format text inside a text box.

   

3. Type your text. As you type the text, if your text box is not wide enough to hold the text, the text box will grow to accommodate your text by adding new lines when your typing reaches the right side of the box.

4. Use the Formatting toolbar and the Format, Font command to modify the text style and format.

5. Click anywhere outside the text box to deselect the text box and return to the rest of your editing chores.

As Figure 13.6 shows, when you click the toolbar's Font drop-down list box, PowerPoint displays each font name in its own font style so that you will see how each font looks before you apply one of them.

Figure 13.6. See a preview of the fonts before you select one.