The PowerPoint window and your first presentation

Tomorrow Leyla has to present her school project on the Caspian Sea, and Murad will show his team a new plan at work. Both need the same thing: clear slides shown one after another on a big screen. Microsoft PowerPoint is made for exactly that — building slides, showing them to an audience and sharing them with others. Let's start with the program window.

Parts of the PowerPoint window

Open PowerPoint and choose Blank Presentation on the start screen: the first slide appears in the middle of the window, surrounded by these parts:

• Ribbon — the command area at the top, divided into tabs: Home, Insert, Design, Transitions, Animations, Slide Show, Review, View and more. Inside each tab, commands sit in groups, e.g. Home › Slides.
• Search box — Search in the title bar (Alt+Q). If you can't find a command, just type its name.
• Slide thumbnails — small copies of all your slides on the left. Click a thumbnail to open that slide; drag it up or down to change the order.
• Slide pane — the current slide in the middle, where you do your editing.
• Notes pane — below the slide (“Click to add notes”). This is where speaker notes go; the audience never sees them. The Notes button on the status bar shows or hides it.
• Status bar — at the very bottom: the slide number (e.g. Slide 2 of 8), the view buttons, the zoom slider and the Fit slide to current window button.
• In the top-right corner are the Comments and Share buttons — you will use them in the lesson on teamwork.

Create a presentation and add slides

1. 1
   Create a new presentation

   Open PowerPoint and choose Blank Presentation. To start from a ready-made design, pick a theme or template in File › New. The first slide uses the Title Slide layout: two boxes, for a title and a subtitle.

2. 2
   Fill in the placeholders

   Click “Click to add title” and type your title, e.g. “The Caspian Sea”. Put your name and the date in the subtitle. These dotted boxes are called placeholders.

3. 3
   Add a new slide

   Click Home › Slides › New Slide or press Ctrl+M. After the title slide, a new slide usually gets the Title and Content layout; after that, new slides repeat the layout of the current one. Click the arrow under the button to open the layout gallery.

4. 4
   Change the layout

   Select a slide and pick another layout from Home › Slides › Layout, e.g. Two Content or Comparison. Your text is kept — PowerPoint moves it into the new placeholders.

5. 5
   Duplicate, delete, reorder

   Select a thumbnail on the left: Ctrl+D duplicates the slide, Delete removes it and dragging moves it. Hide Slide in the right-click menu hides it from the slide show without deleting it.

In the big placeholder of layouts like Title and Content you will see small icons: one click inserts a table, chart, SmartArt graphic, picture, video or icon. As soon as you start typing, the icons disappear.

Views

You can look at the same presentation in different ways. All the views are in View › Presentation Views, and the most used ones are also buttons on the status bar.

• Normal — the working view: thumbnails on the left, the slide in the middle, notes below.
• Outline View — only the text of titles and bullet points; handy for writing the plan of your talk.
• Slide Sorter — all slides as small pictures; the best view for reordering many slides.
• Notes Page — a slide and its notes laid out as a printed page.
• Reading View plays the show inside a window so you can check it; Slide Show (F5) plays it full screen for the audience.

Save and export

Press Ctrl+S, type a file name and choose a location (This PC or OneDrive). PowerPoint saves the file as .pptx. If the file is on OneDrive, the AutoSave switch in the top-left corner saves every change for you. Other formats are in File › Save As and File › Export: