Overview of the Desktop Screen and Views in PowerPoint 2016

During this Microsoft PowerPoint 2016 training tutorial video, we will give you an overview of the dekstop screen and views in PowerPoint. Some of these views are the normal view, outline view, slide sorter view, and reading view. We will run through the tabs and commands in the ribbon and explain their functions.

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Okay welcome back. So this is module two, the overview module, and we’re in section two. And we’re going to take a quick look at the desktop screen here so you’ll kind of know what you’re looking at and some terminology and stuff like that. So let’s start at the very top.

So first of all in your title bar you’re going to have the name of the particular file that you happen to be working in. Now remember that PowerPoint files are called Presentations. And that’s why you see the extension .pptx. Okay? Now what you’re going to notice on the left over here is you’ve got some quick launch options.

Now what happened is they got rid of the toolbars in the Microsoft Office products a couple versions back and they left this one which is the Quick Launch Toolbar and they give you some basic tools or buttons you can work with and you can customize this if you want.

So this one here is your Save, this is your Undo, this one here’s going to be your Redo, and this is going to be your Print. Now if you some other options that you want to use you can see you can customize your Quick Launch Toolbar. So if I like to use the Email option often I’ll just click on Email. Just a little FYI with this email button.

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This has been around since the beginning of time in the Microsoft Office products but if you happen to use Outlook for your email instead of saving this file and closing it and flipping over to Outlook and attaching a file there’s like about eight steps there. Just go ahead and click this button. It’ll pop up an Outlook message with this already attached and you just address it and put in whatever text you want and send it on. So that’s really cool.

Alright the next thing is if you go way over to the right on your title bar you now have a new button that you had before but it was in a different place. This is the Ribbon Display Option. So basically what that is is when you’re clicked on a particular tab, and I just clicked on File which took me into this, so if you ever do that just hit the Back button to get out. But when you click the tabs Home, Insert and so forth this is the ribbon below.

These are the buttons that have to do with Insert, for example. We used to be able to use these option, the Ribbon Display Options, they used to be located right underneath the ribbon here. So they just really moved this. But this allows you to have the ribbon auto-hide and that means it only shows up if you actually go up and point to it. You can actually show just the tabs if you want or you can show the tabs and the commands. Now keep this in mind too.

If you happen to double click any tab you’re actually going to hide the ribbon. That’s something that normally people do and they don’t realize they’ve done it and they don’t know how to get out of it. So you can double click a tab again or you can go back and use your Ribbon Display Options to show the tabs and the commands. Okay?

So those are your tabs. Remember this is your ribbon all the way across. And they’ve actually got groups of buttons on your ribbon. So each grouping has a name. Like this ones called Clipboard, this ones called Slide, and so forth. And some of your groupings have a little arrow on the bottom right.

So if you ever see that you can click the arrow to see what your additional choices would be. And in this case if you click it you get the clipboard. Notice also if you happen to have that open and click the little arrow again it just kind of slides and hides. See that? So that’s pretty cool how that works.

Alright now here’s where it gets a little different because this stuff here is pertinent to Office in general. This whole screen is in what we call the Normal View. See this little button right down here at the bottom? That’s your normal view. So if you ever want to get back to it just click on that. Now the normal view consists of your slide, over on the left you see a little mini copy of your slides. So if you wanted to go to a particular slide you can click on it. You can also do things like move your slides. If I happen to click slide four and drag it up notice I can drop it off wherever I want that particular slide to end up. So that is one way to change the order of your slides.

Now the other thing you see in the normal view is what we call the Notes section. Now it’s at the very bottom of your screen and right now I can’t see it because I have to pull it up. So see how if I move the mouse way down here I get the double arrows. I can just drag like this and now my Notes section appears.

So the way this works is you can type any notes that you want down here at the bottom. Now these notes are not going to show up when you run the slideshow. So let me tell you how you would actually use these.

Number one, you can actually print a view that will show you on a piece of paper the slide at the top and your notes at the bottom. And that’s very helpful for you as a presenter so that you know what to say when you have a particular slide pulled up on the overhead. You might also print it out and hand it out to your audience with the notes here for them so they’ll know what kind of notes go with this particular slide.

The other thing you’ll see is when we talk about printing way down the list here then you’re going to notice that you can leave this blank and still print it and that way it gives your audience somewhere to write their own notes. So several ways you can do that. So we’ll talk more about that later. Right now I’m just going to pull it back down and that way we make the slide a little bit bigger.

Okay now down at the bottom if you notice on the bottom left it says Slide Number. So this tells you which slide you’re clicked on and how many slides you have. And then moving on over we just saw the notes. Another way to pull that up is to click on it like this.

Also comments. So if you wanted to open up the Comments Pane on the right hand side you just click on that and then you can put a new comment in if you want. Now remember what this is for is when you’re collaborating with someone else then you have the ability to actually type notes in and if you’re working on the same file at the same time you can both create comments and see what each other is saying at that particular point. So I’m just going to close that right now.

Alright so the Views. I’ve mentioned a couple of these. Remember this first one is called Normal. So I was telling you that if you ever happen to get into a different screen and you want to see this again just click the Normal View.

Now let me mention the next one, Slide Sorter. I’m going to click on that. This shows you a little mini copy of each one of your slides. So some things you can do with this is just like we saw before we can actually change the order of our slides by dragging one left or right. But you’ll see later when we start applying transitions and doing animations and things like that or adding timings you’re going to see all those below the slide. So we’ll be working in this view a little bit later when we start doing some of those particular options.

Now your next view at the bottom here is called Reading View and Reading View kind of looks like this. So notice you could use this view and hit these arrows to go left or right to move back and forth between your slides.

And then we talked about the last one which is running your slideshow. And later we’re going to through and actually look at all of these different options here because you have the ability to move back and forth between the slides. You can actually do some things like you can un-black a slideshow which I’ll show you how to do that. You can actually zoom in around. You saw me doing some of that earlier. A lot of different things you can do here.

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Now if you want to end at the slideshow you can hit Escape or hit End Slideshow and that takes you back to your previous view.

So I’m actually going to go back to the normal view at the beginning. Now I also told you that you can use the View Tab at the top to go through these same views. Okay? So here’s your slide sorter, here’s notes pages and a couple of these other ones we’re going to look at in a little bit. So here’s your main way to get into normal and slide sorter and then like I said the others are down at the bottom.

So that’s going to give you a quick overview of what you see here. One more quick thing. At the very bottom on the right you can zoom in or out a little bit by using your slider. You should be familiar with that from previous versions. And also just kind of notice if you want to fit the slide to the current window there’s a little box in the bottom right and you’re going to be able to do that. Okay?

Alright. So I think that kind of covers everything on the screen here. So let’s go ahead and wrap up section two here. And there is an exercise I’d like you to go through for this particular module. Basically all you’re going to do is you’re going to open the file that’s attached and just use slide sorter in some of the different ways that we talked about moving around just to get familiar with it before we move on. So the next module is module three, Getting Started, and as soon as you go ahead and finish that exercise I will see you in module three.

Simon C

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!