PowerPoint 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual

A.1. Getting Help from PowerPoint

In PowerPoint 2007, help's never far away. In fact, the program gives you a helpful description of just about every item onscreen before you even click itin the form of a screen tip. You can also get help from wherever you are inside PowerPoint by displaying the Microsoft Office PowerPoint Help window.

A.1.1. Displaying Screen Tips

To get help on a specific button, menu, or dialog box option, first mouse over the option. A good- sized screen tip pops up with a description of the item, and advice on where to get further help (Figure A-1).

Figure A-1. Not every screen tip you see contains a link you can click to get more help, but many do. New in Office 2007, this contextual help system was designed to whisk you directly to help articles describing the thing you're trying to do (instead of the old approach, which forced you to hunt for the right article yourself).

A.1.2. Searching Help Topics

To open the Help window, click the Help icon located in the upper right of the screen (Figure A-1). This icon's always visible in the top-right corner the PowerPoint interface, no matter which tab you're on. Just as in older versions of the product, PowerPoint gives you an alternate way to display the help window: by pressing F1.

Either way, the Microsoft Office PowerPoint Help window shown in Figure A-2 appears. PowerPoint help launches in its own window, which means it doesn't automatically disappear when you go back to working in PowerPoint. (Minimizing the help window and clicking the pushpin icon keeps it handily in sight when you go back to work.)

Figure A-2. The question-mark icon shown here (the international symbol for help) replaces the Help menu that was included in earlier versions of PowerPoint.

Figure A-3. PowerPoint lets you access the latest and greatest online help, or just the help files you installed on your computer when you installed PowerPoint. Head to the bottom of the window to change this setting.

In the Search box, type the word or phrase you need help with and click Search. You can also click any of the links in the Table of Contents pane to search for a word or phrase. PowerPoint displays a list of topics and topic- related links in the right-hand side of the Help window. You may have to repeat this step several times to zero in on the information you want.

Out of the box, PowerPoint assumes you want to see online help files, which are more numerous than the ones installed on your computer. You can tell PowerPoint whether you want it to search online help files or not. (Unless your Internet connection is down or is very, very slow, you want to search online.) To do so:

  • To tell PowerPoint to access online help files: At the bottom of the Help window, click the down-arrow next to Offline and, from the menu that appears, choose "Show content from the Internet." When you do, Offline changes to Connected, and PowerPoint attempts to access your Internet connection. If it can't get online, you'll get an error message.

  • To restrict PowerPoint access to the help files stored on your computer: Click the down-arrow next to Connected and choose "Only show content from this computer." When you do, Connected changes to Offline.

Note: To get help while you're running a slideshow, right-click anywhere on the slide. When you do, a menu of options appears (unless the slideshow creator turned it off using kiosk mode, as described in Section 7.1.1.3). In the PowerPoint Options dialog box (Figure A-3), many of the options include help icons.

Figure A-4. Figuring out what you can expect when you set an option in PowerPoint can be challenging. Fortunately, many of the options include Help icons you can mouse over to see a meaty description.

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