2007 MicrosoftВ® Office System Inside Out (Bpg-Inside Out)

As with other programs in the 2007 Microsoft Office system, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 has a new interface that makes it easy to complete even the most complicated tasks when creating a presentation. The point-and-click design places features at your fingertips, with a more visual and contextual experience that offers functions, tools, and commands in the order that most users commonly perform tasks. The tabbed navigational structure, Microsoft Office Button, and Quick Access Toolbar have replaced many menus of the past to help make Office PowerPoint 2007 more intuitive and logical to use.

In this chapter, you’ll learn about what’s new in PowerPoint 2007. You’ll learn about how to customize the user interface to fit your needs; about where to find commonly used commands; and about features such as file formats, tables, themes, Master views, custom slide layouts, Slide Libraries, and program recovery features. Each of these capabilities makes creating dynamic presentations something anyone can do, regardless of previous PowerPoint experience.

Command Locations

The new Ribbon means you access the commands you used in PowerPoint 2003 differently in PowerPoint 2007. Since PowerPoint 2007 offers more than 1,000 commands, we won’t cover all of them in this book; however, we will show you the most commonly used menus and toolbars in PowerPoint 2003 and compare them to their counterparts in PowerPoint 2007. Note that in PowerPoint 2007, you can often access a command in multiple ways; for example, you can access the Print command through the Microsoft Office Button and the Print Preview tab. Table 16–1 outlines the command locations that we have found the easiest to use. Remember that some contextual tabs will not become available until you click the previously listed command or option. If you’re looking for a command that is not listed here, refer to PowerPoint 2007 Help.

For more information about the general features of the 2007 Office system user interface, see Chapter 2, “The 2007 Office System User Interface-What’s Changed, What’s the Same.”