This is intended to be a quick lesson for anyone who has never used PowerPoint before. If you are already a PowerPoint user and have the basics well ahead, you can skip this lesson. When you open up PowerPoint to get started, the first thing you're going to do is to select New to create a new presentation. I always select blank presentation, though, if you'd like to start with a PowerPoint template, you can select from those presented. However, I don't recommend it for reasons that I'll describe in later lessons. Like other Microsoft Office products, there's a toolbar across the top of the screen called the ribbon.

And the ribbon can be customized but I typically just use the default. The only tricky part of the ribbon that confuses some new users is that in the newer versions of PowerPoint, the ribbon occasionally adds new sections depending on what you have selected on the slide. For example, if I click on this text box Notice how suddenly PowerPoint adds a Drawing Tools Format menu to my ribbon. There are other examples that we will see in later lessons. For the most part, PowerPoint is pretty intuitive in bringing up these secret menus, depending on what you're doing, and what you have selected. Also, bear in mind that PowerPoint typically has at least two ways to do anything that you want to do.

So for instance, a lot of formatting capabilities on this particular hidden menu are also included in the home menu, or by right clicking your mouse. As a general rule, if you can imagine it, PowerPoint can probably do it. You just have to patiently find the right button to push. Let's do a quick tour of your screen to get you oriented. Now, in the middle of your screen, you have your slide. This is an editable version of what will be presented on the screen to your audience.

It's extremely Flexible as to what you can put on this canvas, you can put text, pictures, graphs, diagrams, videos, or even attach other files. On the left hand margin of your screen, you will find thumbnails of your slides, which can be a handy for navigating while you're editing your slides or moving them around. The other views of your slides can be accessed using these quick buttons at the bottom right hand corner of your screen. This button gives you a thumbnail only view of your presentation very handy when it comes to reordering slides or taking an existing hour long presentation and compressing it into say a 20 minute presentation by removing certain slides. The next view is a reading pane and frankly, I don't use this at all. However, the button beside that is the presentation view.

And this takes PowerPoint from Edit Mode into presentation mode. And we're going to look more at this in the final lesson of this course. One Oh Another very important, yet subtly hidden portion of our screen is the speaker notes section. using your mouse, grab the lower border of the slide and bring it up to reveal those speaker notes. Remember that script that we talked about in the first lesson? Well, this is where we can now copy and paste that script to attach it to specific slides.

Speaker notes can be displayed on your laptop as you are presenting the presentation running on the display screen. speaker notes can also be printed with the handouts. So this is an area that we will use extensively in this course. Let's now take a quick tour through the ribbon. in later lessons, we will review various features in much more detail. Let's start with the Home menu which has most of our basic functions.

Here is where you can add a new slide and select the template layout of the slide for slide titles or text slides. Blank slides, you can also perform most of your formatting using this menu. I find myself using the shape menu a lot. However, this also can be accessed from the Insert menu which we will look at more now. Under the Insert menu, you can insert virtually anything onto the slide, from tables to pictures to audio to video, and I'm going to show you many of these in the lessons to come. The design menu allows you to access PowerPoints pre formatted templates.

I never use this functionality simply because I don't want my PowerPoint presentations to look like I'm using PowerPoint. However, the Customize toolbox is helpful for changing the slide size and the background. These are both functions that I do use quite regularly. The transition menu is used to animate the transition between slides in presentation mode. The End Animation menu allows you to bring onto or off of the screen, different pieces of your slide one at a time. This is a very important piece of functionality, particularly when you have busier slides with lots of content.

Now I'm going to dedicate an entire lesson to this menu item later on. But as cool as this functionality is, bear in mind the golden rule of using PowerPoint, less is more. The slideshow menu is another way of launching your presentation and provides different options for setting up your screen and your laptop during the presentation. The only really useful function on the review menu is the add comments to a presentation if you were reviewing somebody else's presentation and want to provide them with feedback. The View menu is another menu that doesn't get used all that often. But it's another way of accessing those different hot buttons in the lower right hand.

Quarter that we looked at earlier, you can also access and set up your own slide template by accessing the Slide Master, which may be handy for some of you. And we're going to look at that in our next lesson. But I have two other menu items on my screen that you may or may not have on yours. And both of these menus pertain to PowerPoint add ins that I've configured to my version of PowerPoint, the particular add ins that I have related to screen capture software, which is allowing me to record this presentation for you. The only other menu item we have yet to look at is the File menu. And the File menu is where we began when we created our new presentation.

We will also use it to save our presentation, print our presentation or export it. You can click on this backward looking arrow to return to the Edit version of your presentation. Within the File menu, I use the export menu item a lot. So let's just look briefly At this because this is where you can convert your PowerPoints to a PDF, or create handouts. And when you create handouts, you have different options as to how many slides you want per page or how the speaker notes are shown if at all. This will convert your PowerPoint into a Word document, which allows you to further edit your handouts if necessary.

So with that overview, we should now have a basic understanding of some of PowerPoints functionality, the different places it can be accessed through the ribbon, or some of the hot buttons located around your screen. in later lessons, we will see some new menu items pop up now and then we'll discuss those as they appear. Different versions of PowerPoint tend to move some of these functions around a bit. But for the most part, everything we discussed in this course has been included all the recent versions of PowerPoint, regardless of whether you're using 2013 2010 2007 or 2003 time now to begin with Making our presentation