Subtitles of the Movie

Welcome to chapter two. In this chapter we'll get going with PowerPoint and tackle some of the very basic steps to get you up and started with a new presentation and this module introduces the topic, of course, of starting a new presentation. Now, it shouldn't be that hard because when you launch PowerPoint, you'll see something known as the Project Gallery, which you can invoke at any time by using the File menu and clicking on Project Gallery. It'll look just like this. And with PowerPoint presentations, you really get only one choice. You have a bunch of templates and predefined settings that you can use here, but if you start clicking around at brochures and Calendars and CD labels and things like that, you'll notice that these are for the most part Word documents, sometimes Excel spreadsheets, but not many of them are PowerPoint presentations. In fact, this is the only thing you have to choose from and you can click and open it up here. Another option you have, of course, is just the ability to make a new presentation by doing Command-N or using the shortcut, the menu shortcut that you see here to make a new presentation. So I'm going to close that right there and go back to this one and then of course we can create different slide layouts by using the slide layout themes and this would allow us to add new slides or change the slide layout by applying it to this slide or by inserting a new slide with a different layout. Notice if I choose insert new slide, I can choose this one or this one and the icon next to it changes into a plus. There's a slight magnification that occurs as you hover the mouse over. Now, some of these things, I'm not going to add new slides. We'll tackle that kind of as a separate topic here. But some of these things are governed by the Preferences that you set in PowerPoint. So if you go now to the PowerPoint menu, I'll show you how that's set. You go PowerPoint, Preferences, you can click on the general button in the Preferences and unfortunately, there's not a uniform look and feel as we go throughout this tutorial. You'll see me go to the Preferences dialog box several times. This one looks a little bit different from the one you'll see for example in Word, but it's all pretty easy to navigate. Click on General and whether or not the Project Gallery shows at start-up time, when you're dealing with PowerPoint, is governed by that checkbox right there. You could also determine whether or not to display or to track recently-opened documents, which I think is a good idea. It helps you find what you were recently working with without you having to go back and go through the finder and find that PowerPoint presentation that you were recently working with. And then of course you can govern how many from this little entry box right here. On the View menu also, or the View button, there's another setting that I just want to point out here and it's the default view for new presentations. So whether that be a Slide View or an Outline View is completely up to you. So if I make the change here and create a new presentation once again, now it's just the slide. It's not the slide, the normal layout where I see my thumbnails on the left and then the slide to the right. And again, I have the ability to change that even if I've chosen a slide view. I can go back down here at the bottom and choose the normal view if I want to. So those are some of your options. I know it sounds like a very elementary topic, starting a new presentation, but yet there are a couple things to point out that I think are important and some of those things will translate as we go down the road and look at the other applications.