Subtitles of the Movie

Getting to Know the PowerPoint Interface. Whenever you first open a program of any kind, it's always a little frightening at first. After all, when the program first comes to life on your screen, you see a lot of buttons, toolbars, menus, an area like this, and at first glance, it can almost be a little overwhelming. Somewhat like getting behind the wheel of a new car and trying to learn to use the radio the first time. But if you will stop for a moment and take a careful look, PowerPoint is actually laid out very logically and very carefully so that using it is easy, and once you've just spend a little time working with PowerPoint, you will see that right away. First things first, the big PowerPoint interface that you see here is actually made up of several different pieces. This doesn't represent one interface, but it represents a number of different parts that you can use to create the presentations that you want. So we will kind of start from the top and work our way down as a quick introduction to what you see here. First of all, the very things that you see at the top are called menus, now if you click these, for example edit, a drop-down dialog box appears where you can choose different options that are available there. If you look between the menus, you will find different options that have to do with the menu title. For example, under view you can choose different ways to view PowerPoint, such as the normal view, which is what we are looking at now; you can also switch to a slide sorter view, so you can see a listing of all of your slides. You can go to a slide show view and actually take a look at all of your slides in a slide show format and a number of other options. Now as you work with PowerPoint, you will use these different menus to access different tools that are available, depending on what you want to do, and you will learn more about those as we move forward. The next thing you see is a toolbar. This is called a standard toolbar; it contains commonly used options such as new, in other words creating a new slide, open, save, print, and so forth. There are a number of toolbars that you will use and you will learn about those as we go forward, but the standard toolbar is here by default. The next thing you see is over in this area and this is called the slides and notes pane. Basically what this does is when you create slides, it will list all of them here, so you can quickly find the slide that you want. You can switch over to outline view and actually see the words that you will be typing; as you can see the words I have just typed here now appear on the outline view. This way you can look through all of your slides and see what you have written without having to switch between them. At the very bottom, you have a few other buttons where you can switch from normal view, slide sorter view, or you can actually preview your show once you get it done and we will see how to do that later on. This is what I call the work area and it's the area that you actually construct your slides. You work on your text here, backgrounds, graphics, and all those kind of things. Over on the right side of the interface, you have what is called a task pane. Now a task pane contains different options, depending on what you are actually doing at the moment. It is designed to help you get to things that you need quickly and easily, and keep them right in front of you, and we will actually see how to do that in an upcoming tutorial. Finally at the bottom of the page, you have a notes view where you can type in notes, which we will learn about later, and you also have another toolbar that appears by default at the bottom, which is the draw toolbar, and what it does is helps you create different shapes. Now one thing to note here, notice as I come up over these little series of dashes, how my cursor changes, the reason for that is you can move the toolbar around simply by clicking your mouse and dragging. I can even drag it up and put it on top of the interface if I want. Then I just drag it back in place. If I decide I don't want it at the bottom, I can even drag it to the top. So as you see, the interface is actually easy to use, you can move things around as you want them, and you can even do things like take away the slides sorter and notes view. You can even remove the task pane, if you like. You see the interface can be used anyway that you want, and the main thing is get familiar with it, take a look at the individual parts, and we will see how to use those parts in more detail as we move forward.