Subtitles of the Movie

If you look on the right side of the PowerPoint interface, you see what is called a task pane. Now actually, this task pane is basically a listing of things that you can do and it will change depending on what you are working on in PowerPoint. First things first, though, the task pane is really just another toolbar, like you see up here, it just looks a little bit different. You can actually grab it, the task pane, and drag it around; as you see here, I can move it around if I want it over on this side. So it works just like a toolbar. The difference with a task pane, though, is what it does is it tries to help you actually accomplish whatever task you might be working on. When you first open PowerPoint, it's set to new presentation in the task pane. PowerPoint assumes you are either going to want to create a new presentation or opening an existing presentation and work on it. So this is where the task pane starts. Now depending on what I choose here, the task pane will change to accommodate my needs. For example, we are going to see how to do this in more detail later, but let's say I want to create a new presentation and I want to use a design template. All I do is click that option, now as you have noticed the title has changed because the task pane has changed. It's now in slide design mode so that I can scroll through the list of designs and choose a design that I want to use. So the task pane will move around depending on what I am actually trying to do. The trick, though, is if you click this little arrow button you see here, you can see all of the different tasks that the task pane provides, such as new presentation. It provides a search feature, as you can see here. I can look at slide layouts and choose a layout that I want, which we will learn more about later. I can look at different color schemes, custom animation, which we will learn about later as well. So as you see, there is a number of different things that the task pane gives you. The thing is you can use the task pane if you want, but all of the options that you see here will also be available on different toolbars or in the menus. It's just often easier to just use the task pane, but if you decide you don't want to use it, you can always click the x at anytime to close it. That moves it out of your way and gives you more area to work here as you are actually constructing your slides. If you want the task pane back, click view, go to toolbars, and you will see task pane listed here. Just click it and it pops right back into place. So just remember as you move forward, that the task pane provides different tasks and it will change according to what you are working on at the moment, or you can always manually change it to whatever you need at any time using the drop-down menu. But its main job is to help you get to task easier and to provide you with listings to make your work with PowerPoint more efficient.