PowerPoint 2013: New Look, Better Function

Microsoft’s powerhouse presentation software PowerPoint has a bold new look and beautiful new interface. But sometimes with changes, comes a learning curve. Fortunately, with Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 none of the sweeping changes will leave you scratching your head.

The basic structure of the PowerPoint 2013 Workspace has been altered to a different, but extremely user friendly interface. The sleek new design streamlines basic processes like opening and closing presentations and even presents your recent PowerPoint presentations into tidy lists.

The initial shock of familiar programs changing so vastly can be daunting, but with the addition of useful items like suggested presentations for different niches, the move to Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 is intuitive and gentle.

Watch the free video here, transcripts for the entire video follow:

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Video transcripts:

Welcome back to our course on PowerPoint 2013. The very first thing you see when you start up PowerPoint 2013 for the first time will be something similar to this and in fact this screen shows you one of the main changes in PowerPoint 2013 compared to earlier versions because on this screen you have presented to you a number of different ways of getting started working on a presentation.

So let’s start on the left of the screen here. You would normally have a list of recent presentations that you’ve worked on. Now since this is the first time that I’ve launched this installation of PowerPoint 2013, the list of recent presentations is empty. Below that is a button that enables me to open other presentations. This means that I can access one of the presentations that I’ve got stored on my computer or on a touch device or on a network drive. On the right over here, I’m basically looking at ways of starting a new presentation. Now this particular entry here which has a caption Blank presentation, very often will be the one that I choose if I want to start with a completely empty PowerPoint presentation that’s the option that I’d choose. Below that I have a whole list of templates. These are if you like designed but not filled presentations. So each of these will have a certain style and the style will include things like color schemes, fonts, font sizes, and the like. And there’s quite a long list of these templates available from the start screen. However, if you don’t want or you don’t like those presentations, if you look at the note at the bottom “Not finding what you’re looking for”, use the Search box at the top to find more templates and themes. And up here you have a search box. You can type in a subject and search for a template to suit the content or the style that you’re looking for. Now just under that search box there’s a list of suggested searches; so, Business, Calendars, Charts and Diagrams, Education, Medical. They’re typical kinds of presentation that you might want. A very popular one is over here on the right, Photo Albums. So you can enter a term here, search for it, and try to find an appropriate template, and we’ll be coming back to templates in detail later on.

Let me go back up to the start again. There is also a Welcome to PowerPoint tour available here and you can click on that and take the tour. And if you’re new to PowerPoint I think that’s a very good place to go.

In the very top right hand corner of this screen, you see a set of buttons that are pretty much the standard ones that you see in a Windows application. So we have a Close button. We have a Maximize button which makes the window fit the screen, Minimize button that normally shrinks the window down to sit on your taskbar and the question mark in PowerPoint 2013 gives access to Help. We’ll be coming back to PowerPoint Help a little bit later on in the course. Below that set of buttons, you can see details of the current user including a Microsoft account if there is one. And that’s very important in relation to two or three things in PowerPoint 2013 and in particular in relation to the use of SkyDrive. We’ll come back to that later on, but obviously once you are using PowerPoint 2013 as when you see a name and an email address there, they will not be the same as mine.

So the first thing we’re going to do is to look at one of the presentations that is supplied with this course. So click on Open other presentations and you will see a list similar to this, Recent presentations. That list will be empty if you haven’t opened any presentations so far. Link to your SkyDrive which you may or may not have setup; mine is setup. And then there’s the link through to your computer. So click on Computer and, again, you should see a list something like this, Recent Folders which might be My Documents, your desktop; you need to click on Browse and then browse to the folder that contains the files that came with this course. Now your folder will almost certainly be in a different place to mine, so click on Browse and then browse to that folder. So when you’ve found that folder, click on the first example, example-01.pptx, and then you can either click on Open or you can double click on the file name. So let me double click there and my first presentation is now open.

Now during this section and the next one we’re going to talk a lot about this PowerPoint 2013 workspace. But I want to start in this section with a few of the basics that you’re going to need throughout and one of them is actually one of the new features of PowerPoint 2013. You probably saw a little message pop up on the right just then and there’s a strange little box sitting down here on the right. Let me just hover over that, Welcome back! Pick up where you left off. One of the features which is across quite a bit of Office 2013 is a Resume Reading function. If you’ve used Word 2013, you may well have seen it there. But basically if you’re working on something, if you’re were working on a presentation or perhaps in Word reading a document and you’re partway through it, this gives you an easy way to get back to where you were working before. Now I’m going to talk about resume reading a little bit more later on, but basically the last time I opened this presentation, I worked on what’s called Slide 3 and if I wanted to go back to the slide I was working on, I could literally click here, it would take me back to Slide 3. But I’ll come back to resume reading in a bit more detail later on.

So let’s look at some of the main features of the PowerPoint 2013 workspace. Right at the top we have a title bar and in the title bar we can see the title of the current presentation that we’re working on. This is ssi-powerpoint2013-example-01.pptx and that’s always a good point to make sure you’re working on the presentation that you think you’re working on. Along here we have the Ribbon and I’m going to talk about the Ribbon a little bit later on. In the top left corner, we have something called the Quick Access Toolbar. I’m going to talk about that later as well. But down in this pane on the left we can see the slides or, to be more accurate, we can see thumbnails of the slides. There are currently three slides in this presentation and if I hover over each one, I get a summary of one of the pieces of text that’s written on the slide. So that’s Slide 1, that’s Slide 2. When I select a slide, it appears in the window on the right, the main document window, the main slide window in PowerPoint 2013. So let me now select the third slide and in each case you’ll see that the slides have different text written on them. To select the first slide again, I just click there. Note also that when I’ve got the cursor in that panel, I can step through the slide using the arrow keys and, of course, I can easily select them just by tapping on the screen with my finger if I’m using a touch device.

Now on this particular occasion I’m going to select the second slide. I’m only reading it. I’m not changing any of the content on the slide at all. But now I’ve finished working on this presentation and when you finish working on a presentation, you would normally close it. To close the presentation, you go into what’s called Backstage View and to access Backstage View in PowerPoint 2013, you click on the File tab up here. The very left one on the Ribbon, just the top left of the Ribbon, you’ll see a little tab there that says File and that takes you into Backstage View. Now we’re going to talk about Backstage View at length later on, but just go down to Close, click on Close, and that particular presentation is now closed.

Now once I’ve closed that particular presentation I have no presentation open so the title bar now just says PowerPoint. If I wanted to exit PowerPoint all together, the simplest way of doing it is just to go to the top right hand corner, the close cross in the top right hand corner, click on that, and I will close PowerPoint. So I’m now going to close PowerPoint and then reopen it again. When I reopen PowerPoint again, I’ve now, of course, got an entry in my recent presentations list. But even so if I ignore that and go to Open other presentations, I will still, again recent presentations appears here and there’s the one presentation that I’ve worked on so far, click on that, and the presentation opens again. Now note in this case I get the resume box on the right as well, but it knows that last time I looked at this presentation I looked at Slide 2. So it’s updated that to Slide 2. If I click on that it’ll take me straight through to Slide 2 this time.

So in this section you’ve seen how to open a presentation, some of the basic structure of the PowerPoint 2013 workspace. You’ve seen how to close a presentation and how to use the recent presentations list. In the next section, we’re going to actually do some work on a presentation, make some changes, and fill in some more of the details of the PowerPoint 2013 workspace. So please join me for that.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!