MS PowerPoint: Views, Slide Master and Shortcuts

MS PowerPoint is the presentation program of the Microsoft Office family. It arranges matter on slides — text, tables, pictures, charts, sound and video — and plays them one after another as a slide show. Every Computer Awareness section in SSC, Railway and Banking papers carries a question or two from it, and they come from a narrow set of places: file extensions, the views, the Slide Master, the difference between a transition and an animation, and the shortcut keys.

Where PowerPoint came from

PowerPoint was built by Forethought Inc., where Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin designed it, and it was released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh. Microsoft bought Forethought the same year, and the Windows version followed in 1990. It is a presentation package, not a word processor like MS Word or a spreadsheet like MS Excel. The file it makes is called a presentation, and a fresh blank file carries the temporary name Presentation1 until it is saved.

File extensions you must remember

The views of a presentation

• Normal view — the working view, with the slide in the middle, thumbnails on the left and the notes pane below.
• Outline view — only the text of the titles and body placeholders, so a whole deck can be typed quickly.
• Slide Sorter view — every slide as a thumbnail; slides are reordered, copied, hidden and deleted here.
• Notes Page view — one slide with the speaker notes below it, exactly as it prints.
• Reading view — the show inside a window instead of the whole screen.
• Slide Show view — the full screen presentation the audience sees.

Besides these there are the master views: Slide Master, Handout Master and Notes Master. A change made on the Slide Master — the font of the titles, the bullet style, the background, the place of a logo — reaches every slide built on it. That is why a paper asks which view changes the look of all slides at one stroke: the answer is Slide Master view, not Normal view.

Layouts, placeholders and sections

A layout is the arrangement of boxes on a slide: Title Slide, Title and Content, Two Content, Comparison, Picture with Caption and Blank are the common ones. Each dotted box is a placeholder and holds the title, the body text, a table or a picture. Sections group the slides of a long deck under headings, and the Hide Slide command keeps a slide in the file but out of the show.

Transitions are not animations

The difference is a favourite question. A transition is the effect between two slides — Fade, Push, Wipe, Morph — and it sits on the Transitions tab. An animation is an effect on one object inside a slide, and it sits on the Animations tab. Animations fall into four groups: Entrance, Emphasis, Exit and Motion Paths. The Animation Pane sets their order, the Animation Painter copies an effect to another object, and Rehearse Timings records how long each slide needs.

Running and printing the show

F5 starts the show from the first slide and Shift+F5 from the slide on the screen. Inside the show, N, Enter, the spacebar or the right arrow move forward; P or the left arrow go back; B blanks the screen to black and W to white; Esc ends the show. Presenter View keeps the notes and a timer on the speaker's screen while the audience sees only the slide. When printing, a handout can carry 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 or 9 slides on one page.

Shortcut keys papers ask