Hello again and welcome back to our course on PowerPoint 2013.
In this section, we’re going to look at the mini toolbar or perhaps it will be more
accurate to say the mini toolbars because there are sort of two of them, as we’ll
see; so, mini toolbar.
Now at one point in the previous section, we made the content of this line on this slide
here bold and although we haven’t looked at selecting text at the moment what I’m
going to do now is to select that line again using the mouse.
So I’m going to sweep across with the mouse and I want you to watch very carefully what
happens.
Now having made the selection and left the pointer over the selection a box, a block
of commands appears to the right, the upper right of the selection, and that is the mini
toolbar.
On it there are a number of commands and they are deemed to be the most common or popular
commands that I’m likely to want to execute having made that selection.
Now you notice on that mini toolbar, the one in the bottom left corner, the Bold button
is highlighted and that’s because the text we’ve got there is bold.
If I wanted to un-bold it, I wouldn’t need to go to the Ribbon.
I wouldn’t need to go to the Quick Access Toolbar.
I could just un-bold it by clicking the button on the mini toolbar; so let’s un-bold it.
It’s now no longer bold.
I could also, for instance, make it italic or make the point size much bigger.
So it’s currently 18 point.
I could make it say 24 point.
So that is how you use the mini toolbar.
Now before we look at doing the equivalent with touch, let me just point something out.
If I go into Options via Backstage View, you may remember on the General tab the very first
option there is Show mini toolbar on selection.
And if I uncheck that and click OK, now let me select that text again exactly the same
way as I did before, leave the arrow pointing at the text.
I don’t get a mini toolbar with mouse and keyboard if I have that option disabled.
Not everybody likes using the mini toolbar.
Some people find it gets in the way.
And a combination of using right arrow and contextual help which includes access to the
mini toolbar when you actually do right click and using the Ribbon and Quick Access Toolbar
is plenty for them; they don’t need the mini toolbar as well.
So let’s do the same thing using touch.
In the case of touch, you can see the markers at either end of the selection, those little
circles at either end of the phrase, Content of the first slide.
And in order to bring up the minibar or mini toolbar when using touch, all I do is tap
and hold on the selected text, and what you see now is the minibar.
Now this minibar has a different layout to the one that you get using the mouse and keyboard
but other than that the function is very similar.
So you have operations like cut and copy which are relevant to a selection of text, but you
also have options to do things like change from italic to bold.
And again, I operate these buttons just using my finger.
So let me change that from italic to bold and tap on the I to stop it being italic.
And apart from the bar itself, as you can see there, there is a little drop down on
the right where I can access a contextual menu.
Now exactly what’s on the menu is contextual.
It does depend on the particular situation, but that will give you access to some more
commands.
And just one other thing to point out before we move on; in touch mode, as we saw earlier,
the Ribbon has its commands much more spaced out.
When you’re using the mini toolbars, it’s noticeable that the one you get when you use
touch has commands that are much more spaced out to make it easier to operate with your
fingers.
Okay so that’s it on mini toolbars for now.
We’ll be using those throughout the course.
It’s time to move on and have a quick look at customizing the status bar.
I’ll join
you
in the next section.