Welcome back to our course on PowerPoint 2013.
In this section, we’re going to look at couple of very important tools when you’re
working with PowerPoint 2013 and that’s the Undo and Redo tools.
Now I’m sure that if you’ve used Windows software before, if you’ve used any components
of Microsoft Office before, you’ll be familiar with Undo.
There are a couple of specific things in relation to PowerPoint that I want to cover in this
section, but briefly Undo is straightforward enough.
Let’s suppose that I select this Home Slide here and then I press the Delete key to delete
the slide.
It’s gone.
If I decide that that’s a mistake, I’ve accidentally deleted it, then I can undo it.
Generally speaking the Undo button is one of the ones that people tend to have on the
Quick Access Toolbar and I’ve got an Undo button on the Quick Access Toolbar.
It’s this sort of curvy arrow here pointing up to the top left and it says Undo delete
slide.
In fact, it’ll say Undo whatever I did last.
And very importantly and this is one of the keyboard shortcuts that I tend to remember,
there is a keyboard shortcut Control-Z to do an Undo.
So if I click on Undo delete slide, my previously deleted slide is back again.
Closely related to the Undo command is the Redo command.
I’ve restored that slide and I thought, no I did actually mean to delete that in the
first place.
I could either do the delete again or I can use the other button which is normally to
the right of the Undo which is the Redo delete slide; keyboard shortcut on Redo is Control-Y;
Redo and it’s gone again.
Now let’s suppose that having deleted that slide I didn’t immediately realize that
I wanted to put it back again or indeed that I subsequently changed my mind yet again but
I went and did something else.
So I went back to Slide 1.
I took the second sentence there and I decide, ah I don’t want to say “Your host for
the day”.
I want to say I am the presenter for this first session.
And then I said, oh I don’t want to say “Welcome to this presentation”.
I want to say “Welcome to our presentation”.
So I make a few other changes, in this case in the notes on the first slide.
If I now go up to the Undo again, I could undo those in reverse order.
So my first undo would get rid of the last change that I made.
The next undo would do the one before that and so on.
But you may see that just to the right of the Undo button, there’s a little drop down
and if I click on that drop down, it gives me a list of the last so many things that
I’ve done.
Now it won’t tell me exactly what typing I did but it does know that the last thing
I did was some typing and before that I did some typing and before that I did some typing.
Now as I go down that list it’s saying undo three actions, undo four actions.
If I get right back to the delete slide, they’re actually five actions.
Note that the typing does not necessarily imply one character or one word or one sentence.
It’s one sort of batch of typing.
If I wanted to undo right back to deleting slide, if I click now everything back to delete
slide, so all of the subsequent changes, they would all be undone.
And there is a very important point here and that is that if I wanted to undo that delete
slide, then I would have to undo everything since then as well because, of course, those
other changes may have been affected by deleting the slide.
I cannot selectively go back and just undo delete slide and ignore the other four changes
since.
So although this is a very useful facility to be able to go back and automatically undo
several actions, I cannot sort of choose the odd action here and there to undo.
If I want to go back to delete slide I have to undo everything since then as well.
So let me suppose that instead of that I just want to go back say three changes.
If I were to undo back to three changes, you can see the effect of that in the notes page.
Let me just go back those last three and undo that and you can see the very last change
has been undone and part of the change to the second sentence has been undone, but not
all of it.
So you can certainly undo the last action and you can undo back several actions using
that drop down, but you cannot selectively take old actions and undo them.
You have to go right back to the first chronologically the first action that you took that you want
to undo.
You have to undo everything since.
Now there’s one other point to make here.
If I click on the File tab to go into Backstage View and then click on Options, go to the
Advanced tab, then in the first section in the Editing options the last entry there,
Maximum number of Undos.
This defaults to 20.
You can increase the maximum number of undos if you want to.
It has to be a whole number between three and 150.
On some older or perhaps less powerful computers, having a very high number for the maximum
number of undos can cause performance problems because there’s an awful lot of information
for PowerPoint 2013 to keep.
But to be fair nowadays, you can set that at a much higher figure if you really want
to.
I’d say that confidently undoing more than 20 steps would be a pretty ambitious thing
to do because you’d have to remember very well exactly what those 20 steps were.
So I tend to leave mine at this default figure of 20, but it’s another one of those settings
that really only you can decide where you want it set for you own purposes.
If like me you have a tendency to make mistakes or to change your mind, then I think you’ll
find that Undo and Redo are pretty useful facilities and there should be enough there
for you to be able to use them with confidence.
I’ll see you in the next section.