Hello again and welcome back to our course on PowerPoint 2013.
In this section, we’re going to look at views.
Views are not only different ways of looking at a presentation, but they’re also different
ways of working on a presentation, which means it’s very important to know which is the
most appropriate view to use when you have a particular task to perform.
So far, generally speaking, we’ve done everything in Normal View and as you’ll see later in
this section that’s not always the most appropriate view to work in.
The presentation you can see in front of you is example-03 from the supplied files.
It’s a very straightforward presentation with four slides.
The first slide is the title slide and the other three contain details of three of the
tabs on the PowerPoint 2013 Ribbon.
So first of all, let’s switch to the View tab.
And on the View tab, you can see in the left a group, Presentation Views, and you can see
that Normal is the one that’s currently highlighted here.
Now don’t worry about Master Views, the second group at the moment.
We’ll come back to that later.
Presentation Views, there basically are five, although in fact there are more views than
this, as we’ll see a little bit later on.
These are the five we’re concentrating on in this section.
Now apart from those five alternative views in the third group along Show, there is a
Notes button.
And if you look right at the bottom of the display here you can see a little rectangle,
Click to add notes.
Now that is the area where we can specify the notes for a slide.
And generally speaking people refer to these as the speaker notes in that they will normally
be the notes that somebody who is talking while the presentation is being run will use
to explain points to the audience or in some cases they’ll be the notes that give the
speaker, the presenter instructions about what to do or maybe give a little outline
of a diagram to draw or a joke to tell or something like that.
As you can see at the moment, Notes is highlighted which means that the notes are shown.
If I click that button, then I won’t see the notes at the bottom of the display.
And note that in general when you change a setting of that kind of button, something
that affects the view, the size of the slides and the rest of the working window tend to
resize themselves to make better use of the available space.
Let me just show notes again and you can see at the bottom, Click to add notes.
Within Normal View, there are several things we can do to actually adjust the view to our
specific requirements.
Note that the view is separated into two halves by this vertical line.
On the left, we have the thumbnails of the slides; on the right we have the selected
slide.
You can actually move this vertical line.
If you hover it, you’ll see a double headed arrow like that, click with the mouse, and
you can make the left hand panel smaller in which case the thumbnails shrink or you can
make the left hand panel bigger in which case the thumbnails grow.
Now exactly where you have that set is a matter of both personal preference and probably where
you are in terms of a presentation.
If you’ve got a very simple presentation, you may only need very small thumbnails.
If you’ve got a complex one, you may need bigger thumbnails to be able to read what’s
on each of the slides.
Now it’s also possible to split the area on the right of the screen where we can see
the selected slide in the top part and the speaker notes in the bottom part.
On this occasion, I’m going to do this with touch.
All you really need to do is to touch the horizontal line that divides the two parts
of the right hand side of the screen and then just pull it up or down with your finger.
So let me just do that with touch, pull it up, I think that’s far enough, and now I
have a much better area that I can work on the speaker notes in.
So speaking of speaker notes, let’s just click in that area.
Note whenever it says Click to, you are almost always dealing with some kind of placeholder.
So as soon as I click the words Click to, add notes have gone and I can start adding
those notes.
I’m going to do a little bit of typing here.
So get back to me in just a moment.
So what I’ve done here is to type several paragraphs of speaker notes and I’ve typed
enough that you can’t see all of the notes with the current arrangement of this Normal
View.
When you’ve typed more than that you get a scroll bar on the right of the note area
which enables you to scroll through the notes.
It’s worth pointing out here that people use speaker notes in different ways.
Some people have pretty much word for word notes and so the notes can be quite extensive
and they really just read the notes out pretty much as they are when they’re giving the
presentation.
Other people take perhaps a more casual or a more flexible approach and may just have
a few bullet points to remind them of the main things they need to talk about and then
the detail of what they’re going to say they pretty much make up as they go along.
This is very much a matter of personal style.
You should also be able to see that there is a scroll bar and a couple of additional
buttons to the right of the selected slide here as well.
And in terms of the two buttons at the bottom, there’s a Next slide button and there’s
a Previous slide button, and they basically let us step through the slides in the presentation.
As we step through the slides, let’s go next slide, then not only do we get the next
slide but any speaker notes that go with that as well.
I’ve only done speaker notes on the first slide at the moment.
So I can step through the slides in the presentation using those buttons.
I can also work my way through the presentation using this scroll bar.
Now the use of the scroll bars a little bit more complicated in this case because if you’ve
got a very close up view of a slide in this panel, at the moment you can see the whole
of this slide, but just imagine we were sort of zoomed into the detail, the scroll bar
would also be used to help you to look at different areas of a slide where you’re
very close up to it.
But at the moment, the way it works is this.
If I pull the scroll bar down a little way, you see there’s a screen tip there that
tells you which slide you’re selected.
So that says Slide 2 of 4.
If I went down to Slide 3 of 4 and released, I’d actually have Slide 3 selected and displayed
and I’ve done that using the scroll bar rather than using the buttons down there.
Now the next view I’d like to look at is Outline View.
So select Outline View on the View tab and essentially it’s the same as Normal View
on the right hand side in that you see the currently selected slide and below that the
speaker notes that you can switch on and off using the same button.
But here you see an outline on the left which is basically a structured list of the text
on the slides.
Now again you can resize, you can change the division between the left hand part of the
view and the right hand part of the view.
You can drag the notes area up and so on.
But it’s the view on the left that is essentially different.
And one aspect of Outline View that can be very useful is that in some situations it’s
a very good way of inserting a new slide.
So let me show you how that works.
Let’s suppose that having created this presentation with four slides with some details of groups
on the Home tab, the Design tab, and the View tab, I decide I want to put in something about
the Review tab.
So I’m going to click on the Review tab here just to remind myself what groups are
in there.
To create a slide to contain that equivalent information, I want it to go before the View
tab because I’ve at least nominally got these tabs in order: Home, Design, View.
Click to the right of Customize, that’s the end of the slide for Design, note that
the cursor is in the outline on the left.
Press the Enter key.
I can now say, okay the name of the slide is Review and then what I do is to promote
that to a top level heading.
Now there’s two ways of doing this.
One way is to use the Ribbon; another way is to use the contextual menu.
So I’m going to right click there and one of the options on the contextual menu is Promote.
Watch what happens when I do promote.
What happens is that it automatically creates a new slide because I’ve now got an entry
at the top level, Review, press Enter.
Here I’m going to put the first group on the Review tab, that’s Proofing.
Now I don’t want that as a separate slide.
That should be on the Review slide so let me right click there and this one I’m going
to demote. and now you can see I’ve got a new slide overall called Review.
I’ve got the name of the first group and I can go ahead and put the names of two other
groups in, and you can see what a great way that is of adding a new slide to a presentation.
I mentioned just now that there’s another way of doing what we’ve just done.
Let me just click within the word Language and then on the Home tab in the Paragraph
Group, there are a set of commands that we’re going to see a little bit later on, they’re
to do with bullet point lists.
And the two commands are decrease list level and increase list level, and those two are
effectively promote and demote.
So if I have the cursor there in the word Language and I click the left hand one, decrease
list level, it’s effectively promote.
It makes that particular line a top level heading if you like, a top level entry in
a bullet list, and that makes it a new slide.
So as you see it’s created a new slide.
I can demote it again by clicking on the other one.
Now there are some other useful things you can do in Outline View and if you’re primarily
working with text like this in a structured form, this is a great place to do them.
If you say take the Design tab here and right click, one of the options is Collapse and
really you collapse all of the text under that which makes it a little bit easier if
you like to see the wood for the trees.
Sometimes if you’re just looking at one or two slides or looking for particular text
on a slide, being able to collapse the others can be very helpful.
You don’t always see all the text here by the way.
These are quite short phrases we’ve got here.
But if you had longer phrases, you’d only see part of the text.
If you’ve collapsed an entry like that you can expand it again just by clicking on expand.
And the other thing that you can do here is to move the slides into a different sequence.
So if I wanted to put Design before Home, if I hover over the box there it becomes the
move cursor, click, you see how not only the Design but all of the text in the lower levels
of the bullet list look selected there.
If I drag upwards I get a little horizontal line and that horizontal line shows me where
that slide will go if I release the mouse button.
So release the mouse button and it’s there.
Let’s put Home back at the beginning, click, hold the mouse button down, drag up, and Home
is back at the beginning again.
So that’s a very brief look at Outline View.
We have three more views to look at: Slide Sorter View, Notes Page View, and Reading
View.
And we’re going to look at those in the next section.
So please join me for that.