Welcome back to our course on PowerPoint 2013.
In this section, we’re going to look at Help and Help has actually changed quite significantly
in Office 2013 in general.
For example, if you’ve used, say, Office 2010 including PowerPoint 2010 in Backstage
View, you would’ve seen an option down here for Help.
There is no such option in Office 2013.
Instead, there is a fairly consistent way of obtaining help which is this little question
mark here brings up the appropriate help.
Now you notice this with the screen tip here, Microsoft PowerPoint Help and then in brackets
F1.
F1 is the keyboard shortcut to bring up Help.
So wherever I am if I press the F1 key on my keyboard, I invoke Help.
Now what we have here is the online Help for PowerPoint 2013 and one of the options here
is Search online Help.
This is basically a browser based system of help and wherever you are, whatever you see
when you fire up this online help, you can search for help on any topic related to PowerPoint
2013.
But depending on where you actually invoked Help either by clicking that question mark
or pressing, the F1 key the Help is generally contextual in nature.
That is it tries to give you help on what you’re doing at this time.
Now when I press the F1 key just now, I was looking at the Info category within Backstage
View, Protect presentation, Inspect presentation, versions, and so on.
And if you look at the Help, you’ll see that the topics on the Help I can see here
generally relate to those subjects.
If in fact I wanted help on something all together different, so for example let’s
suppose I happen to be on that page but I wanted to find out about templates which are
nothing to do with that page really, I could just type in here Templates and then press
the magnifier and Help searches for Help topics related to templates.
Now when I find a particular topic, say, this one, Where do I find templates, the link then
takes me through to the online help related to templates.
So let’s just try that.
If I click on Where do I find templates, there is the Help topic.
I can work my way through that.
There will be further links within that to take me through to other information and also
things like tips in an Office 2013 program choose a template from the new start screen.
Now as I work my way through the Help trying to find the help that I need, as I mentioned
earlier this is a browser based system so I can press the back arrow here to go back
a page.
When I’ve gone back a page, I can press the arrow to go forward a page.
There is a Print button there if I want to print a particular topic.
And if I want to increase the size of the font, the text that I’m looking at when
I’m reading the help, there’s a button here “Use large text” which will give
me the help in a larger text form.
Click it again to go back down to the regular size.
At any time, I can go back to Home on the Help by clicking on this Home button.
And in fact, if you’d like some more background information about PowerPoint 2013 including
some free training, some learning for PowerPoint basics, tips for tablets, how to use the PowerPoint
web app that we’ll look at later on in the course, and a list of keyboard shortcuts,
looking at what’s new.
There’s some great links here that you should find very helpful.
The Home page for PowerPoint 2013 Help also lists some of the most popular searches for
Help in PowerPoint 2013.
Now I should emphasize here that this is online help that’s available when you’re connected
to the internet.
If you’re not connected to the internet, you will not get this help.
What you get instead is offline help which is a very restricted form of Help which basically
gives you access to information about how to locate things on the Ribbon and not very
much else at all I’m afraid.
The other thing to point out in relation to Help which is really just an extension of
what we looked at so far is if we take the Info page here again and click on Properties,
one of the options was advanced properties.
This is another route to get into that dialog with the advanced properties in it.
In earlier versions of PowerPoint, you will normally have had a button here saying Help,
something of that sort within a dialog.
These buttons no longer exist in PowerPoint 2013.
What you have instead is the same little question mark up here.
So the question mark is to the left of the Close button in this case; so click on the
question mark and it brings up the PowerPoint online Help, again, provided that you’re
connected to the internet.
And again, this is contextual.
So having clicked it from that Properties dialog we see a link, View or change the properties
for an Office file.
And this is actually related to Office 2013 components in general in terms of the properties
of documents, not restricted only to PowerPoint in this case.
So the dialogs that we’re going to see throughout PowerPoint 2013 will all share this feature
in common as well.
So let’s now go back to the Home for the Help system and then look at a couple of very
important items that we access from Home.
And let’s start with one of the ones I mentioned earlier which was keyboard shortcuts.
Now I must confess that I am not a great user of keyboard shortcuts myself.
I use a certain number and they tend to be the ones that are the same across many pieces
of software, things like Control-C to copy or Control-V to paste.
But as you’ll appreciate if you’ve used Microsoft Office before, all of the components
have very, very large numbers of keyboard shortcuts and I do appreciate that many people
use many keyboard shortcuts.
Now I’m not going to cover lists and lists of keyboard shortcuts on this course.
And if you like to use keyboard shortcuts, and I appreciate that many of you do, the
PowerPoint Help system has a nice entry about keyboard shortcuts for use while creating
a presentation in PowerPoint 2013 and here it is.
The keyboard shortcuts are categorized and with each category, let’s just scroll down
here a bit.
Let’s choose the category of Find and Replace.
If I click the plus next to Find and Replace, I’ll see the keyboard shortcuts related
to Find and Replace.
So to open the Find dialog box the keyboard shortcut is Control-F, open the Replace Control-H,
repeat the last Find action, Shift plus F4.
Now there are many, many of these keyboard shortcuts as I’m sure you appreciate.
Some people print them out, stick them on the wall, and use them all the time which
is fine if that’s how you work.
I’m not going to cover those but the PowerPoint Help is a very comprehensive source for those
and, in fact, if you scroll down there are some very useful general categories such as
running a presentation because I think if I were going to do things with keyboard shortcuts,
something like running a presentation would seem like an excellent application.
So the PowerPoint Help is the main source on this course for keyboard shortcuts.
I will mention one or two as we go along because one or two of them I think really need to
be used to save a huge amount of time.
And of course, in many cases you will see the keyboard shortcuts because as with the
example when we brought up the Help itself, the keyboard shortcuts are very often written
in brackets after the name of a command and when we come to the Ribbon, we’ll quite
often see the keyboard shortcuts marked there as well.
So it’s back to Home in the online Help again and the other main area of Help that
I want to point out to you now is the bottom right hand one here, Tips for tablets.
Now, Tips for tablets is an absolutely excellent place to start if you’re going to be using
PowerPoint 2013 with a tablet.
There are descriptions of the main gestures such as tap, pinch, stretch, slide, swipe.
We’ll be using all of those during this course.
And then there are some general comments about how to do certain things in Office programs;
for example, how to switch to full screen in an Office program.
We’ll be looking at quite a few of those.
How to move around in a file, make a selection, work with shapes and objects.
And then there are specific examples and gestures related to Excel and then particularly related
to PowerPoint.
So how to zoom into a slide, how to zoom out of a slide, and we’ll be looking at quite
a few of these as we go through the balance of the course.
In the meantime, I suggest this is a great place to look if you’re using a touch device
and you want to find out a bit more about how to make the most of the touch device with
PowerPoint 2013.
When you’re using online Help in PowerPoint 2013, it is a separate browser window.
When you finish with it, just click on the Close button at the top right, the browser
window closes, and you’re back to whatever you happen to be doing when you asked for
help.
That’s it for this section.
I’ll see you in the next one.