Welcome back to our course on PowerPoint 2013.
In this section, we’re going to look at the PowerPoint Options.
Just before we do that let me just give you a useful little tip.
If you have some files, say, here in the recent files list, the recent presentations list,
if you hover over them, you’ll normally see a little pin on the right.
Let me just hover over that pin and you’ll see it says Pin this item to the list.
Now where it says Pin this item to the list that’s called a Screen Tip, and screen tips
we’re going to be talking about in this section.
But if you do pin this item to the list, what it means is that that item will stay on the
recent files list until you unpin it from the list.
If you tend to work on a lot of presentations and it may be the case for example that you
very often go back to an old one to use as a basis for starting others, by pinning it,
it stays in the recent files list which otherwise just shuffles through; so ones that you haven’t
worked on for a while will tend to shuffle off the bottom of the list.
That’s a way of pinning it to the list to stay there and then when you no longer need
to pin it to the list hover over, unpin, and it’s unpinned from the list and it will
remove itself from the list at the appropriate time.
So anyway let’s now select that particular presentation, open it, and then go into Backstage
View and I mentioned to you earlier on that one of the options we’d come back to is
indeed Options down at the bottom here.
So let’s click on Options.
Now I should point out that sometimes this PowerPoint Options dialog appears at other
points where we’re using PowerPoint 2013.
Sometimes when we have to make a decision about something, this Options dialog will
pop up and we’ll need to change or set something in that dialog.
So the dialog is arranged into pages and the pages on the left, General, Proofing, Save,
Language, Advanced, etc.
And whenever we change something here to commit the change, to actually make it happen, we
use the OK button which is at the bottom of the dialog.
So it’s a standard type of dialog.
And if you decide not to go ahead with the change you were going to make, hit the Cancel
button to cancel that particular change.
So what is the PowerPoint Options dialog for?
Well, the reason for having this is to enable you to customize your installation of PowerPoint
2013 and the customization takes several different forms.
One very important aspect of the customization is identification.
And on this General page, roughly halfway down there is my user name and my user initials.
And your user name and initials should appear in the equivalent place in your set of PowerPoint
Options in your copy of PowerPoint 2013.
I can also in that same section of the General page of the PowerPoint Options specify which
Office background I want if any.
There are several to choose from.
I’ve got no background, but there are many others that I could use.
And I can also decide which Office theme I want.
It’s a choice of white, light gray, or dark gray.
If you are considering changing the background or the theme, I suggest you experiment with
those and see which of them you like.
I tend to go for the white and very plain types of background in what I do.
Now let’s take a look at a couple of the other options on this General page.
In the user interface options section, at the top there are two options.
There’s show mini toolbar on selection and enable live preview.
Now with both of these we’re going to come back to them later on because both of them
will make more sense later on.
But I’m just going to hover over enable live preview now and you will see its screen
tip.
It says Enable live preview; that is effectively the screen tip.
And then there is a description, Show a preview of how a feature affects the document as you
hover over different choices.
Now within the PowerPoint Options dialog, you always see those screen tips and their
descriptions.
But let me now go and look at a screen tip on a regular command on the Ribbon.
So I’m going to click on OK on the PowerPoint Options and I’m going to click over one
of the buttons on the Ribbon on this particular presentation.
I’m going to go up and hover over that one, and what you can see there is a screen tip.
It says Shapes.
Now, let me go back into Options again.
On the General page, the third option there is screen tip style and it says don’t show
feature descriptions in screen tips.
If I change that to, say, Show feature descriptions in screen tips.
Click on OK, then go back to that same command again, hover over it, I now get Shapes.
Insert readymade shapes such as circles, squares, and arrows.
And then I can even click on Tell me more and it brings up the PowerPoint Help and it
will tell me all about that particular option.
Add shapes, PowerPoint takes me through to a fairly comprehensive help about using that
feature.
So that’s what showing the description with screen tips causes to happen.
Now let me go back into the Options again and from the Options this time, instead of
Show feature descriptions in screen tips, I’m going to select Don’t show screen
tips.
Click on OK, hover over that again, and I get nothing at all now; I get no kind of screen
tip at all.
And this example effectively shows the second main category of PowerPoint Options and probably
the one that’s most numerous and this is where you make a very subjective decision
about how you like PowerPoint 2013 to work.
Do you like to see screen tips or not?
If you do, do you like to see the descriptions?
It may well be that when you first use PowerPoint 2013 you like to see the descriptions to remind
you of what each of those commands does.
But then when you get more used to it, you know pretty much how all the commands on the
Ribbon work, you don’t need those screen tips and their descriptions anymore, and sometimes
they can get in the way.
When you’re working on something, they may appear over a piece of work that you’re
doing and actually can be a little bit of a nuisance.
So a lot of the PowerPoint Options relate to personal preferences.
And a very prominent one of those personal preferences is right at the bottom of the
General page, Show the start screen when this application starts.
If you don’t want that start screen where you choose from recent presentations, open
a presentation, the array of templates that you can use.
If you uncheck this box, next time you start PowerPoint, you won’t see the start screen.
Now regarding the other PowerPoint Options, many of them we’re going to come back to
later on.
So for instance the Proofing page which relates to Auto-correction which we’ll come back
to when we talk about checking spelling and grammar; we’ll look at these option.
The Save options also we’ll come back to.
One or two of these you may want to take a look at now, for instance roughly in the middle
there, “Default local file location” specifies where your presentations are saved by default.
But one that you will need to check now is Language.
Now it’s important when you’re working in PowerPoint 2013 that you are working in
the correct language.
I have two editing languages setup.
I use pretty much alternatively English United States and English United Kingdom roughly
the same amount.
You need to make sure that you have the correct language set.
There are many languages.
If you look at the drop down below this main panel, Add additional editing languages, click
on the drop down, there is a long list, and you need to make sure you’ve got the right
language for you set there or the tools associated with the language you want and the general
structure or the language you want will not be correctly set.
When you do have more than one language setup, you can set one of them as the default.
I have English United States set as the default for me, and you can basically install as many
as you like and switch between them.
Of course, different presentations that you work on may be in different languages.
So you need to have setup all of the languages that you use when you’re working in PowerPoint
2013.
Associated with this are things like which language do you want the screen tips in?
If you look at this entry down at the bottom here, you may be preparing a presentation,
say, in French or Spanish but you may still want the screen tips to appear in English.
So as I mentioned earlier on, several of these options we’ll come back to as we get to
the appropriate point in the course.
On the Advanced tab, there are a really large number of very specific settings.
Some of them will mean a lot now.
So in the Display section at the beginning, Show this number of recent presentations.
Currently set by default to 25.
You could show more or less presentations.
Note the screen tip there that tells you that you can have any number of presentations between
zero and 50.
Customize Ribbon is another page; Quick Access Toolbar another one.
We’ll come back to those in a little while.
Add-Ins which we won’t be covering on this course.
But we will talk about the Trust Center briefly towards the end of the course.
So that in outline is the PowerPoint Options.
There are two or three there that you need to go through and make sure that you’ve
got correctly.
The others we’ll come back to as we need them later in the course.
And that’s the end of this section.
I’ll see you in the next one.