Slides come in shapes: title only, title with bullets, two columns, picture with caption. Choosing the right shape first saves all the fiddling later.
The New Slide button lives on the Home tab. Clicking the top half adds a slide immediately. Clicking the small arrow underneath opens a menu of layouts, which is almost always what you want.
- Drag thumbnails to reorder
- The bulleted content placeholder
- The layout currently in use
Try it yourself
On the Home tab, click the arrow under New Slide.
This shows the gallery of layouts instead of guessing for you.
Choose 'Title and Content'.
It is the workhorse layout: a heading at the top and a bulleted list underneath. Most slides in most talks are this one.
Type a heading, press Tab or click into the lower box, then type your first point and press Enter.
Enter starts the next bullet. The list keeps its spacing and alignment on its own.
Press Tab at the start of a bullet to indent it, and Shift+Tab to move it back out.
Indenting creates a sub-point and PowerPoint shrinks the text slightly to show the hierarchy.
Drag a thumbnail in the left strip up or down to reorder your slides.
Reordering is a drag, not a retype. Build slides in any order and arrange them at the end.
Words people use
Check yourself
If you can say yes to each of these, you are ready for the next lesson.
- I can add a slide and choose its layout
- I can type a heading and a list of bullets
- I can indent a sub-point with Tab
- I can reorder slides by dragging thumbnails