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Microsoft PowerPoint Tips

Tool Time

My grandfather was particular. He was a jack of many trades, including carpentry, electronics, photography, and masonry, among several others. He kept his workshop just so, and he demanded that, if you worked there, you put every tool in its place when you were done. He even drew on the wall with chalk the shape of hanging tools so there was no doubt what went where.

PowerPoint can help you develop powerful presentations, but few people take advantage of more than a fraction of its features. I find that in teaching others how to be more proficient with PowerPoint, my students must learn what tools are available. Then they must know how to find a tool when they need it. Otherwise their blood pressure rises, they utter monosyllabic words that have nothing to do with their presentation, and they give up in frustration.

PowerPoint provides you with toolbars that include a variety of tools in the form of buttons or “icons” you can click with your mouse. To see the toolbars that are available, right click any tool bar. You can turn on or off any toolbar by clicking it.

Beyond those standard toolbars, PowerPoint allows you to customize what toolbars you want to see at any time, what tools are on them, and where you want them to appear on your desktop. I find this very useful in that my sense of organization (which I may have inherited from my grandfather) does not exactly match that of the Microsoft engineer who made up the standard toolbars.

PowerPoint even graciously allows you to make up your own toolbars and put the tools you want on them. I found that by doing this I soon learned what tools were where and became very proficient at completing any task.

For example, text is a major element in slides. I found it logical to put on a single toolbar everything that had to do with creating and formatting text. So I modified the “Formatting” toolbar so that it included left to right the tool to insert a text box, font color, increase font size, decrease font size, change case, font selection, font size, bold, italic, underscore, font shadow, subscript, and superscript.

Likewise, I created a new toolbar that I called “Arrange,” which contains tools to work with drawing objects, such as grouping and ungrouping, aligning, rotating, and cropping. I added a toolbar to insert everything from new sides to clip art. Eventually, I created a set of toolbars that work for me. I now know instantly where to find any tool I need, most with a single mouse click.

Here’s how you can customize your toolbars. Click the Tools button at the top of your screen to get a drop-down box of options. Click Customize. Click the Commands tab.

On the left you see the categories of commands that are available. On the right you see all the commands that apply to the selected category.

To place any of the commands on any of your toolbars, click and hold a command, drag the icon anywhere on your desktop you want it to appear, and release the click. In this view, you can also remove an item from any toolbar by clicking and holding it, dragging it off the toolbar to the open screen area, and releasing it. It will disappear.

Here’s a shortcut to quickly move tools on your desktop. Press the “Alt” key and click any tool icon. You can move it anywhere or drop it into oblivion.

To create your own toolbar, go back to Customize as described above and click New. Name the toolbar anything you want (as long as it is not already the name of a PowerPoint toolbar). Your newly named toolbar will appear. Click theCommandstab and place the tools you want to appear in your new toolbar. You can even position where on the desktop you want your toolbars to appear.

It will take you a little while to set up your toolbars, but it will save you major time in the long run. Any time I work on a strange computer for any length of time, I take 15 minutes or so to arrange my tools and make my desktop “Don-friendly.”

My grandfather was right about getting your tools organized, even if he never heard of PowerPoint. But I bet he could have done that too.

Don Barksdale is a Microsoft-certified PowerPoint expert. He consults with business and industry to develop dynamic, effective presentations.