As with anything, it's easier to work with PowerPoint when you can clearly see what you're doing. Here are some tips for making the display show the elements you want to see.
Customizing the Normal View Panes
In Normal view, you can adjust the sizes of the panes relative to one another by dragging the borders between them. To get rid of one of the panes entirely, drag the border between it and the adjacent pane so that it is as small as possible. For example, in Figure 1-4 I've dragged the bar between the Slide pane and the Notes pane down all the way to the bottom, so the Notes pane is completely hidden, and I've increased the width of the Outline tab's section. The Outline/Slides pane also has an X in its top-right corner that you can click to close it.
To restore any panes you've hidden, reselect Normal view from the View menu. This does not restore the sizes of any panes you resized, nor does it reopen the task pane. (Choose View⇨Task Pane to do that.)
Setting the Zoom
If you need a closer look at your presentation, you can zoom the view in or out to accommodate almost any situation. For example, if you have trouble placing a graphic exactly at the same vertical level as some text in a box adjacent to it, you might zoom in for more precision. You can view your work at various magnifications on-screen without changing the size of the surrounding tools or the size of the print on the printout.
In a single-pane view like Notes Page or Slide Sorter, a single zoom setting affects the entire work area. In Normal view, each of the panes has its own individual zoom. To set the zoom for the Outline/Slides pane only, for example, select that pane first by clicking inside it, and then choose a zoom level. Or to zoom only in the slide pane, click it first.
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Instead of clicking a pane in the Normal view to switch to it, you can press F6 to move clockwise among the panes or Shift+F6 to move counterclockwise. You can also use Ctrl+Shift+Tab to switch between the Slides and Outline tabs of the Outline/Slides pane.
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The easiest way to set the zoom level is to open the Zoom drop-down list on the Standard toolbar and choose a new level, as shown in Figure 1-5. You can also type a specific zoom percentage into that box; you aren't limited to the choices on the list. (However, some panes do limit you to 100% as the highest zoom level.)
The default zoom setting for the Slide pane (Normal view) is Fit, which means the zoom dynamically adjusts so that the entire slide fits in the Slide pane and is as large as possible. If you drag the dividers between the panes to redistribute the screen space, the size of the slide in the Slide pane adjusts too, so that you continue to see the whole slide. You can change the zoom to whatever you like and then return to the default by choosing Fit as the zoom amount.
The larger the zoom number, the larger things appear on-screen. A zoom of 10% would make the slide so tiny you couldn't read it. A zoom of 400% would make the slide so big that a few letters on a slide would fill the entire pane. The main advantage to zooming out is to fit more on the screen at once. For example, if you're working with a lot of slides in Slide Sorter view and normally can see three slides per row, zooming out to 33% might let you see eight or more slides on each row. The disadvantage, of course, is that if the slides get too small, as shown in Figure 1-6, you can't read the text or tell the slides apart from each other.
Another way to control the zoom is with the Zoom dialog box. Select View⇨Zoom to open it. Make your selection, as shown in Figure 1-7, by clicking the appropriate button, and then click OK. Notice that you can type a precise zoom percentage in the Percent text box. This is the same as typing a percentage directly into the Zoom text box on the Standard toolbar.
Displaying and Hiding Screen Elements
PowerPoint has a lot of optional screen elements that you may (or may not) find useful, depending on what you're up to at the moment. In the following sections I'll show you the most common ones and explain how to toggle them on and off.
RULERS
Vertical and horizontal rules around the Slide pane can help you place objects more precisely. The rulers aren't displayed by default, however; you have to turn them on. To do so, select View⇨Ruler. Do the same thing again to turn them off. Rulers are available only in Normal and Notes Page views.
Rulers help with positioning no matter what content type you are working with, but when you're editing text in a text frame, they have an additional purpose as well. The horizontal ruler shows the frame's paragraph indents, and you can drag the indent markers on the ruler just like in Word (see Figure 1-8). Control those indents more precisely by holding the Ctrl key while dragging them.
Notice in Figure 1-8 that the rulers start with 0 as the spot in the top-left corner of the selected frame, and they run down to the right from there. When an object other than a text frame is selected, or when no object is selected at all, the ruler's numbering changes. It starts with 0 at the center of the slide vertically and horizontally and runs out in both directions from those midpoints.
GRID AND GUIDES
Guides are on-screen dotted lines that can help you line up objects on a slide. For example, if you want to center some text exactly in the middle of the slide, you can place the object exactly at the intersection of the guide lines. With the ruler alone you would have to eyeball it, but with the guides you can be very precise. Guides are available in the same views as rulers: Normal and Notes Pages. Figure 1-9 shows one vertical and one horizontal guide line.
The grid is a group of evenly spaced lines like those on a piece of graph paper. When you drag objects around on a slide, they snap to this grid automatically, to help you get things aligned with one another. The Snap feature is on by default, although, by default, the grid's lines are invisible.
The settings for both guides and the grid are controlled from the Grid and Guides dialog box. Choose View⇨Grid and Guide (or press Ctrl+G) and then use the settings there to turn the features on/off and change their settings (see Figure 1-10).
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A shortcut for displaying or hiding guides is to press Alt+F9. To use more guides than just the default two, hold down Ctrl as you drag one of the guide lines; a duplicate will be created of it, up to eight in total in either direction.
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DISPLAYING OR HIDING COLORS
Most of the time you will work with your presentation in color, but if you are eventually going to present the presentation in black and white or grayscale (for example, on overhead transparencies or black-and-white handouts), you might want to check to see what it will look like without color. To do so, choose View⇨Color/Grayscale and then choose Color, Grayscale, or Pure Black and White.
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This Pure Black and White option is especially useful when you are preparing slides that will eventually be faxed, because most fax machines fax only in pure black and white. Something that looks great on a color screen could look like a shapeless blob on a black-and-white fax.
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When you choose Grayscale or Pure Black and White, a Grayscale View toolbar appears. From it you can open a drop-down list of various types of grayscale and black-and-white settings. Select an object, and then choose the setting that shows the selected object to best advantage; PowerPoint will remember that setting when printing or outputting the presentation to a grayscale or black-and-white source (see Figure 1-11). When you are finished, click the Close Grayscale View button on the Grayscale View toolbar, or choose View⇨Color/Grayscale⇨Color. Changing the Black and White or Grayscale settings doesn't affect the colors on the slides; it only affects how the slides will look and print in black and white or grayscale.
DISPLAYING OR HIDING THE TASK PANE
The task pane is a separate pane that sometimes appears to the right of the other PowerPoint panes. Its content depends on the activity you are performing. Many activities that used to be contained in dialog boxes in earlier versions of PowerPoint are now accessed from the task pane instead, such as changing the design template and the slide layout.
To display the task pane, choose View⇨Task Pane or choose a command that requires it to be open (such as Format ⇨ Slide Layout). To hide the task pane, click the Close (X) button in its upper-right corner.
Once the task pane is open, you can switch among all the available task pane pages by opening its menu. As you can see in Figure 1-12, there are many task pane pages, and just like with any other panes in PowerPoint, you can resize the task pane to take up more or less space on-screen; just drag its border.
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The Getting Started task pane opens automatically each time you start PowerPoint. If you want to suppress that, choose Tools ⇨ Options and on the View tab, deselect the Startup Task Pane checkbox. While you're there, check out some of the other viewing options you can control there, such as whether or not to show the status bar and vertical ruler.
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