Working with Views

A view is a way of displaying your presentation on-screen. PowerPoint comes with several views because at different times during the creation process, it is helpful to look at the presentation in different ways. For example, when you are adding a graphic to a slide, you will want to be able to work closely with that individual slide, but when you need to rearrange the slide order, you will want to see the entire presentation as a whole.

PowerPoint offers the following views:

• Normal: This is a combination of several resizable panes, so you can see the presentation in multiple ways at once. Normal is the default view and was shown in Figure 1-1. Each of the panes in Normal view has its own scroll bar, so you can move around in the outline, the slide, and the Notes panes independently of the other panes.

• Slide Sorter: This is a light-table type overhead view of all the slides in your presentation, laid out in rows, suitable for big-picture rearranging (see Figure 1-2).

  Note

  Here's a funny little quirk. Even if you choose to show the Standard and Formatting toolbars on two rows, the two toolbars in Slide Sorter view will still appear on a single row by default. In Slide Sorter view, the toolbars at the top are Standard and Slide Sorter. To make them appear on two rows as shown in Figure 1-2, drag the Slide Sorter toolbar down below the Standard toolbar by dragging its "handle"-that is, the vertical row of dots at its left end.

• Notes Page: This is a view with the slide at the top of the page and a text box below it for typed notes to yourself. (You can print these notes pages to use during your speech.) See Figure 1-3.

• Slide Show: This is the view you use to show the presentation to an audience on a computer screen. Each slide fills the entire screen in its turn.

In some earlier versions of PowerPoint there were also Outline and Slide views, but these have been combined into Normal view. The tabs in the Outline/Slides pane in the Normal view switch back and forth between viewing the presentation's text outline and viewing thumbnail images of the slides, and these serve the same purpose as those older views did. You can resize the space allocation among the panes by dragging the borders between them.

There are two ways to change the view: open the View menu and select a view, or click one of the View buttons in the bottom left corner of the screen, as pointed out in Figure 1-1. All of the views are available in both places except Notes Page; it can be accessed only from the View menu.