Exploring Office 2007: PowerPoint 2007 Tips and Tricks PowerPoint 2007: Get Started with New Templates Helen Bradley
PowerPoint 2007 is one of the Office 2007 applications that supports the new next-generation Office interface, complete with the new Ribbon layout and interactive galleries.
Most of the functionality of the older PowerPoint releases is still there — with a few exceptions — but added to the mix is a host of new features that will take your PowerPoint presentations to a new level of graphic excellence and functionality.
In this article we will look at some of the improvements in PowerPoint 2007 that you can put to work in your presentations today.
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Get Started with New Templates
PowerPoint has always been very generous in the templates it provides users with. Now templates are accessible from the Office Bar — click New and you can view templates installed on your computer as well as templates available on Microsoft Office online.
These include calendars, schedules, and resumes as well as content slides. Click the More Categories link to find more templates including those for instructional presentations, evaluations, and sales presentations. Gone is the old Auto-Content Wizard, although some of the templates include the basic structure for a typical presentation of that type.
To match the larger monitors now being used, you can configure your presentation to take advantage of letterbox format screens. To do this, on the Design tab click the Page Setup button and from the Slides Sized For option choose On Screen Show (16:9) or On Screen Show (16:10) for a letterbox format presentation.
If the monitor you are designing on is not a letterbox format monitor you can still preview your show — the top and bottom of the screen will be filled with black so your letterbox format slides will show in the correct aspect ratio. To be safe, set up letterbox format before you start designing the rest of the presentation.
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Picture Perfect with Themes and Effects
When you open a template or start a new blank presentation, you can apply one of PowerPoint's new Themes from the Design tab. Themes are richly featured tools which provide well-designed and attractive formatting options for your slides. With each theme comes fonts, effects, background styles and customizable colors. If the built-in themes aren't enough, there are more themes downloadable from Microsoft Office online.
Once you apply a Theme to a presentation many of the elements that you add will be automatically formatted according to the theme's design. For example, tables that are inserted using Table on the Insert tab now come preformatted with the theme's coloring and style. As in other Office 2007 applications, when a table is selected the Table Tools options include Design and Layout tabs from which you can select a look for your table. Those at the top of the gallery are offered as the best match for the document's theme.
When you change the Theme you're using, all the elements in the presentation, charts, SmartArt and your tables will change to match the new theme. And all of these elements can have quite sophisticated effects such as shadows, bevels, and reflections applied to them using the Effects icon on the Design tab.
If there is a theme that you want to use repeatedly (such as one designed for your business), you can set it as the default theme by right-clicking it in the gallery and choosing Set as default theme. If you have made changes to elements of a selected theme, such as selecting different colors, fonts and effects as well as background styles, you can save this configuration of your theme by selecting the Save Current Theme option in the themes palette.
You can also configure this as the default theme if so desired. As in earlier versions of PowerPoint, you can right-click a theme and select to apply it to all slides in the slide presentation or only to selected slides.
Other theme options include the ability to change the background for any theme. So if you like the theme's look and feel but need to use a different background, select the Background Styles dropdown gallery from the Design tab and select a different background. These backgrounds vary from light to dark, and when you select a dark background, text on the slides will change color so it can be read on the new background color.
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Recoloring Art
PowerPoint now has the ability to recolor an image such as a photo in much the same way as you have been able to do in Publisher. The Recolor tool appears on the Picture Tools, Format tab when you have a picture selected. Click the Recolor option in the Adjust area to preview the duotone effects, which range from dark variations to light variations. You can choose one of the color variations or create your own with a color selected from the current theme.
It is also possible to use a photo as a slide background, and for images used this way, you can adjust the image so it works better behind text and other graphics. To do this, from the Background Styles option choose the Format Background, Fill option and select the Picture Or Texture Fill.
Click the File button and locate a file to use as the background and click Insert to insert it. You can now vary the transparency of the image, and from the Picture options adjust its brightness and contrast to wash it out if desired. You can also select the recolor option and recolor the image.
