Powerpoint 2013 Tips & Tricks

By John Hales

Unleash the power of the newest version of PowerPoint with this new addition to our Office Tips & Tricks line of QuickStudy® guides. Go beyond the basics of PowerPoint and learn time-saving tricks and best practices, including animations, using objects, and more, bringing your PowerPoint presentations to the next level.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BarCharts, Inc.
• Release date: May 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781423240747

Book preview

Introduction

This guide is intended for all audience levels, although basic PowerPoint knowledge is assumed and will not be described here. This guide can also be used in conjunction with the standard PowerPoint 2013 QuickStudy® guide and the Microsoft® Office Integration QuickStudy® guide, which covers how to use, link, and embed data from Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook, as well as how to add and modify graphic elements in PowerPoint.

This guide is broken down into five sections. The first section is about preparing the slide deck, including comments, masters, and themes. The second section contains information about layout and design, including layers, objects, removing backgrounds from photos, transitions, timing, audio, and video. The third section encompasses animation—everything from how to add animation to making your animations smooth and professional. The fourth section addresses different aspects of giving a presentation, including preparing handouts in grayscale or black and white, saving the presentation as a video, and presenting the presentation over the Internet directly through PowerPoint 2013. The last section contains dos and don’ts for creating and giving a presentation.

This guide has been written for PowerPoint 2013 and contains new features such as the Comments pane, the Eyedropper, additional animation features, and the ability to save in MPEG-4 format and insert videos without video embed code.

Preparing the Slide Deck

Using Comments

Comments are like mini sticky notes and can be placed on any slide. These allow users to leave reminders for themselves or notes to everyone who has access to the file, such as in a collaborative project. For a single author, comments can be used as reminders on slides that need attention. For a group, comments are an efficient way to communicate back and forth. When in use, the comment sticky note will be shaded and there will be a box around the associated comment. Comments are not visible when presenting a slide show (in Slide Show View or Presenter View). New to PowerPoint 2013 is the Comments pane. The Comments pane is located on the right side of the screen and is used to view all the comments associated with a slide.

TIP: In PowerPoint 2013, go to File, click Options, and select the General link to view or change the initials for the current user (in the Initials text box). If you always want these initials to be used, regardless of which Microsoft account you are using, check the Always use these values regardless of sign in to Office checkbox. (For more on Microsoft accounts, see the PowerPoint 2013 QuickStudy® guide.)

To insert a comment:

On the Review tab, click New Comment