Learn to love the Ribbon
If you're comfortable with the Ribbon interface in PowerPoint 2007, you'll be happy to hear that it's largely the same in PowerPoint 2010, with two new additions: the File tab (also known as Backstage) and the Transitions tab. You can read about the Transitions tab below, then skip directly to the next section of the story, "Find your way around Backstage," where you'll learn, among other things, how to customize the Ribbon -- a feature that wasn't available in PowerPoint 2007.
If the Ribbon is new to you, here's what you need to know. At first, the Ribbon may be offputting, but once you learn to use it, you'll find that it's far easier to use than the old PowerPoint 2003 interface. It does take some getting used to, though.
By default, the Ribbon is divided into nine tabs, with an optional tenth one (Developer). Here's a rundown of the tabs and what each one does:
File (a.k.a. Backstage): As you'll read later in the story, here's where you perform a variety of tasks such as printing, sharing files and more.
Home: This contains the most commonly used PowerPoint features, including creating new slides, changing layouts, formatting text and paragraphs, inserting shapes, performing search and replace operations, and creating drawings.
Insert: As the name implies, this one handles anything you might want to insert into a presentation, such as pictures, clip art, charts, tables, videos, audio clips, equations, photo albums, headers and footers, and text boxes.
Design: Here's where you'll apply different themes to your presentation; change colors, fonts and effects; select background styles; change the slide orientation and page setup; and so on.
Transitions: This tab is new to PowerPoint 2010, although some of its features were controlled by the Animations tab in PowerPoint 2007. It lets you create transitions between slides, such as cuts, fades and wipes, as well as a number of 3D slide transitions that are new to PowerPoint 2010. This tab also lets you preview the transitions and edit some of their effects, such as having the "wipe" transition move in from the right, the left, the top or the bottom.
Animations: This lets you add animation effects to your slides. Don't confuse it with transitions -- transitions are effects between slides, while animations are effects on the slide itself. There are a variety of animations to choose from on this tab, such as wipe, float in, fly out, pulse, bounce and many more. You can preview your animations from here as well.
Slide Show: This tab gives you control over your slideshow as a whole. You can set a slideshow's options, preview the slideshow from the beginning or from the current slide, rehearse and time your narration, record it and more. New to PowerPoint 2010 is the ability to broadcast your slideshow over the Internet.
Review: Here's the place to turn to for checking spelling and grammar, looking up a word in a thesaurus, marking up a presentation with comments and reviewing other people's markups.
View: Go here to change the view, including switching among presentation views (slide master, handout master, notes master, slide sorter and so on); showing or hiding a ruler and gridlines; zooming in and out; choosing from color, grayscale or black and white; and displaying windows split or cascaded. You can also create, edit and use macros from this tab.
Developer: If you write code or create forms and applications for PowerPoint, this is your tab. It's hidden by default. To display it, click the File tab and choose Options --> Customize Ribbon and then check the box next to Developer in the Customize the Ribbon section.
Tab organization
Each tab along the Ribbon is divided into a series of groups that contain related commands for getting something done -- for example, controlling font size, color and other text attributes.
How the Ribbon is organized.
Inside each group is a set of what Microsoft calls command buttons, which carry out commands, display menus and so on. There's also a small diagonal arrow in the bottom-right corner of some groups, which Microsoft calls a dialog box launcher. Click it to display more options related to the group.
Context-sensitive tabs
All that seems simple enough... so it's time to throw a curveball at you. The Ribbon is context-sensitive, changing according to what you're doing. Depending on the task you're engaged in, it sometimes adds more tabs and subtabs. For example, when you insert and highlight a chart, several entirely new tabs appear: Design, Layout and Format, all underneath a Chart Tools supertitle just above the Ribbon.
Other "now you see them, now you don't" tabs include Drawing Tools, Picture Tools, Table Tools, Video Tools and SmartArt Tools -- all of which appear in response to various actions you take in PowerPoint.
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