The Office button and Quick Access toolbar: Your new best friends
There are two more new PowerPoint tools that you'll want to get to know: the Office button and the Quick Access toolbar. Think of the Office button as a greatly expanded File menu from the PowerPoint 2003 days -- the File menu on steroids.
This is where to go for the various Open, Save, New, Print and related options and includes a list of all your recently opened files. But there are two particularly noteworthy new features here as well -- Prepare and Publish.
Publish does exactly what it says: It gives options for publishing a document. If your company uses a document management server or SharePoint, you can publish it there. Another Publish option lets you package a presentation by copying the presentation and links to a folder that you can then burn to a CD. And yet another option lets you open the presentation in Word, where you can create custom handout pages.
Use Prepare when you've finished your presentation and are ready to share it with others. There are plenty of great options here, such as marking a document as final, encrypting the document, inspecting it for hidden metadata and information you'd prefer remain private, and adding a digital signature. Because PowerPoint 2007 isn't yet widely deployed, a particularly useful feature here is running the Compatibility Checker, which will let you know whether your presentation contains features not supported by earlier PowerPoint versions.
For those who like to fiddle with the PowerPoint interface and how it works, the PowerPoint Options button, located at the bottom of the Office button's box, lets you customize PowerPoint in many ways, including determining your overall color scheme and how the slide show should work. It has many of the features that you accessed via Tools > Options in previous versions of PowerPoint, plus more. It's far better organized and easier to use than Tools > Options was.
Even those who can't stand the PowerPoint makeover and the Ribbon will find at least one thing to cheer about -- the Quick Access toolbar. This nifty little tool seems innocuous enough, but spend some time with it, and you'll be impressed.
The three buttons on the left -- Save, Undo and Redo -- are useful but not particularly noteworthy. But you can add buttons to the Quick Access toolbar so that just about any PowerPoint feature or option will be available on it. There are several ways to do this.
To the right of the Redo button, the nearly invisible Down arrow is the key to the Quick Access toolbar. Click it, and you'll be able to add and remove tool-bar buttons for a preset list of 10 commands. To add buttons for additional commands, select More Commands from this list. The screen below appears. (You can also get to this screen by clicking the Office button and choosing PowerPoint Options > Customize.)
Choose a command that you want to add to the Quick Access toolbar from the left-hand side of the screen and click Add. You can change the order of the buttons by highlighting a button on the right side of the screen and using the Up and Down arrows to move it.
The list of commands you see on the left may seem somewhat limited at first. That's because PowerPoint is showing you only the most popular commands. There are plenty of others you can add. Click the drop-down menu under "Choose commands from" at the top of the screen, and you'll see other lists of commands -- All Commands, Home Tab and so on. Select any option, and you'll see plenty more commands you can add.
Finally, there's an even easier way to add a command. Right-click any object on the Ribbon and choose "Add to Quick Access toolbar." You can add not only individual commands in this way, but also entire groups -- for example, the Cell Styles group.
Once you've got the Quick Access toolbar customized to your liking, you will hardly ever have to use the Ribbon.