Office 2013: The Missing Manual

Chapter 22. Editing Slides

You could create a presentation, shovel in some text and images, and leave it at that. Lots of people do. You’ve probably sat through slideshows that were little more than a collection of one poorly formatted slide after another. But when PowerPoint makes it so easy to make your slides look good, why settle for boring or, worse, confusing?

In PowerPoint, whatever you put on a slide—text, photo, table or chart—is an object. That means it lives inside a frame, such as a text box or a content box, and everything inside the frame comprises the object. So when you move a frame, you also move its contents. When you resize a frame, its contents automatically adjust to the new space. And when you delete a frame, you delete the whole object—not just the frame but everything inside it. Understanding objects makes it easier to create good-looking slides.

This chapter shows you how to edit the objects on a slide, including text, tables, pictures, clip art, SmartArt diagrams, and more. If you’re familiar with Word, you’ll be happy to know that you work with many of these objects in PowerPoint just as you do in Word. Read on for the full scoop.

Editing Text

If you’re used to Word, editing text in PowerPoint is both familiar and a little different: familiar because the Mini Toolbar and the Font and Paragraph sections of the Home tab look pretty similar, and different because you’re working in a text box inserted into a slide, rather than directly on the page. This section ...