PowerPoint 2007: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2. Editing Slides

Text is the heart and soul of an effective PowerPoint presentation. But coming up with just the right words—and organizing them in just the right way—isn’t always easy. Just as you would if you were constructing a presentation using a flip chart or overhead transparencies, you jot down a few bullet points, read through what you’ve written, think of a few additional points, change your mind, and end up deleting, rearranging, and editing your material over and over again until you’ve got every word on every page (slide) exactly right.

Fortunately, PowerPoint can help. In addition to the standard cut, copy, and paste operations, this chapter shows you how to use PowerPoint’s Search and Replace feature to find words and phrases buried in long presentations and change (or delete) them quickly.

You’ll also see how to get on-the-spot editorial assistance using PowerPoint’s spell check, thesaurus, and online research options, as well as how to save yourself time by turning on PowerPoint’s automatic correction tools. If you find yourself giving a lot of presentations to non-English-speaking audiences, then you’ll appreciate the section at the end of this chapter that describes how to incorporate Spanish, French, Japanese, and many other languages into your presentations.

Editing Text

When you change the text on a PowerPoint slide—when you cut it, copy it, replace it, or move it around—what you’re doing is editing your text. To see most of the editing tools PowerPoint ...