PowerPoint 2007: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5. Editing Your Slideshow

If you want to give a great presentation, then you have to practice. But if you’re like most folks, every time you fire up PowerPoint, clear your throat, and start rehearsing, you find a few places in your slideshow that need tweaking. For example, you may realize that you’ve duplicated information on a couple of slides. Or maybe you discover that you’ve forgotten to cover a critical point, or decide that a small graphic on each slide would reinforce your message. Or, worst of all, you realize that the way you’ve organized your content is all wrong.

In this chapter, you’ll see how to make all these changes and more. You’ll learn to reorder your slides as easily as you shuffle a pack of cards. You can add, delete, move, duplicate, and renumber slides, and even copy slides from other slideshows. You’ll also see how to control the overall look and feel of your presentation by editing its behind-the-scenes slide masters (Section 5.4).

Viewing Multiple Slides

When you’re adding text and graphics to an individual slide, as described in Chapter 1, you’re concerned with just one slide at a time—the slide you’re working on. Not so when you want to edit your slideshow as a whole. In that case, you need a way to spread all your slides out in front of you (virtually speaking) so you can see what you’ve got and then decide which slides you want to delete, duplicate, move, and so on.

PowerPoint gives you two handy ways to see most (if not all) of your slides at ...