PowerPoint 2002 Screen Elements

If you have not used PowerPoint 2002 before, you should take a moment to familiarize yourself with its screen elements. Figure 1 identifies these elements.

• Menu Bar:  Located at the top of your screen, the menu bar helps you perform major functions such as opening and closing presentations, choosing fonts, inserting images, and viewing slides. When you click the boxes on the menu bar, drop-down menus appear with more choices.
  
• Upper Tool Bar:  The upper tool bar appears just below the menu bar. It provides shortcuts that help you perform such tasks as creating new slides, adding bold or italicized text, undoing your previous action, and saving your work.
  
• Lower Tool Bar:  The lower tool bar stretches across the bottom of the screen. Among the items on this bar are three View buttons with icons just above Draw in the lower-left-hand corner. These buttons allow you to move instantaneously among different views of your presentation. If you place your mouse pointer on each button, a sign will appear identifying the button's function. The lower tool bar also includes shortcuts for such functions as adding text boxes, charts, clip art, and color.

When you open PowerPoint 2002, the main part of the screen will default to what PowerPoint calls Normal view. As illustrated in Figure 2, this view is divided into three areas.

• The center area displays your current slide.
  
• On the left is a task pane that allows you to switch between viewing an outline of all your slides and thumbnails of the slides.
  
• On the right is a task pane that provides tools for creating new presentations and for formatting slides. The vertical arrow to the right of New Presentation exposes a drop-down menu that allows you to perform a number of additional tasks. (Some PowerPoint commands will cause the task pane to disappear. If this happens, click View in the menu bar and select Task Pane from the drop-down menu.)