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Overview
Get up and running fast with the PowerPoint 2019 PowerPoint continues to be the go-to tool for business presentations. The software helps anyone who needs to communicate clearly by creating powerful and effective slideshow presentations featuring data in the form of charts, clip art, sound, and video. You can even use it to create presentations for the Web. In PowerPoint 2019 For Dummies, expert Doug Lowe shows you how to use this popular tool to make show-stopping presentations that will get your message across — and your audience excited.
- Create a slide presentation with special effects
- Work with master slides and templates
- Collaborate with other users in the cloud
- Add charts, clip art, sound, and video
Want to learn to use PowerPoint quickly and efficiently? Look no further!
PowerPoint 2019 is the most powerful presentation software available to create and edit slide show presentations for work, home, or school. PowerPoint 2019 offers a number of helpful keyboard shortcuts for performing tasks quickly. Here are some shortcuts for common PowerPoint formatting, editing, and file and document tasks.
About The Author
Doug Lowe is a master at demystifying technology. The 50+ technology books he's written include more than 30 For Dummies books, including Networking All-in-One For Dummies. Doug has been managing networks at publishing companies and nonprofit organizations for more than 20 years and is presently IT director for a civil engineering firm.
Articles From The Book
3 results
PowerPoint
Articles
PowerPoint is similar to a word processor such as Word, except that it’s geared toward creating presentations rather than documents. A presentation is kind of like those Kodak Carousel slide trays that your grandpa filled up with 35mm slides of the time he took the family to the Grand Canyon in 1965. The main difference is that with Microsoft PowerPoint 2019, you don’t have to worry about dumping all the slides out of the tray and figuring out how to get them back into the right order.
PowerPoint
Articles
In Microsoft PowerPoint 2019, you can control several important aspects of how an audio file is played by selecting the file to reveal the Audio Tools contextual tab on the Ribbon and then opening the Playback tab, shown here. As you can see, this tab contains several controls that let you edit the way the sound file is played.
PowerPoint
Articles
Microsoft PowerPoint 2019 is great for preparing presentations to give in person. But what about giving presentations when you can’t be there? With digital video cameras practically being given away in cereal boxes these days, just about anyone can record a video of himself giving a presentation. Wouldn’t it be great if you could easily combine the slides from a PowerPoint presentation with a video of you presenting it?
PowerPoint
Articles
The simplest way to create a new presentation is to start Microsoft PowerPoint 2019, click Blank Presentation on the opening screen, and then edit the blank presentation to your liking.After PowerPoint is started, you can also create a new presentation by clicking the File tab to switch to Backstage View and then clicking the New command.
PowerPoint
Articles
When you start PowerPoint 2019, it greets you with the screen shown here. This screen lets you create a blank presentation, open a recently used presentation, or create a new presentation based on a template. You can also take a video tour of PowerPoint. PowerPoint’s opening screen.Click Blank Presentation to get started with a new presentation.
PowerPoint
Articles
After you save your Microsoft PowerPoint 2019 presentation to your hard drive, you can retrieve it later when you want to make additional changes or to print it. As you might guess, PowerPoint gives you about 2,037 ways to accomplish the retrieval. Here are the two of the most common:
Click the File tab to switch to Backstage View and then choose the Open command.
PowerPoint
Articles
For precise control over how you want your Microsoft PowerPoint 2019 presentation to be printed, you must switch to Backstage View and conjure up the Print screen, shown here. To summon this screen, choose Office→ Print or press Ctrl+P. Behold the Print screen.After you call up the Print screen, click the big Print button or press Enter to print all the slides in your presentation.
PowerPoint
Articles
Microsoft PowerPoint 2019 has a pretty decent spell checker. In fact, the spell checker in PowerPoint is so smart that it knows that you’ve made a spelling mistake almost before you make it. The spell checker watches over your shoulder as you type and helps you to correct your spelling errors as you work.
How to check spelling as you go in PowerPoint
Spelling errors in a word-processing document are bad, but at least they’re small.
PowerPoint
Articles
Microsoft PowerPoint 2019 provides a bit of picture editing wizardry in the capability to remove the background from a picture. For example, the following image shows a picture of my dog Lucy with the background removed. (Background removal works best with picture that have a clear high-contrast distinction between the picture’s subject and the background.
PowerPoint
Articles
You can easily share a PowerPoint 2019 presentation with a friend or colleague by sending an invitation via email. The invitation email will include a link that will open the presentation in a web-based version of PowerPoint called the PowerPoint Web App. From the PowerPoint Web App, the user can view the presentation.
PowerPoint
Articles
Microsoft has integrated cloud computing into PowerPoint 2019 by providing its own dedicated cloud storage resource, called OneDrive, and designating it as one of the primary places you can store your PowerPoint presentations. (OneDrive used to be called SkyDrive, but Microsoft had to change the name because of a trademark lawsuit.
PowerPoint
Articles
Microsoft PowerPoint 2019 includes an online presentation feature that makes it ridiculously easy to share your presentation with other people remotely over the Internet. All you need is a Microsoft account, which you already have if you’re an Office 365 subscriber. If you don’t yet have an account, you can sign up for one.
PowerPoint
Articles
The Custom Shows feature in Microsoft PowerPoint 2019 lets you create several similar slide shows stored in a single presentation file. For example, suppose that you’re asked to give presentations about company benefits to management and non-management staff. You can create a presentation containing slides for all the company benefits and then create a custom show containing only those slides describing benefits that are available to non-management staff.
PowerPoint
Articles
Presentation View in Microsoft PowerPoint 2019 has several icons that are useful during your presentation, as described in the following sections.
How to use the Laser Pointer feature in PowerPoint
The Laser Pointer feature displays a bright red dot on the screen, which you can move around by moving the mouse.
PowerPoint
Articles
Many Microsoft PowerPoint presentations consist of slide after slide of bulleted lists. You might see a chart here or there and an occasional bit of clip art thrown in for comic effect, but the bread and butter of the presentation is the bulleted list. It sounds boring — and it often is. But in some cases, an endless stream of bullet points turns out to be the best way to get you through.
PowerPoint
Articles
PowerPoint slides are nothing without objects. Objects are items — such as text, pictures, and charts — that give meaning and content to otherwise formless and empty slides. When it comes to objects, however, sometimes less is more. Don’t overdo it by cluttering your slides with so many objects that the main point of the slide is obscured.
PowerPoint
Articles
The Ribbon is Microsoft’s primary user interface gadget. Across the top of the Ribbon in PowerPoint 2019 is a series of tabs. You can click one of these tabs to reveal a set of controls specific to that tab. For example, the Ribbon in this image shows the Home tab. PowerPoint’s cluttered screen.The following figure shows the Ribbon with the Insert tab selected.
PowerPoint
Articles
Like any good Windows program, PowerPoint 2019 uses the standard Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, Find, and Replace commands. These commands work on text that you’ve selected, or if you’ve selected an entire object, the commands work on the object itself. In other words, you can use these commands with bits of text or with entire objects.
PowerPoint
Articles
There are a lot of things you can do with PowerPoint 2019, and having shortcuts for the things you do most often is very handy. Some of the things you’ll frequently do in PowerPoint include creating, saving, and printing new presentations, as well as opening existing presentations, adding new slides, and getting help from PowerPoint.
PowerPoint
Articles
PowerPoint 2019 is the most powerful presentation software available to create and edit slide show presentations for work, home, or school. PowerPoint 2019 offers a number of helpful keyboard shortcuts for performing tasks quickly. Here are some shortcuts for common PowerPoint formatting, editing, and file and document tasks.
PowerPoint
Articles
If you’re ready to format text in PowerPoint 2019, this table gets you on the road toward ooohs and aaahs of doing so. If you use PowerPoint 2019 templates as the basis for your presentations, your text is already formatted acceptably. To really pull out the pyrotechnic stops, however, you have to know a few basic formatting tricks.
PowerPoint
Articles
What do you do when you’re plodding along in Microsoft PowerPoint and realize that the slides you’re trying to create probably already exist in some other presentation somewhere? You borrow the slides from the other presentation.Note that in the old days, the only way to steal slides from another presentation was to get on your horse and chase down the other presentation (that is, find the presentation on your hard drive), jump on board (open the presentation), and steal the slides at gunpoint (copy the slides you want to steal and paste them into the new presentation).
PowerPoint
Articles
PowerPoint 2019 is designed to create slides that are presented directly on a screen rather than printed out. The screen can be your computer’s own monitor, a projector, or an external monitor, such as a giant-screen TV. In most cases, the default settings for showing a presentation are adequate. However, in some cases, you may want to take control and run the slide show yourself.
PowerPoint
Articles
The Themes group of the Design tab lets you select a theme to apply to your Microsoft PowerPoint 2019 slides. PowerPoint 2019 comes with a ton of carefully crafted themes that give a professional look to your presentations. If you’re somewhat artsy, you can design your own themes, as well.A theme is a set of design elements that are applied to one or more slides in a presentation.
PowerPoint
Articles
The Design Ideas feature in Microsoft PowerPoint 2019 examines the content of a selected slide and offers you a variety of design choices based on what it finds. To use this feature, simply select a slide that you think needs some improvement and click the Design Ideas button in the Design tab.This figure shows how the Design Ideas feature has suggested some design alternatives for a slide that contains a picture of William Shakespeare.
PowerPoint
Articles
Upgrading from PowerPoint 2016 to PowerPoint 2019? There are several new features that make it easier to create professional-looking presentations and videos and deliver them with panache and style.
You may see some Microsoft documentation that says that the features described in this article are available only to Office 365 subscribers, but that warning is outdated and doesn’t apply to Office 2019.