Learn PowerPoint | Interface & Basics

Slide Area in PowerPoint 2007

by Geetesh Bajaj, April 26th 2008

Introducing Slide Area
The Slide
The Slide Workspace
The Scroll Bars
The Rulers

Introducing the Slide Area

The Slide area comprises everything in the highlighted area shown in Figure 1. To learn more about the rest of the PowerPoint 2007 interface, see here...

Figure 1: Slide area

This includes:

1. The Slide
2. The Slide Workspace
3. The Scrollbars
4. The Rulers

We discuss each of these individual interface elements in this article.

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The Slide

This is the actual slide were you can add slide objects such as text, pictures, charts, etc. to create a presentation. When you present your PowerPoint presentation as a Slide Show, it only shows objects within this area.

You normally click on a text placeholder and type some text to replace the dummy text in the placeholder, as shown in Figure 2.


Figure 2: Add text in an existing text placeholder.

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The Slide Workspace

This is the grey area behind the slide -- although any objects you place here can be edited and animated, they won't show up in Slide Show mode.

This makes the Workspace a convenient place to store stuff that you might want to use later -- or maybe a slide objects animates from the Slide Workspace into the actual Slide!

Figure 3 shows a slide that has objects both within the actual Slide and in the Slide Workspace.


Figure 3 : A slide object placed outside the Slide in the Workspace.

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The Scroll Bars

There are two scroll bars -- the horizontal and vertical scroll bars.

The vertical scroll bar, placed towards the right of the slide is always visible while the horizontal slide bar only shows up when you zoom your slide to a larger view.

The vertical scroll bar can be used to navigate from one slide to the other -- to move forward and backward from one slide to the other, click one of the double-headed arrows at the bottom of the vertical scroll bar as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Scroll Bar

You can also drag the handle box in the vertical scroll bar and move up or down to navigate several slides at a time.

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The Rulers

Just like the scroll bars, there are two rulers: the Horizontal ruler and the Vertical ruler, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Rulers

While both rulers are used for positioning and creating guides, the Horizontal ruler can be used for working with tabs and indents as well.

Note: If you cannot see any rulers in the slide area, select the View tab of the Ribbon, and check the Rulers option.

Tip: Cannot see the vertical ruler even when you set the Rulers to show on the View tab of the Ribbon? You might have unchecked the option to show the Vertical ruler in PowerPoint Options. To change that, choose Office Button | PowerPoint Options, and select the Advanced tab -- under the Display section, make sure that you have set the relevant option, as shown in Figure 6.


Figure 6: Show vertical ruler

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