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Mini Toolbar in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

Learn about the mini toolbar, and how it works in PowerPoint 2010.

Author: Geetesh Bajaj

Product/Version: Microsoft PowerPoint 2010
OS: Microsoft Windows XP / Vista / 7 / 8

Date Created: September 27th 2010
Last Updated: September 27th 2010

Introducing the Mini Toolbar
Working With Mini Toolbar

Introducing the Mini Toolbar

The interface options in PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 are almost the same, yet very different from the earlier versions such as PowerPoint 2003. Apart from the Ribbon with its tabs, the Backstage view, and the Quick Access Toolbar, PowerPoint 2010 also includes the Mini Toolbar, a semitransparent floating toolbar that spawns right next to the cursor -- and it is also available instantly with a right-click.

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Working With Mini Toolbar

The Mini Toolbar is by nature unobtrusive -- and thus not visible all the time within the PowerPoint 2010 interface. You can access it via a right-click, but it only pops up on its own, when some text is selected -- follow these steps to summon the Mini Toolbar:

Create a new presentation or use any exiting presentation -- Figure 1 shows created presentation in PowerPoint 2010.

Figure 1: New presentation
Select any text -- and you can see a semitransparent Mini Toolbar (see Figure 2 -- here the Mini Toolbar is almost transparent).

Figure 2: Select text to summon the Mini Toolbar
To make the transparent Mini Toolbar visible, hover the cursor on top of the toolbar as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Mini Toolbar

As you can see in the Figure above, the Mini Toolbar contains most of the text formatting options you may require -- it thus saves you from accessing the Ribbon tabs each time you want to apply some text formatting.

Note: Another way to access the Mini Toolbar is to right click the selected text (see Figure 4) -- this brings up both the Mini Toolbar (the toolbar on the top) and the right-click context menu at the same time.

Mini Toolbar in PowerPoint
Figure 4: Mini Toolbar

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