Mini Toolbar in PowerPoint 2007 for Windows

Introducing the Mini Toolbar
Working With Mini Toolbar

Introducing the Mini Toolbar

The whole point in redesigning the interface in Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 (and the other programs in Office 2007) was to make access to often used commands easier, and to make users aware of the options available.

While the new interface already helps achieve that goal through the Office Button, Ribbon tabs, and the Quick Access Toolbar, there's another useful interface option that lets you access options even quicker, and that's the Mini Toolbar.

The Mini Toolbar is a semitransparent floating toolbar that spawns right next to the cursor, and it is also available instantly with a right-click.

Working With Mini Toolbar

The Mini Toolbar is by nature unobtrusive, and thus not visible all the time within the PowerPoint 2007 interface. It only pops up when some text is selected, follow these steps to summon the Mini Toolbar:

1. Create a new presentation or use any exiting presentation, Figure 1 shows a new blank presentation in PowerPoint.
2. 
   Figure 1: New presentation
2. Type some text on the slide, as shown in Figure 2.
3. 
   Figure 2: Text
3. Now just select the text, and you can see a semitransparent Mini Toolbar (see Figure 3, here the Mini Toolbar is almost transparent).
4. 
   Figure 3: Select text to summon the Mini Toolbar
4. To make the transparent Mini Toolbar visible, hover the cursor on top of the toolbar as shown in Figure 4.
5. 
   Figure 4: Mini Toolbar
6. 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.

Another way to access the Mini Toolbar is to right click the selected text (see Figure 5), this brings up both the Mini Toolbar (the toolbar on the top) and the right-click context menu.

Figure 5: Mini Toolbar