Mini Toolbar in PowerPoint Online

Slide designers love to make quick edits to their slide objects! Impressive slides, though, are created painstakingly and take so much time. For example, you may have to play around with different fill options to make your slides look awesome, or even make umpteen changes to how your slide text appears.

PowerPoint Online does provide extensive commands that allow edits; these command options are found within the Ribbon tabs. Yet, all these tasks involve moving your cursor to the Ribbon, located above the Slide Area and back continuously. While this movement may not result in Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, it helps to know that PowerPoint Online also includes the Mini Toolbar, a floating toolbar that spawns right next to the cursor, and it is also available instantly with a right-click!

The Mini Toolbar is by nature unobtrusive, and thus not visible all the time within the PowerPoint Online 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 learn more:

1. Create a new presentation or use any existing presentation, you need a presentation with a slide populated with some text and/or other slide objects. Figure 1 shows such a slide populated with a SmartArt containing some text, open within PowerPoint Online.
2. 
   Figure 1: Slide with some text
2. Select some text, and you can see the Mini Toolbar, as shown in Figure 2.
3. 
   Figure 2: Mini Toolbar
4. As you can see in Figure 2 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. An alternative way to access the Mini Toolbar is to right-click the selected text (see Figure 3). This brings up both the Mini Toolbar (as shown highlighted in red) and the right-click context menu at the same time.
5. 
   Figure 3: Mini Toolbar accessed by right-clicking the selected text
6. However, the Mini Toolbar you see in Figure 3 is not the one you will always see. Based on the slide object you select, you may see a different Mini Toolbar altogether! Let's explore more.
3. In the previous step, our Mini Toolbar showed text formatting options since we right-clicked some text. Then we selected the entire SmartArt that contained the text and then right-clicked. Make sure you select the entire SmartArt graphic, and not individual text within the SmartArt to bring up a different Mini Toolbar with Style, Color, and Layout formatting options, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 4.
4. 
   Figure 4: Mini Toolbar with SmartArt formatting options
4. To use the options within the Mini Toolbar, just click any of the commands or buttons in the same way that you do with similar options in the Ribbon.