What if you have some great new stuff to add to a PowerPoint slideshow but you don't want to start a whole new presentation from scratch? Or, perhaps you've used the AutoContent Wizard to create a presentation, but the slides it created for you just don't cover everything you'd meant to include. Although you may be able to adapt some of the prebuilt slides by editing their titles and text objects, you need to add slides of your own.
You're in luck! PowerPoint gives you about 50 ways to add new slides to your presentation. You see three of them here:
- Click the New Slide button on the standard toolbar.
- Choose Insert --> New Slide.
- Press Ctrl+M.
In all three cases, PowerPoint displays the Slide Layout Pane alongside the new slide. This pane enables you to pick from 27 types of slide layouts. Just click the mouse on the one that you want to use and PowerPoint sets the new slide to the layout of your choosing.
Each slide layout has a name, which you can see by hovering the mouse pointer over the layout for a moment. The layout that's highlighted in Figure 1 is called Title and Text. The layout name indicates the types of objects that are included in the layout. For example, the Text layout includes a text object. Title, Text & Clip Art layout includes two objects; one for text, the other for a picture from the PowerPoint clip art gallery.
Figure 1: A typical Text slide.
You'll probably use the Text layout most. It's the best format for presenting a topic along with several supporting points. For example, Figure 1 shows a typical bulleted list slide, in which a list of bulleted items describes signs that your son is headed down the road toward moral decay.
One of the layouts available in the AutoLayout section of the New Slide dialog box is named Blank. This layout doesn't include any objects; it is a blank slate that you can use to create a slide that doesn't fit any of the predefined layouts. All slide layouts except Blank include a single-line text object that serves as a title for the slide. This title is formatted consistently from slide to slide in order to give your presentation a professional look.
