Microsoft PowerPoint 2016 – Find Things Faster and Easier with the PowerPoint Ribbon and Contextual Tabs

The PowerPoint ribbon makes finding things faster and easier, by grouping controls together by functionality on contextual tabs that appear only when you need them, which eliminates the need for multiple rows of toolbars.

Ribbon tabs that are available in PowerPoint 2016 are:

·      Home Tab -- The Home tab holds the Cut and Paste features, Font and Paragraph options, and what you need to add and organize slides.

·      Insert Tab -- Click Insert to add something to a slide. This includes pictures, shapes, charts, links, text boxes, video and more.

·      Design Tab -- On the Design tab, you can add a theme or colour scheme, or format the slide background.

·      Transitions Tab -- Set up how your slides change from one to the next on the Transitions tab. Find a gallery of the possible transitions in the Transition to This Slide group - click More Button image at the side of the gallery to see all of them.

·      Animations Tab -- Use the Animations tab to choreograph the movement of things on your slides.
Note that you can see many possible animations in the gallery in the Animation group, and see more of them by clicking More.

·      Slide Show Tab -- On the Slide Show tab, set up the way that you want to show your presentation to others.

·      Review Tab -- The Review tab lets you add comments, run spell-check, or compare one presentation with another (such as an earlier version).

·      View Tab -- Views allow you to look at your presentation in different ways, depending on where you are in the creation or delivery process.

·      File Tab -- At one end of the ribbon is the File tab, which you use for the behind-the-scenes stuff you do with a file, such as opening, saving, sharing, exporting, printing and managing your presentation.

o Click the File tab to open a new view called the Backstage.

o Click from the list on the side to do what you want to do; for example, click Print to find the options and settings for printing your presentation.

o Click Back to document to return to the presentation that you were working on.

 

·      Tool Tabs -- These tabs disappear or change when you click something else in your presentation:

·      When you click some parts of your slides, such as pictures, shapes, SmartArt or text boxes, you might see a colourful new tab appear.

·      When you click a picture, the Picture Tools tab appears.

·      Other such tabs include SmartArt Tools, Chart Tools, Table Tools and Video Tools.

·      You can make contextual ribbon commands available by selecting relevant objects in your presentation. For example, clicking within a table displays the Table Tools tab, which offers additional options for the Design and Layout of your tables.

 

Here’s what you do:

To minimize the ribbon, to gain back some screen space:

·      To quickly go back and forth between un-collapsed and collapsed, simply double-click (instead of single-click) a tab on the ribbon. Or

·      Collapse the ribbon by right-clicking a tab and clicking Collapse the ribbon.

Use the keyboard to work with the ribbon:

Press and release the ALT key.

You see the little boxes called Key Tips over each command available in the current view.

Customize the ribbon in Office:

·      You can personalize your ribbon to arrange tabs and commands in the order you want them, hide or unhide your ribbon, and hide those commands you use less often.

·      You can add custom tabs or rename and change the order of the default tabs that are built in to Office.

Notes:

For more details on how to manage or customize the ribbon, please see the PowerPoint Help (commonly the <F1> key on desktop keyboards), or use the Tell Me box.

To reduce/increase the size of your ribbon, or the size of the text or the icons on the ribbon is by changing your display resolution, which would change the size of everything on your page.

Your ribbon customizations only apply to the Office program you're working in at the time (not other Office applications, such as Excel or Outlook).