Making Favorite PowerPoint Commands Easily Accessible

If PowerPoint 2007 is the first version of the program you have ever worked with, you will by now have become accustomed to working with commands represented as buttons on the Ribbon. However, if you have upgraded from an earlier version, you might have identified a few commands that no longer seem to be available.

For the 2007 Microsoft Office release, Microsoft conducted extensive research to find out how people actually use the programs in the Office suite. As a result, a few PowerPoint features that seemed superfluous have been abandoned, and a few others that were used very rarely have been pushed off to one side. If you sorely miss one of these sidetracked features, you can make it a part of your PowerPoint environment by adding it to the Quick Access Toolbar.

You might also want to customize the Quick Access Toolbar if you regularly use buttons that are scattered on various tabs of the Ribbon and don't want to switch between tabs to access the buttons. If you use only a few buttons, you can add them to the Quick Access Toolbar and then hide the Ribbon by double-clicking the active tab. The tab names and Quick Access Toolbar remain visible. (You can temporarily redisplay the Ribbon by clicking the tab you want to view, or permanently redisplay it by double-clicking any tab.)

In this exercise, you will add a button to the PowerPoint 2007 Quick Access Toolbar.

1.	Display Slide 8. Suppose you want to be able to quickly reorganize the bullet points on a slide by adding Move Up and Move Down buttons to the Quick Access Toolbar.
2.	At the right end of the Quick Access Toolbar, click the Customize Quick Access Toolbar button. Customize Quick Access Toolbar By default, the Save, Undo, and Redo buttons appear on the Quick Access Toolbar. You can add a button to the toolbar for any of the common commands that appear in the Customize Quick Access Toolbar list by clicking the command in the list.
3.	In the Customize Quick Access Toolbar list, click More Commands. The PowerPoint Options window opens, displaying the Customize page. You can add a less common command to the Quick Access Toolbar by selecting it in the list of available commands on the left side of the page, and then clicking Add (or double-clicking the command) to copy it to the list of toolbar commands on the right side of the page.
4.	Click the Choose commands from arrow, and then in the list, click All Commands. The available commands list changes to include all the commands available in PowerPoint 2007.
5.	In the available commands list, click Move Down, and then click Add to copy the command to the toolbar commands list.
6.	Repeat Step 5 to add the Move Up command to the toolbar commands list.
7.	At the top of the available commands list, click <Separator>, and then click Add. The separatora horizontal line indicating the beginning or end of a group of commandsappears at the bottom of the toolbar commands list. [View full size image]
8.	In the toolbar commands list, click <Separator>, and then click the Move Up button to the right until the separator sits below Redo in the toolbar commands list. Move Up
9.	In the PowerPoint Options window, click OK. The Quick Access Toolbar expands to accommodate the separator bar and buttons you added.
10.	On Slide 8 in the Slide pane, click the bullet to the left of Forms. The bullet point and its subpoints are selected.
11.	On the Quick Access Toolbar, click the Move Up button twice. Move Up The Forms bullet point and its subpoints move to the top of the bulleted list.
12.	Display the Customize Quick Access Toolbar list, and then click More Commands.
13.	In the PowerPoint Options window, click Reset. Then in the message box asking you to confirm that you want to restore the Quick Access Toolbar to its default command set, click Yes.
14.	Click OK to close the PowerPoint Options window. The buttons and separator you added earlier in this exercise no longer appear on the Quick Access Toolbar.

Tracking Down Keyboard Shortcuts Another way to access commands quickly is by using keyboard shortcuts. Pressing key combinations is particularly efficient if your hands are already on the keyboard typing slide text. The list of built-in PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts is extensive and too long to reproduce here. To print a list of these shortcuts: 1. At the right end of the Ribbon, click the Help button. 2. In the Search box, type keyboard shortcuts, and then click Search. 3. In the results list, click Keyboard shortcuts for PowerPoint 2007. 4. Click the Show All link at the beginning of the topic to display all the text, and then on the toolbar, click the Print button. You cannot assign custom keyboard shortcuts to PowerPoint commands unless you purchase, install, and load a third-party add-in. See Also For information about add-ins, see the sidebar "Using Add-Ins" earlier in this chapter.