Slide Area in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

Introducing the Slide Area
The Actual Slide
The Slide Workspace
The Scroll Bars

Introducing the Slide Area

The Slide area in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac comprises everything in the highlighted region shown in Figure 1. Learn more about the rest of the PowerPoint 2011 for Mac interface here.

Figure 1: Elements of Slide Area

The Slide area includes:

1. The actual slide
2. The slide workspace (blank area surrounding the slide)
3. The scrollbars that let you navigate to other slides (or the same slide when you zoom the view to a larger percentage)

We discuss each of these individual interface elements next.

The Actual Slide

This is the actual slide where you can add slide objects such as text, pictures, charts, etc. When you use Slide Show view to display your PowerPoint presentation, you only get to see objects that are placed within this area.

You normally click on a text placeholder and type some text to replace the dummy text in the placeholder, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Text added in an existing text placeholder

PowerPoint provides three extra interface features that help in placing the elements properly on the slide. These are part of the slide area but you'll be not able to see them until they are activated.

1. Ruler: Horizontal and vertical ruler appears at the top and to the left of the slide.
2. Gridlines: A grid of evenly spaced dots appears directly on the slide and help you position slide objects.
3. Guides: A pair of horizontal and vertical lines intersecting at the middle of the slide. You can also add more guides as required.

The Slide Workspace

This is the gray area behind the slide, although any object you place here can be edited and animated, they won't show up in Slide Show view.

This makes the Workspace a convenient place to store stuff that you might want to use later, or maybe a slide object animates from the Slide Workspace into the actual slide! Also any sound object you place in the Workspace plays, fortunately, sound is only heard and not seen!

Figure 3 shows a slide that has objects within the actual slide and in the extended Slide Workspace.

Figure 3: A slide object placed outside the slide in the Workspace

The Scroll Bars

There are two scroll bars:

1. The vertical scroll bar, placed towards the right of the slide is always visible. The vertical scroll bar can be used to navigate from one slide to the other, to move forward and backward from one slide to the other, click one of the double-headed arrows at the bottom of the vertical scroll bar as shown in Figure 4 (highlighted in red). You can also drag the handle box in the vertical scroll bar and move up or down to navigate several slides at a time.
2. The horizontal slide bar only shows up when you zoom your slide to a larger view.

Figure 4: Scroll Bar