Status Bar in PowerPoint 365 for Windows

The Status Bar

The Status Bar is a thin strip located at the bottom of the PowerPoint 365 interface as shown highlighted in red within Figure 1. This area provides information about the active slide, and also provides several View options.

To work with options in the Status Bar, you must have a presentation open in PowerPoint 365 for Windows; otherwise, the options within the Status Bar will be grayed out.

Figure 1: Status Bar within PowerPoint 365 interface

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Status Bar Components

Let's explore some components of the Status Bar. Figure 2 marks some of these components so that we can refer to them in the explanations below:

Figure 2: Status Bar components

Orange, Grey, or Black?

Is your PowerPoint 365 Status Bar orange in color? Yes, the orange can be glaring in appearance! The Status Bar that you see in Figure 2, above is grey in color because we changed the interface color to grey from the default orange color; this updates the color of the Status Bar too.

A. Slide Number

This displays the active slide number, as well as the number of slides in the open presentation.

B. Spell check

This sign indicates that spell check is enabled in the presentation. This sign has two different appearances:

Open book with red X: This sign indicates, that the spell check has finished and spelling error are found. The spelling error is underlined with a red squiggly line.

Open book with check mark: This sign indicates that there are no spelling error.

C. Notes

This is a toggle button to open or close the Notes Pane.

D. View Shortcuts

Here you can select the appropriate buttons to switch to the Normal, Slide Sorter, Reading or Slide Show views. Shift + click the same buttons to access the Slide Master view, Handout Master view, and the Set Up Show dialog box.

E. Zoom Slider

Pull the slider left or right to zoom in or out.

F. Zoom level

Click the zoom level to bring up the Zoom dialog box as shown in Figure 3, here you can specify the zoom level.

Figure 3: Zoom dialog box

G. Fit slide to current window

Click this button to fit the slide in the available Slide Area.

You can customize what appears on the Status Bar by right-clicking on it and selecting or deselecting the check boxes in the resultant Customize Status Bar menu (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Customize Status Bar menu

We selected the Theme and Accessibility Checker options, which as you can see are not selected by default (see Figure 4). Doing so results in showing both these options on the Status Bar, as can be seen highlighted in red within Figure 5, below.

Figure 5: Theme and Accessibility Checker options added

We explain both these options below:

Theme

Shows the name of the Theme applied to the active slide. Learn how you can apply a Theme within PowerPoint here.

Accessibility Checker

Clicking this option brings up the Accessibility Checker Task Pane, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 6, below.

Figure 6: Accessibility Checker Task Pane