Introduction

Below you will learn the basic keystrokes required to create slides for a presentation.

You will also learn some useful SuperNova and Dolphin ScreenReader Speak Keys to help you complete these tasks.

Reading time: 5 minutes approx.

Choosing a template

Creating a presentation begins by choosing a template. You can choose from a variety of PowerPoint templates, which can make it easy to make a creative and fun presentation. You can search for templates by going to the "File" option, selecting "New", and entering your search term in the search box (ALT + F, N, S).

But, for these help pages, we’ll work from a blank presentation. You can select "Blank Presentation" from the startup screen or by selecting the "File" option, followed by "New", and choosing "Blank Presentation" (ALT + F, N, L, 1).

These help pages also assume you are creating your slides using Normal View Layout. You can confirm you are using this layout through the "View" tab of the Ribbon (ALT + W, L).

Preparation

There are many guides on creating effective PowerPoint presentations and it is well worth spending time considering their concepts before embarking on your own presentation. Popular guides include the 10 – 20 – 30 Rule the 7 by 7 Rule, and the How to avoid death by PowerPoint (Tedx Talks) video by David JP Phillips.

There are three key points to consider:

• Keep to one concept per slide.
• Keep the text on each slide succinct to ensure the audience focus is on you and not the slide content.
• Keep your slides uniform and use graphics, animations, transition effects sparingly so that they do not detract from the content.

With a better understanding about designing slides, you can now focus on working on your presentation.

Working on slides

You create your slides in the Slide View Pane. If the focus is not currently in the Slide View Pane, you can move focus to this area by pressing F6 or SHIFT + F6. When the area has focus, speech will say "Click to add title, edit. Click to add subtitle, edit". This is the text from the two place-holders plus the control type description for the elements on the slide.

Tip: To confirm your location, press the Speak where am I? hotkey. The speech output from this command will include the name of the current pane. The hotkey is NUMPAD 7 or, if you are using the Laptop Universal Hotkey Set, press CAPS LOCK + PAGE UP.

To move focus onto the first object, press TAB. Speech will read the place-holder text and its properties including its position and dimensions. You can use the Arrow Keys to reposition the object on the slide.

You can turn off the announcement of the property information by switching to a Minimum or Low Verbosity Scheme.

 Tip: To change Speech Verbosity Scheme, press CAPS LOCK + EQUALS or, if you are using the Laptop Universal Hotkey Set, press CAPS LOCK + V. To change your Braille Verbosity Scheme, press LEFT SHIFT + CAPS LOCK + EQUALS or, if you are using the Laptop Universal Hotkey Set, press LEFT CONTROL + CAPS LOCK + V.

If you press the TAB key again, you will move to the next object on the slide. Pressing TAB or SHIFT + TAB cycles you through all the objects on the slide.

Tip: Irrespective of your Verbosity Scheme, you can discover a place-holder’s properties by pressing the Speak additional focus information hotkey. Press LEFT SHIFT + NUMPAD 0 or, if you are using the Laptop Universal Hotkey Set, press LEFT CONTROL + CAPS LOCK + UP ARROW.

To add text into an empty object, simply begin typing.

To edit an existing object, press ENTER. This will switch you into editing mode with the current text selected. If you press LEFT ARROW, you will de-select the text and position the focus at the start of the text. Conversely, pressing RIGHT ARROW will de-select the text and place the focus at the end of the text.

When editing is complete, you can do one of the following:

• Press CONTROL + ENTER to move to the next object and automatically switch into edit mode.
• Press ESCAPE to exit edit mode and then press TAB to move to the next object on the slide.

Navigating and selecting text

While editing, you will find you can use the same familiar keyboard commands to navigate and select text.

You can also use SuperNova and Dolphin ScreenReader Speak Keys to read the focus and provide additional information about the current text.

Tip: Many of these keyboard commands are multikey commands. This means multiple presses of the hotkey will elicit further information, for example, additional presses of the Speak character command will cause the character to be read phonetically, and then its font attributes to be announced, and then its Unicode value to be stated.

Formatting text and paragraphs

You can apply changes to text including format changes using familiar keyboard commands. In most cases, the stated hotkeys require you to make a selection prior to applying the hotkey.

Popular changes include:

• Left align text: CONTROL + L.
• Centre text: CONTROL + E.
• Right align text: CONTROL + R.
• Justify text: CONTROL + J.
• Make text bold: CONTROL + B.
• Make text italic: CONTROL + I.
• Make text underlined: CONTROL + U.
• Open "Font" dialog box to apply advanced font and character changes: CONTROL + T or CONTROL + SHIFT + F.

When using the Blank Presentation Template, text in the content object default’s to bullet items. You can turn off the bullet item by positioning the focus at the start of the line and then press BACKSPACE. Alternatively, open the context menu (SHIFT + F10) and de-select "Bullets" from the available menu items.

In fact, many of the formatting options you may want to apply can be easily found in the context menu. This includes access to Font settings, Paragraph settings, Bullet options, Numbering options, Format text effects, and more.

Deleting content

As previously mentioned, if you want to delete sections of text from a slide, you can do so by switching into editing mode, selecting the content, and pressing the DELETE key.

On the other hand, if you want to delete all the content from an object, you do not need to go into editing mode, instead you can simply press DELETE when the object has focus. However, you should be careful when performing this action as a second accidental press of the DELETE key will remove the object place-holder from the slide. If this occurs, press CONTROL + Z to undo your last action.

Inserting a new slide

When your creation of a slide is complete, you can move onto the next slide by doing one of the following:

• If you are in edit mode and focus is in the last object on the slide, you can press CONTROL + ENTER to insert a new slide based on the current slide layout.
• If you are not in edit mode, press CONTROL + M to insert a new slide based on the current slide layout.
• If you are seeking to insert a new slide with a different slide layout, go to the "Home" tab of the Ribbon and select "New Slide" (ALT + H, I) and choose a slide layout from the available templates.

Summary

In this section you learnt about the keystrokes you can use to create, edit, and format a slide.

Quiz

1. You can insert a new slide by pressing CONTROL + M. Is this statement true?
2. You can use the Speak status bar hotkey to identify what pane currently contains the focus. Is this statement true?
3. To delete all the content from an object requires you to first switch into editing mode. Is this statement true?

End of section

Select the link below to continue to the next section.

To revisit a previous section, please scroll to the top of this page and choose the section from the Available Content menu.

But before you move on, here are the answers to the quiz questions:

1. True.
2. False.
3. False.