Special Characters

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PowerPoint supports the insertion of special characters. This allows the users to adjust the font characteristics of these characters just like any other text giving them greater flexibility in terms of the presentation design. The following steps will help you insert special characters.

Step 1 − In the Insert Tab, under the Symbols group, click on the Symbolcommand.

Step 2 − In the Symbol dialog, select one of the special characters you want to insert in the presentation.

Step 3 − If you cannot find the character you are looking for, you can change the font subset from the dropdown and look at a new set of characters.

Step 4 − If you know the character code of the symbol, you can enter it in the Character Code field and search for it.

Step 5 − To insert a character, you can either double-click on it in the Symbol dialog or, select it and press the Insert button.

Step 6 − The Symbol dialog does not disappear after you insert a character, which means you can add as many characters as you want from this dialog.

Step 7 − Once you are done, you can click Close to close the dialog.

Duplicating Content

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PowerPoint is a multi-content program that supports many non-text content types like shapes, charts, pictures, clip arts, SmartArt and multimedia files. While working with the content, it may sometimes be required to duplicate the content as part of the presentation development. PowerPoint offers options to duplicate the non-text content using the cutcopy-paste features.

Cut-Paste Procedure

In this procedure, the original content is moved to a different location. When you use the Cut option, you can also create multiple copies, it is just that the content in the original location is lost. The following steps will make you understand how to work with the cutpaste procedure.

Step 1 − Select the content you want to move. Right-click on it to access the Cut option.

Step 2 − Now move the cursor to the location where you want the content to be moved and right-click to access the Paste options.

Step 3 − Select one of the paste options to paste the content.

Copy-Paste Procedure

This is exactly similar to the cut-paste procedure except that the original content is retained in the original location.

Step 1 − Select the content you want to move. Right-click on it to access the Copy option.

Step 2 − Now move the cursor to the location where you want the content to be moved and right-click to access the Paste options.

Step 3 − Select one of the paste options to paste the content.

The Use Destination Theme option retains the content as the original content, but uses the destination location theme settings. The Picture option just pastes the content as an image with original settings. Once pasted as a picture you cannot change the parameters of the original content; for example, if you pasted a chart as an image, you cannot edit the data on the chart image.

Setting Language Type

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PowerPoint is a multi-lingual tool; it is evident that there will be an option to set the default language to be used in the slides. The following steps will help you set the language type in PowerPoint.

Step 1 − Under the Review ribbon, in the Language group, click on Language

Step 2 − If you have not selected any content, you will be able to just set the Language Preferences

Step 3 − If you have selected a portion of content with text in it, you can also set the proofing language.

Step 4 − When you select the "Set Proofing Language", you get the language dialog. Wherein, you can select one of the many languages available in PowerPoint. If you are selecting a language just for the selected text, click OK. If you are selecting a language for the entire presentation click Default. You can also check the "Do not check spelling" checkbox, if you do not want PowerPoint to automatically check for spelling errors based on dictionaries available.

Step 5 − When you select "Language Preferences", you get the PowerPoint Options dialog where you can change the language settings like loading dictionaries for various languages, prioritizing the display and help languages, and the Screen tip language setting.

Content Translation

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One of the newer features in PowerPoint is the content translation. This feature allows you to select content and have it translated into a different language. The following steps will help you translate content in PowerPoint.

Step 1 − Select the text to be translated and click on Translate - Translate Selected Text under the Language section of the Review ribbon.

Step 2 − In the research sidebar, the "From" language is set to default language settings for the content. The "To" language is set to the alphabetically first language supported by PowerPoint.

Step 3 − From the "To" language dropdown, select the language you want the selected portion of text translated into. Click on Insert to replace the selected text from the default language to the new translated text.

Step 4 − Notice that if you replace the portion of text using translation, the default language for the replaced text also changes automatically.

Spelling Check

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One of the best proofing tools available in PowerPoint is the spelling check. This is an automated proofing feature which will review the entire presentation for errors. To use this feature, you need to first set the Proofing language from the Language section under the Review ribbon.

In the Language dialog, you can select the language you want to use for your presentation. If you have some content selected, you can click OK and select it for just that section. If you want to use the selected language for the entire presentation you should click default.

Once the proofing language is set you can see it at the bottom of the PowerPoint window. If there are proofing errors in the presentation, you will also see an icon of a book with a red cross on top of it.

You can review the errors in the presentation by clicking on the red cross at the bottom of the window or by clicking on "Spelling" under the Proofingsection in the Review ribbon.

From the Spelling dialog, you can take the necessary actions to ignore, correct or edit the errors in the presentation. The table below describes the various options you have in the Spelling dialog.

 

S.No	Spelling Dialog Option & Description
1	Ignore Ignores the error for the current instance.
2	Ignore All Ignores the error for all the instances in the presentation.
3	Change Accepts the suggested change for the current instance.
4	Change All Accepts the suggested change for all the instances in the presentation.
5	Add Uses the first suggested word each time you click Add.
6	Suggest Includes this word in the PowerPoint dictionary.
7	AutoCorrect Automatically corrects similar errors going forward.
8	Close Closes the Spelling dialog.
9	Options Sets up how PowerPoint should proof the presentation.

Undo Edited Changes

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Like any other program, there are times when you may want to undo some of the changes you made to the slides. PowerPoint offers the "Undo/ Redo" option to facilitate this. While working with the "Undo/ Redo" options, you must remember that these will always be sequential which means you can only undo actions in the order they were executed. You cannot undo the last action, retain the remaining 10 actions and undo the eleventh one. If you want to undo the eleventh action, all the subsequent 10 actions will also be undone.

To undo the last action, click on the Undo button in the PowerPoint Quick Access bar.

You can keep clicking on this button repeatedly to undo the series of actions; however a more graceful way of undoing multiple actions is to use the dropdown next to the undo button. Here you can select the list of actions you want to undo by sliding your cursor on top of the actions and click on them.

Redo is an option available only after you have undone at least one action. The redo follows the same logic as the undo option, except in the reverse order. You can click on the redo button one or more times to redo previously undone action in the sequence. You do not have the dropdown option with redo though.

Find & Replace Content

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PowerPoint offers its users the ability to search for specific text and if required replace it automatically. This is a very useful tool when you need to review a very large presentation or correct the same error in multiple places in the slide. Given below are the steps to find and replace text in PowerPoint. Although, you can only use this function for text, the text itself can be present in a text box, in another shape, as a WordArt, in SmartArt or tables.

Finding Content

The following steps will show you how to find content in PowerPoint.

Step 1 − In the Home tab, under the Editing section click on Find.

Step 2 − Type the text you want to search in the "Find what:" field.

Step 3 − You can narrow your search by selecting "Match Case" - to find exact case match - and "Find whole words only" - to find whole words and not words where typed word is just a part of the word.

Step 4 − Press on "Find Next" to find the next occurrence of the search word.

Step 5 − The Find dialog does not disappear after finding the first instance, so you can keep pressing "Find Next" multiple times till you reach the end of the search. At this point, you will receive a message from PowerPoint indicating the end of the search.

Replacing Content

Here are the steps to replace content in PowerPoint.

Step 1 − In the Home tab, under the Editing section click on the Replacebutton.

Step 2 − Type the text you want to replace in the "Find what:" field and the replaced text in "Replace with:" field

Step 3 − You can narrow your search by selecting "Match Case" - to find the exact case match - and "Find whole words only" - to find the whole words and not words where typed word is just a part of the word.

Step 4 − Press on "Find Next" to find the next occurrence of the search word. PowerPoint will show you the next occurrence and you can then click on "Replace" to replace the word. If you want to skip the occurrence, you can press "Find Next" again without pressing "Replace"

Step 5 − The Replace dialog does not disappear after finding the first instance, so you can keep pressing "Find Next" multiple times till you reach the end of the search. At this point, you will receive a message from PowerPoint indicating the end of the search.