PowerPoint 2013

Introduction

Video: Slide Basics

Watch the video (5:04).

PowerPoint presentations are made up of a series of slides. Slides contain the information you will present to your audience. This might include text, pictures, charts, and more. Before you start creating presentations, you'll need to know the basics of working with slides and slide layouts.

Optional: Download our practice presentation for this lesson.

Understanding slides and slide layouts

When you insert a new slide, it will usually have placeholders. Placeholders can contain different types of content, including text and images. Some placeholders have placeholder text, which you can replace with your own text. Others have thumbnail icons that allow you to insert pictures, charts, and videos.

A slide with empty placeholders

Slides have several different layouts for placeholders, depending on the kind of information you want to include. Whenever you create a new slide, you'll need to choose a slide layout that fits your content.

Different slide layouts

To insert a new slide:

Whenever you start a new presentation, it will contain one slide with the Title Slide layout. You can insert as many slides as you need from a variety of layouts.

1. From the Home tab, click the bottom half of the New Slide command.
   Clicking the bottom half of the New Slide command
2. Choose the desired slide layout from the menu that appears.
   
   Choosing a slide layout
3. The new slide will appear. Click any placeholder and begin typing to add text. You can also click an icon to add other types of content, like a picture or a chart.
   
   The new slide
   

To change the layout of an existing slide, click the Layout command, then choose the desired layout.

Applying a new layout to an existing slide

To quickly add a slide that uses the same layout as the selected slide, simply click the top half of the New Slide command.

Inserting a new slide with the same layout