Ms Office Tune Up

Party Tricks.

There’s a category of software functionality that, despite the best intention of the designers and developers, somehow never seems to make it into general use.

Sometimes these are essential features, and that’s a really bad thing because a customer’s failure to find an essential feature means the developers wasted their efforts. We don’t blame the customer, we blame ourselves and try to fix things down the road. Luckily we’re pretty good about usability testing and don’t have many of those in PowerPoint.

Other times they’re not essential features, they’re quick access or alternative methods for accessing functionality that is easily found elsewhere. Because users can find these features in obvious locations, the failure to find the quick access method isn’t all that bad. And it’s kind of fun to expose them to users, see the delight in their eyes… kind of like party tricks.

View Switching

View switching in Office applications is pretty easy, especially in 2007 where the new ribbons have given views have their own tab.

You can rest assured that this Presentation Views group provides you with all the access you need to be successful in PowerPoint. The rest of this article is just about getting to these views faster, and admittedly to one or two surprise views that you may have never seen before.

Status Bar View Switching

For many releases now PowerPoint has had a view switching control in the status bar.

Note: Although we’re showing pictures of Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, these features work for any version of PowerPoint that has the view switching control.

The view switcher group lets you, with a single click, switch between the main document views.

Very handy of course, and most PowerPoint users make use of one or more of these buttons on a regular basis.

What’s not obvious to most folks is there is hidden access to multiple views in each of these buttons!

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