ABC's of PowerPoint

01. Customize the Toolbars (PowerPoint 2000)
PPT 2007  |  PPT 2003

Customizing your toolbars will help increase your productivity, and more importantly will open up many of PowerPoint's built-in capabilities; many of which you may not had realized existed.

Customize Toolbars:
To access additional toolbars go to the "Menu Bar - Tools - Customize"

There are several toolbars to choose from. I encourage you to explore. The toolbars I used most frequently and recommend are:

- Standard
- Formatting
- Drawing
- Menu Bar
- Shadow Setting
- Picture

The shadow's position has been locked by PowerPoint, and the color is pre-determined by the slide's background color.

Customize Commands
Additionally, PowerPoint allows you to customize your commands. By selecting a category on the left, you will have access to all of its commands. First timers should spend some time scrolling through all of the categories to see what is available. There are many features in here that are not readily available as standard toolbars. Simply find the commands that you most commonly use and drag them to your toolbar of choice.

As a final word: My favorite commands include the all of the alignments, both send to front and back, and the entire grouping series. However the 2 eye-droppers (Pick Up Object Style & Apply to Defaults) top my list. For an explanation on how the eye-droppers will benefit you see Tip 2.

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