I was asked recently, how do you stop PowerPoint from automatically captilising the first letter of a line of bullet points?  Well this is a good question, and the answer is applicable to the other Office packages too.  Automatic formatting like this can be a real pain, but it is easy to work around most of the time.

When you press the enter/return key at the end of the line and get a capital on the following line you will see a little blue line underneath the first letter.  This tells you that there is a message relating to the letter underlined.  Click on the blue line and you will get something similar to this:

In this case it is telling you that it has automatically capitalising the letter.  You can see that if you select the first option you can undo the automatic capitalisation.  Selecting the second option will turn off automatic capitalisation for the whole presentation (it will not undo any capitalisation already in place).  If you want to turn it back on again, go back to one of the letters with a line underneath, click on the line and you will see a tick next to 'Stop Auto-capitalizing....'.  Select the line and auto-capitalising will be turned on again.  The third choice in the list will take you to the auto fomatting options dialogue box where you can change the settings for automatic formatting.

As I said earlier, this works in the other Office programmes too.

A tool available in all Office packages that I feel is rather under used is the alignment feature for images and objects.  If you have several objects in a document/presention you can line them up so they are evenly spaced or align to the top or bottom of the objects.  Here's how you do it.

Select all the of objects you want to align.  To do this click on one object, hold you finger down on the shift key on the keyboard, and click on the remaining objects.  They should all be selected.  If you are having trouble achieving this, select each object, right click and turn text wrapping on.  You should then be able to select them all.

In Office 2007, when you select the pictures you get the picture formatting ribbon.  You will see the align button on the right.

In Publisher if you go to the Arrange tool at the top and choose align, you will get a very similar dialogue box (left).

Then you have to simply select the desired option.  As you can see you can align all of the selected objects across the top or bottom, or down the page to the left or right.  If you have more than two objects you can also distribute them equidistant from each other across or down the page.

So, a very useful tool to improve the look of your documents and presentations.

Following on from my posts last week on PowerPoint, I was asked about how you produce those handouts of presentations that have the slide down the left of the page and a lined notes area down the right next to each slide.

This is the same procedure in all versions of PowerPoint once you have found the print window.  So go to Print, either through the file menu, or through the Office button, depending on which version you have.  Half way down the dialogue box on the left you have 'Print what' and the default choice is 'slides'.  Change this using the drop down to handouts.

This will give you six slides to a page.  To get the text areas change the setting to three slides per page.  You will see the little preview change.  When you are happy with all the settings click on OK.

A question I was asked recently with PowerPoint, was how do have different slide designs in the one presentation?  Easy when you know how.

First, let's apply one of the designs.  Start your presentation and go to the Design tab at the top.  Choose from the designs on offer.  Make sure you have at least two slides so you can see the title slide design and the ordinary slide view.  Often the designs are different. 

Right-click over the slide you want to change and choose Format Background.  Now make the changes you require.  You can remove the background art of the design by putting a tick next to Hide Background Graphics, and alter the other options to change the background colour and add any additional image you may have.  If you click on close once you have finished the changes will apply to the selected slide only.  If you click on Apply to All, then all slides will be ammended.

To apply one of the designs from the design selection, right click on the desired design on the design ribbon and choose Apply to Selected Slide.  Voila! The selected slide has a completely different design applied to the rest of the presentation.

I intended to write this post about PowerPoint, and then realised that in fact the technique is the same for Word and Excel too, so you only need to learn it once to become an expert in three programmes!!  In earlier versions of Office you needed to insert these objects from the drawing toolbar, but in more recent versions from 2007 they have come out of hiding, so to speak.

In Word, Excel and PowerPoint you go to the Insert ribbon at the top and choose SmartArt from the Illustrations segment.

You are then given a very wide range of objects to choose from.  When you single click on each one in the list you will get an explanation of what they are used for in the right hand pane of the dialogue box.

Select the object you wish to use.  I'll choose the organisation chart which is the first one in the hierarchy category.  When you double-click on the option, or click on OK the object is inserted into your document/spreadsheet/presentation.  Click where it says [Text] to type in the required text.  Note when you select the object you get some new ribbon tabs at the top of the screen called Design and Format.  If you wish to change the size, colour or style of your object just click on these and experiment with what's on offer.

The default setting of the object is to re-size the text to fit the object.  If you put too much information in the text will become too small.

Note that in PowerPoint another way of inserting a SmartArt into a slide is to click on the icon when you create a new empty slide:

One Office programme I haven't touched on in this blog so far in PowerPoint.  As usual I will assume some basic knowledge, but some of the more advanced features are actually very easy to do if you know how.  Recently I was asked how to produce a slide with a chart on where the bars were animated so they entered the slide one by one. This is how you do it in PowerPoint 2007.

Open the slide with the chart on in the main window.

Click on the Animation tab on the top ribbon.  You will get the animation pane on the right hand side of the window.

Now click on the chart to select it.  Select the Custom Animation button on the toolbar and you will see the drop down pictured on the left.

If you choose to animate by series, all the bars of the same colour will be animated, before the bars of the next colour, and then all those will be animated before moving on to the next in the series.  Hover over the option in the drop down list and you will get a preview which demonstrates what will happen.

If you choose to animate by category, then each coloured bar will be introduced in the first category, before moving on to introduce the next cateogory of bars.  Again, hover over the option in the drop down and you will see a demonstration.

You can settle for these standard forms of animation, and I think they are fine for most purposes, but if you want to use some of the other animations, do the following:

Select the chart and add the animation to the whole chart.  You will see the animation listed in the animation pane on the right.  Click on the drop down arrow and choose Effect Options.  Select the Chart Animation tab.  Click on the drop down arrow and you will get these choices which are similar to those mentioned above.  Select whether you want the animation by series or by category.  One you have experimented with these tools you will find them easy to use.