Science PowerPoint tips and tutorials

PowerPoint XP/2003 has the option of placing any toolbar as a floating toolbar, which can be positioned anywhere on the screen, even very next to the drawn object within the slide area. Here we show how to create the floating toolbar that contains many other useful drawing commands; however which are not as essential as those described in Essential drawing tools I and II previously. In your future use of PowerPoint, this Toolbar could be activated or deactivated, depending on your drawing needs.

To create the customized floating toolbar you need to follow these steps:

1. From the Tools menu select Customize and the Customize dialog box appear.
2. Within the dialog box select Toolbars tab and click New¦ box on the right. A New Toolbar dialog box will appear in which you will type the name for the floating toolbar, for example My Favorites, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Creating the My Favorites floating toolbar.

1. Click OK and a small empty floating toolbar will appear. In the main Customize dialog box select Commands tab, select Category and, from the Command list on the right, click and drag selected commands to newly created floating toolbar. After placing several items in this toolbar you can change its proportions by pulling the bottom or the side of this bar.

Figure 5. Customize dialog box that helps you set up floating toolbar (select, click and drag).

To have the new floating toolbar show automatically on a startup of PowerPoint next time you do not need to do anything; just close the current session of your drawing project. However, if you close the floating toolbar before exiting PowerPoint, next time you have to reactivate it from the list of toolbars in Customize dialog box (place the check mark by clicking next to My Favorites on the list).

You can create as many floating toolbars as you wish; each may be designed for particular type of slides. If your preferences change, you can always add or delete new commands to a particular floating toolbar later.