Today I’m going to talk about Setting Up the Workspace in PowerPoint.

When the PowerPoint software first opens, you’ll see the workspace with a white square in the centre. It includes two text boxes: “Click to add title” and “Click to add subtitle”. When working with photos only, you don’t want text boxes…at least not these ones.

To remove the text boxes, click LAYOUT in Slides in the top section. There are nine options. Choose BLANK. The other layouts may come in handy at some time, but this time, we’re going to create with a blank background with no set text boxes.

The next step is to set the size of the work space. To do this, click DESIGN, and choose Page Setup (red circle). A pop-up box will appear with slide size and measurements. Don’t worry about the slide size at the moment. Instead, set your work space size in Width and Height. The picture above with the donkey is 5 inches by 5 inches, but you can choose whatever size you want to play around with. This window includes the orientation: portrait or landscape.

If you decide later to change the orientation, you can simply click SLIDE ORIENTATION (yellow square) and choose landscape or portrait. When you change the orientation after a picture has been inserted, be prepared to rework the size of the image because it gets squished or stretched to accommodate the new layout.

That’s it. You’re ready to begin.

Next week: Inserting an Image.

The first post in this series is found here: How to Create with PowerPoint .