Learn to love the Ribbon
At first, the Ribbon may be off-putting. But the truth is, once you learn to use it, you'll find that it's far easier to use than the old PowerPoint interface. It does take some getting used to, though.
The Ribbon, by default, is divided into seven tabs, with an optional eighth one (Developer) that you can display by clicking the Office button and choosing PowerPoint Options > Popular > Show Developer tab in the Ribbon.
Here's a rundown of the main tabs and what each one does:
Home: This contains commonly used PowerPoint features, such as creating new slides, changing layouts, deleting slides, formatting text and paragraphs, inserting shapes, and creating drawings.
Insert: As you might guess, this one handles anything you might want to insert into a presentation, such as pictures, clip art, charts, tables, movies, audio clips, photo albums (a new PowerPoint feature), headers and footers, text boxes, WordArt ... well, you get the idea.
Design: Here's where you'll apply different themes to your presentation; change colors, fonts and effects; select background styles; change the slide orientation and page setup; and so on.
Animations: A more accurate name for this might be transitions, because it lets you control the animations used as transitions between slides. Creating transitions is now exceptionally easy: All you need to do is hover your mouse over an icon representation of a particular transition on this tab, and you'll see a live preview of that transition.
You can also create custom animations, change transition sounds and speeds, and make other changes to animations as well.
Slide Show: Here's where you'll accomplish whatever you need to do with your slide show -- set it up, create a custom slide show, preview it from the beginning or current slide, rehearse your narration and timings, change the resolution, and so on.
Review: Need to check spelling and grammar, look up a word in a thesaurus, mark up a presentation with comments, or review other people's markups? This is the tab for you.
View: Here's where to go when you want to change the view in any way, including changing presentation views -- such as slide master, handout master, notes master and slide sorter. You can also show or hide a ruler and gridlines; zoom in and out; choose from color, gray scale, or black and white; and display windows as either split or cascaded.
Developer: If you write or use macros, this is your tab. It also lets you insert controls such as buttons and text boxes, if you have written code for them.
Each of the tabs along the Ribbon is organized into a series of groups that contain related commands for getting a specific task done.
Inside each group is a set of what Microsoft calls command buttons, which carry out commands and display menus.
There's also a small diagonal arrow in the bottom-right corner of some groups that Microsoft calls a dialog box launcher. Click it to display more options related to the group.
All that seems simple enough ... so it's time to throw a curve ball at you. The Ribbon is context-sensitive; it changes according to what you're doing. Depending on the task you're engaged in, it sometimes adds more tabs, subtabs and supertitles.
For example, when you highlight a picture, the Picture Tools supertitle appears. Click the Format tab when Picture Tools appears, and several new groups appear, including Adjust, Picture Styles, Arrange and Size, which let you edit and format the picture.
Other "now you see them, now you don't" supertitles include Chart Tools, Table Tools and SmartArt Tools -- all of which appear in response to various actions you take in PowerPoint.