Formatting Picture Placeholders
Keeping the look of your picture slides (actually, all slides) consistent adds value to your presentation. When you use different pictures in successive slides of your presentation, you'll want their position, formatting, and size to be the same in all slides. While you can achieve this by working on each slide individually, you will have to spend an inordinate amount of time making sure that the pictures look consistent -- and even then, you may not be too happy with the results. You can get over this problem by using a new slide layout with a Picture placeholder. In this tutorial we'll explore how to work with a Picture placeholder you add to a new slide layout.

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Create Custom Shaped Picture Placeholders
Rather than using simple rectangle placeholders for your pictures, you can use various other shapes that appear almost silhouette-like. Yes, this is possible within PowerPoint! In fact, these custom picture placeholders can be created within PowerPoint, using nothing that's not a part of PowerPoint. Of course this process is a little detailed, but not difficult!

Mini Toolbar
Making edits to your slide objects quickly can be an asset for your time -- but awesome slides are created painstakingly, and use a large amount of time. Slide designers often play around with different fill options to make their slides look awesome -- or even make umpteen changes to how their text appears. PowerPoint 2013 does provide most editing options to make these alterations within the Ribbon tabs, and you can also populate your Quick Access Toolbar with frequently used commands. Yet, all of these involve moving your cursor above the Slide Area and back continuously. While this may not really result in Carpal tunnel syndrome for your palms, it helps to know that PowerPoint 2013 also includes the Mini Toolbar, a floating toolbar that spawns right next to the cursor -- and it is also available instantly with a right-click!

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Live Preview
Editing slide objects works almost the same way, irrespective of what you are actually editing -- you select the object you want to edit and change some attributes -- you then get to see what your changes have caused -- and then you either undo your changes (if you are not too happy with them) or just accept them and start working with another object. What if you could see/preview how an actual change will look on the slide object before you decide to accept or decline that change? PowerPoint 2013's Live Preview allows you to do just that -- this feature was first introduced in PowerPoint 2007, and continues being available in newer versions. Additionally, PowerPoint 2013 now also includes the Live Preview option for Chart Styles as well.

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Outline View
The Outline view is new for PowerPoint 2013 -- wait, that's not absolutely true since you always had access to your presentation's text outline through the Slides / Outline pane on the left side of the PowerPoint interface. What's changed though is that you no longer need to switch tabs within the pane (as you would do in PowerPoint 2010) -- now you just access the outline within a new view! The Outline view displays all the text contained within the title and text placeholders of your slides, and is one of the ten views in PowerPoint 2013.