When you open a blank presentation, PowerPoint provides you with one blank title slide. A title slide contains two placeholders, a title and a subtitle. When you insert a slide, a title and content slide is inserted by default. This contains a title placeholder where you enter the topic for the slide and a placeholder for inserting bulleted points for that topic. There are other slide layouts that use text placeholders, but for building presentation contents, these are the two types of slides you will use most often. (See Chapter 9 for information about working with slide layouts that include graphic elements).
There are other text-only slide layouts as well as a blank slide. Try inserting a Section Header or a Two Content slide layout from the Layout drop-down list. You can add text to a blank slide by using a text box (see "Add a Text Box"), although text in a text box is not reflected in the presentation outline.
Although this section deals with the basics of inserting slides with a few different layouts, I deal with different slide layouts in more detail in Chapter 7.
All fonts have some symbols such as percent and dollar signs, but if you’re looking for little pictures or design elements rather than text, your best bet is to choose from these font sets: Symbol, Wingding, Wingding 2 or 3, or Webdings.
For some Font sets you can narrow down your available symbols in the Symbols dialog box by choosing a category from the Subset drop-down list. For example, if you only want symbols for international currencies, choose the Currency Symbols category, and if you only want arrow symbols choose Arrows.
If you want the date and time to update every time you print or show your presentation, click the Update Automatically checkbox in the Date and Time dialog box before you click OK.
You can also place the date and time in a footer on a slide master so it will appear on every slide in your presentation. See Chapter 10 for more about working with masters.