Status Bar in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

The Status Bar
Status Bar Components

The Status Bar

The Status Bar is a thin strip located at the bottom of the PowerPoint 2016 interface as shown highlighted in red within Figure 1. This area provides information about the active slide, and also provides several View options.

To work with options in the Status Bar, you must have a presentation open in PowerPoint 2016; otherwise the options within the Status Bar will be grayed out.

Figure 1: Status Bar within PowerPoint 2016 interface

Status Bar Components

Let's explore some components of the Status Bar. Figure 2 marks some of these components so that we can refer to them in the explanations below:

Figure 2: Status Bar components

A. Slide

This displays the active slide number, as well as the number of slides in the open presentation.

B. Notes

This is a toggle button to open or close the Notes pane.

C. Comments

This again is a toggle button that opens and closes the Comments Task pane.

D. View Buttons

Here you can select the appropriate buttons to switch to the Normal, Slide Sorter, Reading or Slide Show views. Shift click the same buttons to access the Slide Master view, Handout Master view, and the Set Up Show dialog box.

E. Zoom

Pull the slider left or right to zoom in or out, or click the zoom level to bring up the Zoom dialog box as shown in Figure 3, here you can specify the zoom level.

Figure 3: Zoom dialog box

F. Fit slide to current window

Click this button to fit the slide in the available Slide Area.

You can customize what appears on the Status Bar by right-clicking on it and selecting or deselecting the check boxes in the resultant Customize Status Bar menu (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Customize Status Bar menu