Identification

• The "Insert" tab is a feature on PowerPoint users select to enhance their PowerPoint slides. It is located third from the left, after the "File" and "Home" tabs, near the top-left of the work area. Unless it is active (selected), the "Insert" tab does not actually look like a tab, it just shows the word "Insert." Hovering the cursor over the word "Insert" and/or clicking the word brings the tab view into place and clicking it opens the "Insert" view ribbon/toolbar (PowerPoint began using the word "ribbon" to replace the word "toolbar" at the same time it instituted the tabbed view, with the Office 2007 release).
  
  

Components

• Users who want to create a PowerPoint presentation with more than just bulleted text may spend a lot of time with the "Insert" tab and its ribbon. On the tab are buttons allowing insertion of items such as pictures, charts, shapes, videos, spreadsheets, hyperlinks, headers and footers, text boxes and references. Clicking the "Insert" tab always opens this ribbon. Clicking another tab brings that tab's ribbon to focus, but these options are always available just by clicking the "Insert" tab again.
  
  

How to Use

• Using the "Insert" tab and its components follows a similar path for most of the items on the ribbon. For objects such as pictures, clip art and multimedia, the user clicks that corresponding button and is brought to a search window. After finding the item to insert, the user double-clicks it and the item is inserted onto the slide. Some of the "Insert" tab's buttons are slightly more interactive, such as the "Table" button, where users can create tables cell-by-cell, and the "Bookmark" button, where users may insert nodes onto a slide to allow for slide jumping.
  
  

History

• PowerPoint, along with the rest of its fellow software programs in the Microsoft Office Suite, went to a tabbed system with the Microsoft Office Suite 2007 release (the current version of the suite at April 2011 is Office Suite -- and PowerPoint -- 2010). Prior to this, PowerPoint had a work area similar to the way it looks now, but instead of tabs appearing with a ribbon below them, the menus, including "Insert" had drop-down options with just text and fly-out text menus below them.