Start with the window. It has four regions, and each one has a job. The ribbon across the top groups its controls by task. Home holds the text and object operations you use constantly and Insert brings new objects onto the canvas. Design and Transitions act on the deck itself, View switches your vantage point, and Slide Show controls what happens when you present. The thumbnail rail down the left is the deck as a sequence. The canvas in the middle is one slide. The notes pane below it holds what you'll say. The status bar at the bottom carries the slide number, the view buttons and the zoom control, and it's the fastest route to a view change.
What does each PowerPoint view do?
Four views matter, and if you pick the wrong one, deck work sprawls.
Normal is where you build one slide. It's the only view that shows you the canvas at working size with the notes pane and the thumbnail rail visible at the same time, and it's the wrong place to make a decision about the deck as a whole, because you can only see four or five thumbnails at once.
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Outline shows the text that lives in title and content placeholders, as a linear indented list, with no pictures, no charts and no floating text boxes. That restriction is the point of the view. What survives into the Outline is what a machine can read as the deck's argument, and what doesn't survive is invisible to search, to accessibility tools, to the handout that prints outline text, and to anyone trying to reorder your deck quickly.
Slide Sorter shows the deck as an array of thumbnails with section headers and slide numbers. It's the only view where you can see the shape of the whole thing: how many slides sit under each heading, where the density is, whether the argument has a middle. Reordering happens here because dragging a slide in a grid is fast and dragging in a vertical rail isn't.
Reading view plays the deck full-screen inside the application window and leaves the rest of the display alone. It exists so you can check what a viewer sees without the disruption of a real slideshow, and it's the reliable way to answer "does this slide actually read", because at presentation size you see the type at the size the room sees it.
There's a fifth surface, and you'll meet it at show time. Presenter view puts the current slide, the next slide, the notes and a timer on the speaking machine while the audience sees only the slide. It isn't a deck-building view, but knowing it exists changes what you put in the notes, so it belongs in the same sentence as the other four.
Which view should you use for which job?
The working rule is short. Diagnose in Slide Sorter and Outline, build in Normal, check in Reading view.
Most people do all four jobs in Normal, and then a deck they have worked on for six hours still surprises them the moment it goes on a screen. If that's happened to you, blame the view.