All those odd little gadgets on the PowerPoint text ruler can get a bit confusing.
Worse yet, nobody's quite sure what to call them, so even people who understand the functions perfectly may resort to explanations like "Well, you have to Ctrl+drag the chiclet thingie on the left over to the up-pointing widget then ..."
Yeah. Uh huh.
This MSDN article describes the official MS terminology for the chiclets and widgets and even describes what they do.