Creating PowerPoints in Office365
This article is about creating PowerPoints in Office365.
Creating PowerPoints in Office365
Visuals help reinforce your points in a presentation. They can give you a list
of talking points in case you forget and help engage the audience. I will try to
help you get started with them.
PowerPoint has a default slide layout. Most of the time this is just fine for
any presentation. Know, however, this layout can be changed to fit your
preference. There are also various slide templates you can use that offer
something different. If you are just getting started, I would suggest you start
with a template. Later on, feel free to start from scratch.
Templates will have placeholders for different kinds of content. For example,
click on a text portion to enter in the text that you want. You can do this with
other kinds of content as well. If you desire to change the layout, choose Slide
Layout in the menu and adjust things to your liking. PowerPoint will arrange the
content to make everything fit nicely. If you have changed things and do not
like it, you can go to Home > Slides > Reset to put everything back to the
default.
After you have started a new presentation, it is time to add slides. There are
various ways to do this depending on your needs. Templates have some built in so
all you do is modify what is there. If you do need to add then you can do so one
slide at a time. When you add a new slide, it will appear directly after the one
you currently have selected.
Reusing slides is easy too. Sometimes we have slides from other presentations
that fit our current project. Choose Home > Slides > Reuse Slides. You will be
shown a list and can choose any that you want.
You can rearrange your slides whenever you need. You have slide thumbnails on
the side of your presentation. Just drag them in whatever order you wish to get
your presentation just right. You can also delete slides from here as well.
Choose the undo button at the top of your screen immediately if you need to get
your slide back. If you want to use a slide for a reference but do not want the
audience to see it, then hide the slide. You can do this by by right-clicking
the slide in question and choose the hide option. Do it again to unhide it.
Most slide layouts present information as bullet points. So, do not expect to be
able to add huge paragraphs to a slide. You do not want to do this anyway. Short
and brief is the way to go. After you have started a list, press enter to go to
next point. You can also use tab to create a nested list. Then press shift-tab
to take the indentation back to normal.
There is a nice feature called speaker notes. Obviously, these are notes that
are only viewable by the speaker. Do what you want with this but it can be very
useful. It is useful because you can add a lot more detail here that you would
not want to do with the audience. There are different views for the notes
section as well, they will all let you format text and add sources.
You can change the slide size and backgrounds whenever you want. PowerPoint uses
modern widescreen formats. However, you can change the format anytime you need.
To do this, go to Design > Customize > Slide Size. You will see all the options
there.
Something that is a lot of fun is the animations feature. Be careful when doing
this, though, you don't want to animate every slide. Some people do get carried
away with it. If you have a presentation that could be animated, just do 2-3
slides to get your point over better. To animate an object, display the
animations tab, choose the animation you want, then choose any last settings
you want from timings. You can animate lists and many other objects. These make
them come in one point at a time.
Before it is time to show the audience your masterpiece, run the presentation to
check that everything looks right. Ideally, you want to do this before everyone
is seated and waiting on you to start. Hitting F5 starts the show from the
beginning, while shift-F5 starts from the current slide. This lets you see how
formatting, transitions, and any animations look to the audience. After
everything looks good, you can then choose timings and whether to loop it.