How to Create a Great
PowerPoint Presentation

chillibreeze writer — Suvra Sen

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PowerPoint’s popularity has assumed epic proportions since its inception. It has caught the imagination of people residing at the extreme edges of the social spectrum – the geek and the armed forces alike. Nowadays, every employer expects that the prospective employee’s skill set will include PowerPoint. So it is imperative to learn how to play with the slides. This article gives you some tips about how to make your PowerPoint presentation come alive!

1. A default document theme: Generally your professional presentations need to follow definite guidelines prescribed by your employer regarding colour of your slides, position of your company logo, text fonts, and backgrounds. Create and save this custom theme as default, or make a template out of it so that every time you create a presentation, you won’t waste time customizing the slides.

2. Background Image Insertion: A background image can greatly enhance the look of your presentation. However, the image inserted as a slide back ground does not print. If you want the image to print with the slide, insert the image into the slide itself.

3. Using slide layouts: Instead of clicking and dragging on the slides to change layouts of pictures, objects, you can save time when you use Slide Layouts to add elements and rearrange existing items without clicking and dragging and resizing elements on the slides.

4. Replacing existing fonts: You can change fonts used throughout your presentation by changing the fonts in the Master Slide that control the formatting of your presentation. However, changing fonts in Slide Masters does not affect text in items not controlled by the Masters, such as text boxes. If you want to change fonts throughout your presentation, including in Masters, text boxes, and more, you can use Replace Fonts to replace one font with another.

5. Slide Numbering: Sometimes an audience member wants to ask a question about a slide and there are multiple slides with similar titles, adding slide numbers makes it easier for a viewer to ask about a specific slide.

6. Watermark your slides: Watermarks are often used to identify a document as confidential or any other intended message to the audience. Always use light colours for watermarks so that it does interfere with the contents in the slides. You can easily create attention-getting watermarks by using the tools available in the Insert tab.

7. Using Connector Lines: Connector lines are lines that PowerPoint automatically draws for you between two objects. For example, if you want the user to read Object a first and then Object B, you can add a connector line between them, where the line includes an arrow that leads the reader from Object A to Object B.

8. Borders: You can make images in your presentations stand out when you add image borders. For example, in a presentation where the slide background colour is similar to the colours used on an image on the slide, add a colourful image border to make the slide stand out against the background.

9. Compress Graphics: You can compress graphics from within PowerPoint to minimize the size of graphics files. Compressing graphics files is a good idea because the smaller you make your presentation files, the faster those presentations download and open. Graphics should be compressed after they are manipulated in PowerPoint. For example, if you scan an image into a presentation, it is likely to be a high quality file suitable for print, but may include more richness than can be displayed on standard monitors or projectors. If your presentation is likely to be viewed on monitors rather than printed, you can compress the images for Web or screen resolution.

10. Creating Photo Album: You can quickly create a photo album presentation to display images or graphics in a variety of styles. The Photo Album tool creates a brand-new presentation with the photos and graphics you select arranged on each slide. The images you choose can be in any file format PowerPoint supports, and it is not necessary for the files to be located in the same directory. The Photo Album tool saves time because it allows you to insert many images at once and then formats the slides with the selected number of pictures.

11. Blending Graphics: You can make parts of a graphic transparent against a coloured background by using the Set Transparent colour option. Colour option. The Set Transparent Colour option is helpful if you are placing an image or logo onto a slide that is not rectangular and has a background colour different from the background colour used in your slide. The Set Transparent Colour option works when you click in an area of the image that contains the single colour that you want to become transparent. After you click the colour that you want to make transparent, every instance of that colour in the image is made transparent, allowing the background colour or image to show through.

12. Applying 3D Effects: You can add 3-D effects to shapes and other graphics to make them appear three-dimensional by using the 3-D Rotation gallery on the Drawing Tools Format tab. Three-dimensional effects make graphics more attention-getting because they add depth and an additional layer of colour to slides. 3-D effects add shadows to graphics to help make them look truly three-dimensional. 3-D effects automatically use the colouring scheme that is used on the slide on which the graphic appears so that the effects are coordinated with other slide content.

13. Shadow Effects: You can create shadow effects to help make objects and images stand out on your slides. Shadow effects are coloured duplicates of an object that are placed behind the object to appear like shadows. Shadow effects give objects depth and often help differentiate them from their background. For example, if your presentation uses a theme and you want to use an image or graphic that is similar in colour to the background, the object may appear to fade into the background instead of providing the visual focus you want. You can add shadow effects to images, Shapes, and even text. You can also use semitransparent shadows that allow the slide’s background colour to show through the top layer. Themes in your presentation use default shadow colours, giving the shadow effects a look that coordinates with the other elements in your presentation. After you have added a shadow effect, you can reposition the shadow to appear where you want it.

14. Creating a Link: You can quickly navigate to a specific slide in your presentation with a click of your mouse. PowerPoint automatically creates a bookmark, or a targeted place to link to in your presentation, based on the presentation’s outline. Bookmarks are created for each slide in your presentation. You can easily identify which slide to link to because each slide is listed by a slide number and a slide title. When you create a hyperlink that links to another place in your presentation, you are also creating a hyperlink to a bookmark in the presentation. Hyperlinks to different parts of your presentation work when you deliver your presentation in Slide Show view. By default, hyperlinks appear on-screen as underlined text, and when you click them, the linked slide automatically appears. Hyperlinks to other locations in your presentations can be particularly convenient when you anticipate questions at specific points in the presentation. You can click the hyperlink to quickly shift to the other slide to help answer those questions.

Editor's note: Most articles submitted to Chillibreeze go through a selection process. Only 30 percent of submitted articles are accepted for publication on the Chillibreeze.com featured article list. All accepted articles are edited and proofread for glaring errors of punctuation and grammar. Sentence structure is changed in certain cases and sometimes, entire sections are rewritten. If you notice any errors that have slipped through the cracks, do let us know! (Email us at info at chillibreeze dot com).

Chillibreeze's disclaimer: This is a contributed article and was published on Chillibreeze in June, 2010. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article. The relevance of the facts and figures cited (if any) could change after a period of time.

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—About our writer:

Suvra Sen, a B.Tech from the National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra works for Larsen and Tubro Ltd., as a Structural Designer. He was on the editorial board of his college magazine-"The Helios" and is also a freelance writer.

How to Create a Great PowerPoint Presentation

chillibreeze writer — Suvra Sen

PowerPoint Production Services

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How to Create a Great
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