Presentation Templates

Powerpoint comes with many professionally designed templates on which to base your new presentation. A common approach is to find the template that provides the closest match to the design you need and then amend it. Templates use the .potx extension and provides a specific look consisting of layouts, themes and slide masters.

To create a presentation based on a teplate, click the Office Button > New, and then in the New Presentation window select the appropriate category on the left.

Click to enlarge

On selecting a particular category, all templates within are displayed in the centre of the window. When you select a template you can see a preview over on the right. Click Create to create a new presentation based on the chosen template. In addition to the templates that are provided with Powerpoint, many more are available for download from Microsoft Office Online, Microsoft’s online content library. If you select a template from Microsoft Office Online, you will need to click Download and not Create.

Your new presentation is now ready for you to amend.

When your presentation is complete you can save it as a template itself. This means that you can base new presentations on this design in the future. Click the Office Button > Save As > Other Formats, and in the Save As dialogue box:

• give the template a name
• change the Save as type to Powerpoint Template (*.potx)

Third Party Powerpoint Templates

Although Powerpoint offers a large selection of ready made templates for you to use, you might not find one that fits your requirements. Do not despair; there are third parties out there who supply their own custom made templates for you to take advantage of.

Crystal Graphics, for example, provide a range of stunning Powerpoint templates with which you can energise your presentations.

Understanding Powerpoint Views

Powerpoint provides you with three different views to help you develop your presentation: Normal, Slide Sorter and Slide Show. To switch from one view to another, click on the appropriate view button on the status bar in the bottom right of the work space. Hovering over each one will display a tooltip telling you which one it is.

Alternatively, you can use the buttons in the Presentation Views group on the View tab.

Here’s a description of each available view:

Normal View

Using the normal view allows you to work with the underlying components of a presentation – the outline, slides and notes – each in its own pane. These panes allow you to modify each of those components. The slides and otline panes are found to the left of the work space by default whereas the notes pane is found at the bottom. The outline pane is used for designing and organising your presentation’s content. The slides pane is used to add elements such as text, graphics, movies and sounds to the slides in your presentation. As you might imagine, the notes pane is used to hold speaker notes to discreetly help you or to share with your audience.

Slides Pane

The slides pane in normal view displays a list of thumbnail images providing a preview of each slide. When you click on a slide to select it, it displays in the workspace for you to amend. You can step through the slides in the slides pane by pressing the up and down arrow keys or the page up and page down keys on your keyboard.

Outline Pane

When you switch to using the outline pane by clicking on its tab, you will see a list of numbered headings, each one corresponding to a slide. Click on a heading to display that slide in the workspace.

Slide Sorter View

In slide sorter view thumbnails of all the slides in your presentation are laid out for you in the workspace. As it provides an overall view of your presentation, it’s a good tool to help you arrange and resequence the slides it comprises.

Slide Show View

Slide show view is used to deliver the presentation. It steps through each slide sequentially. To move to the next slide in the sequence, press enter or click the screen. After the last slide has been displayed, a blank screen is presented which you will have to click to end the slide show.

The Evolution Of Powerpoint Themes

In Powerpoint 2003 and previous versions of Powerpoint, design templates defined the colours and styles used in a presentation. These styles included such elements as the background design, fill colour schemes, the font used and its size etc. In a nutshell, design templates have been replaced by Powerpoint Themes in 2007.

Powerpoint Themes contain:

• a pre-prepared collection of slide layouts
• complimentary colour schemes
• fonts
• effects
• matching backgrounds

To apply or change a Powerpoint Theme, click the Design tab and select one of the thumbnail images in the Themes gallery. You can see a selection of ready made themes to choose from, and to view more you can click the More button (the down arrow in the bottom right of the panel) to see the whole themes gallery.

Hovering your cursor over any of the Powerpoint themes temporarily applies the theme to your presentation to provide a live preview. When you move the cursor away, the theme is removed. If you move the cursor from one live preview to the next, you can see that each theme changes the background and text (colour, size, font and placement).

After you have applied a theme, each new slide you add adopts your chosen theme so that the look and feel is consistent across all slides.

What Elements Comprise A Powerpoint Theme

A Powerpoint theme includes the following elements:

• Colours
• Fonts
• Effects

For any particular Powerpoint theme you can change each of the above elements and you can see buttons for changing theme colours, theme fonts and theme effects to the right of the Themes category on the Design tab.

Clicking on the theme colours button, for example, will display all the colour schemes available to that theme. Again, you can see a live preview if you hover your cursor over a colour scheme. Selected colour schemes are applied to all slides in your presentation.

Designing Your Own Powerpoint Theme

If none of the ready made colour schemes fit your requirements, you can create your own. You can do this by clicking on the theme colour button and then selecting Create New Theme Colours. In the Create New Theme Colours window you can then define colours for the 12 different colour scheme elements.

When you have created your new colour scheme, give it a meaningful name and then click Save. Your new colour scheme will then be included in the colour schemes gallery. Similarly, you can create your own theme fonts. In creating a theme font you must choose a font to use for headings and a font for body text:

If you change an existing Powerpoint theme or create a new one, you can save it by clicking the More button and then clicking Save Current Theme. Give the theme a meaningful name, navigate to a place on your hard drive where you want to put the theme and click Save. The theme will be saved with a .thmx file extension. This theme will now be displayed in the themes gallery for future use.

Slide Master

The slide master stores information about the theme and slide layouts of a presentation. Therefore, the slide master controls the background, colour, fonts, effects, placeholder sizes, and positioning used in each of your slides.

Every PowerPoint presentation uses slide masters by default, and their use offers the following benefits:

• If you decide to change the way your presentation looks, you don’t have to change each slide individually. You can make the change in one place – the slide master – and this will affect all other slides that use that slide master.
• The theme and layouts defined for the slide master affect all new slides you add, so you don’t need to keep making the changes.

Slide Master View

To create or edit a slide master, you need to work in slide master view. We get there by clicking View > Presentation Views > Slide Master. You’ll notice that you now see different tabs in the ribbon, all containing commands relevant to editing slide masters.

When you change any of the layouts displayed beneath the slide master, you are still changing the slide master. Each slide layout is set up differently and corresponds to the different types of slide you can add when you click New Slide (Title Slide, Title and Content etc). However, all layouts that are associated with a given slide master contain the same theme (color scheme, fonts, and effects).

If you want your presentation to contain two or more different styles or themes, you should insert a slide master for each different theme. Inserting a new slide master is easy: click Slide Master > Edit Master > Insert Slide Master. The new slide master appears after the last slide layout of the original slide master. If you do intend to use more than one slide master, always create them before you start creating your presentation. If you create a slide master after you build individual slides, some of the items on the slides may not conform to the slide master design.

Although theme and layouts are defined in the slide master, you can override some of the slide master customisations on individual slides by using the background and text formatting features. Others, however, (such as footers and logos) can be modified only in Slide Master view.

Applying A Theme To A Slide Master

In the slide master view there is a tab called Slide Master. If you click on the Themes button in the Edit Themes group, you can see thumbnail images of each of the themes available to you. Hovering over a thumbnail will temporarily display a live preview of the theme. Clicking on what you’d like to use applies the theme to all slides under the slide master.

Powerpoint Download

The following links have been assembled to enable you to download Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 and other supporting software.

Change Your Powerpoint Backgrounds With Background Styles

A background style is a background fill comprising different combinations of colours and/or pictures. Changing the presentation theme changes the background style to maintain consistency with the new theme’s colours. As in other Microsoft Office 2007 applications, hovering over a thumbnail of the background style provides a live preview.

Changing The Background Style

To change the style of your Powerpoint background click Design > Background > Background Styles, and then select one of the available styles. The ones available aren’t very good in my opinion (they’re pretty basic) so you’ll most likely want to create one of your own. Fortunately it’s pretty easy to create some fairly snazzy Powerpoint backgrounds with a minimum of fuss.

Creating Your Own Powerpoint Backgrounds

Click Design > Background > Background Styles > Format Background. Here you can apply either a coloured fill or a picture to the background, so let’s first look at applying a coloured fill.

Creating A Solid Fill For Your Powerpoint Background

Ensure that Fill is selected on the left of the Format Background dialog box. Select either a solid or gradient fill. It’s an easy job to apply a solid fill as the only options you need address are the colour of the background and how transparent the colour is. Click on the Color button to select one of the available theme colours (or click More Colors at the bottom to apply a non theme colour). Change the transparency of the colour by dragging the slider or manually entering an exact percentage into the box.

Creating A Gradient Fill For Your Powerpoint Background

When applying a gradient fill, there are more options. I’ll explain each one in turn, travelling down the dialog box:

Preset Colors: you can quickly apply a colour combination that has already been created by Powerpoint by clicking the Preset Color box and choosing one.

Type: gradients can be linear, radial, rectangular, path or shade from title.

Direction: use this button to change the orientation of the gradient

Gradient Stops: each gradient initially has 6 stops which you can assign a colour to. If you need more, click the Add button. Select a particular stop using the dropdown list, and then amend the following properties:

Stop position: when a particular gradient stop is selected, you can adjust its position, as a percentage, using the slider, or by typing in the exact percentage manually.

Color: change the stop’s colour using this button

Transparency: increase or decrease the stop colour’s transparency using the slider or enter the exact percentage manually.

Using A Picture Or Texture For Your Powerpoint Background

If you are that way inclined, you can apply a picture or texture fill to your background by selecting that option on the Format Background dialog box. When you do that (and only when you do that) the Picture options become available. Use these options to specify the picture or texture you want, and also to adjust how the picture or texture is displayed.

Once you have painstakingly detailed your spangly new Powerpoint background, whatever you do, don’t click the Reset Background button. It does what it says and you will lose your changes. Click either close to apply the background style to the current slide, or click Apply To All to apply it to all slides in your presentation.

Left A Bit, Left A Bit, To Me

Once you’ve created a slide and added objects to it (e.g. text boxes, charts etc) you can modify those objects. To manipulate objects, you’ll need to be using normal view. Before you can perform any modifications to an object, you need to first select it.

Selecting An Object

To select an object, move the cursor over it until it changes into a four headed arrow and then click. You can tell an object is selected by the solid lined rectangle that surrounds it. This is called the selection box (see below). The selection box has sizing handles (small white circles at the corners of the selection box, and small white squares along the sides) on which you can click and drag to resize the object. Resizing Tip: Holding down shift whilst dragging a sizing handle will constrain the edge and holding down ctrl whilst dragging constrains the proportions of the object. With the object selected, you can move, resize, format and delete it.

There are two ways to select multiple objects: you can click on them whilst holding down shift and each additional click adds to your selection, or you can click and drag a selection box over the required objects. Because you have multiple objects selected, you will see multiple selection boxes. Alternatively, click Ctrl-A to select all objects on a particular slide.

If there a several objects on a slide and you are having difficulty selecting one because they are so close together, you can select one and then move to the next one by pressing the tab key. Pressing shift-tab jumps to the previous object.

To deselect an object, click outside its border. If an object is part of a multiple selection you can deselect it and keep the other objects selected by holding down shift while you select it.

Moving An Object

With the object selected, you can click on it and drag it to a new location using your mouse. You can also use the arrow keys on your keyboard.

Copying, Pasting and Deleting Objects

To delete an object, select it and then press the delete key on your keyboard. Pressing the backspace key accomplishes the same thing. As in other applications, like Word 2007 for example, you can use the keyboard shortcut ctrl-c to copy selected objects and then ctrl-v to paste them.

Powerpoint 2007 Text Effects

If you are familiar with the text formatting commands available in Word 2007, you have a head start when formatting text in Powerpoint 2007. The same methods used to change the font, colour, size etc. of text are used here. Also on offer are some other pretty impressive effects.

The first thing to do once you have entered some text on a slide is to select it by dragging the cursor over it. Right click on your selection and select Format Text Effects.

There are many different options available here so we will confine our exploration to the more commonly used effects found in the following categories:

Text Fill

Text consists of a fill and an outline which goes around the fill. This option specifies what properties the fill of the text will have and you can select:

No Fill

You might initially think that this option has little use, as without a fill how can you see the text? Well, if you specify that the text has an outline, you can see it and doing this gives your text a unique look.

Solid Fill

Choosing this option gives your text a solid fill colour.

Gradient Fill

This option gives your text a start colour and an end colour and then smoothly changes from one to the other. You can use the preset colors drop down list to select a prebuilt colour scheme or you can specify your own colours. Use the type drop down list to specify whether your gradient is linear, radial, rectangular or path. As you might imagine, the direction drop down list alters the direction that the gradient runs. The angle input box allows you to set the orientation of the gradient. It’s a good idea to just have a go yourself and change the different settings to further your understanding. Fine control over our gradient is given to us with the gradient stops settings. These allow us to specify what colours appear where on our gradient, and how transparent each colour is.

Picture or texture fill

Specify that your text will be filled with a ready made texture by using the Texture button, or use the Insert from: buttons to fill your text with an image. You can choose an image that exists on your hard drive by using the File button or you can use clipart by clicking the Clip Art button. If you have previously copied an image to your clipboard, clicking the Clipboard button will paste it to your text.

Text Outline

You can use the options here to give your text no fill, a solid line (you can specify its colour and transparency) or a gradient. See the above explanation of gradients to learn how to apply a gradient to an outline.

Outline Style

The outline style category lets you change the attributes of your outline. These attributes include the outline’s width, type etc.

Shadow

To really make your text stand out, you can add a subtle shadow. There’s a useful library of pre-made shadow effects for you to choose from, but you can also fine tune your shadow’s properties using the settings below.

3D Format

The 3D format category provides a way for you to add a bevel to your selected text. Be aware that bevel effects look better on chunky fonts such as arial black (it’s hard to see a bevel on narrower fonts).

3D Rotation

You can rotate text on a particular axis by the angle you specify using the options here.

Text Box

The settings here allow you to change:

• the horizontal alignment of the text within its text box – e.g. top, bottom or middle
• the direction that the text flows
• autofitting options – whether to shrink text to fit the text box when it overflows, or to resize the text box instead
• internal margins – how far away from the text box edge the text is pushed
• columns – how many columns the text is distributed

Starting Your Presentation From Scratch

When creating a presentation you can either base it on a predefined template or you can create it from scratch. Creating from scratch is useful if you aren’t sure how you want your presentation to look, and that’s the method we’re going to investigate now.

When you open Powerpoint a blank presentation is immediately created for you which you can amend as you see fit. Alternatively, you can request a new presentation by clicking the Office Button > New, then in the Blank and recent category select Blank Presentation and then click Create.

Your new presentation will default to the name of Presentation1, Presentation2, Presentation3 etc (the number increments each time you create one). To rename it click the Office Button > Save, and type in the desired name into the File Name box. Click Save. The keyboard shortcut for saving presentatins is pressing ctrl-s on the keyboard.

At this point you are ready to start adding to your presentation, so why not have a look at adding text to a slide or use the navigation to find other information.

Powerpoint Animations

Animating text can spice up an otherwise boring presentation and captivate your audience. If your presentation is self running, you might consider adding more animation than if you were presenting it yourself, but you shouldn’t use so much animation that it detracts from the content. The following kinds of animations are available to you:

• Fades
• Wipes
• Fly ins
• Custom animations

Applying An Animation To Some Text

To apply an animation to some text, first of all select your text. Then click Animations > Animations > Animate. The most commonly used effects are displayed here. Hovering the mouse over any of the effects provides you with a temporary live preview, which allows you to see what the effect looks like without actually applying it. When you make your selection, the animation runs again. To the left in the slides pane, animations are indicated by the presence of a small white star.

You can click the star on a slide to run its animation at any time.

Creating A Custom Animation

If you want to deviate from the norm where your animation is concerned, you can create a custom animation. With your text selected, click Animations > Animations > Custom Animation (doing this also allows you to modify animations that are already present). The Custom Animation panel appears on the right of your workspace. This panel gives us more control over the animations we apply to our text. Click Add Effect to add a new animation. From the drop down menu you can choose from the Entrance, Emphasis, Exit and Motion Paths categories, and each category provides further sub categories of effects. It pays to just play around and experiment.

When the effect is applied, you can change its attributes. The attributes available for change depend on the effect that has been applied. For example, the image below shows the attributes you can change when a “Blinds” effect has been applied:

Using the Custom Animation panel, you can build layer upon layer of animations. Just keep clicking the Add Effect button to add more. To change an existing animation, click to select it in the Custom Animation panel and its attributes are displayed for you to amend. You’ll also notice that the Add Effects button transforms into a Change button (see the image above) and this allows you to change the animation to one of the other effects. You can also use the Remove button to delete animations from your text.

As well as using the animations that ship with Powerpoint, you can also take advantage of the third party products that are available. Crystal Graphics, for example, provide a range of TV-style graphics and effects for Powerpoint.