40 PowerPoint tips and tricks - Speed up your workflow, learn new techniques and improve your slides | Alan Lomer | Skillshare
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40 PowerPoint tips and tricks - Speed up your workflow, learn new techniques and improve your slides

teacher avatar Alan Lomer, POWERPOINT DESIGNER AND TEACHER

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Course Introduction

      2:07

    • 2.

      SECTION 1 - ESSENTIALS

      0:09

    • 3.

      Format Painter - copy font types, colours, styles and effects

      2:55

    • 4.

      Animation Painter - copy single or multiple animations

      5:13

    • 5.

      The Quick Access Toolbar allows convenient access to any command

      2:57

    • 6.

      Set the default shape style

      3:10

    • 7.

      Resizing shapes with keyboard modifiers

      3:23

    • 8.

      Quick duplication keeping alignment and style

      2:40

    • 9.

      Use the Selection Pane to organize and control slide objects

      3:13

    • 10.

      Fit more text in a shape

      1:24

    • 11.

      Enhance bullets by converting to SmartArt boxes

      6:36

    • 12.

      Create a custom colour theme

      5:35

    • 13.

      SECTION 2 - USEFUL TECHNIQUES

      0:09

    • 14.

      Resize multiple images Using SmartArt or Designer

      2:50

    • 15.

      Replacing images while maintaining formatting and animation

      1:42

    • 16.

      Re-use slides from other presentations and control the formatting

      3:56

    • 17.

      Dictate text to add content quickly and easily

      1:23

    • 18.

      Save a chart template for consistent chart styles

      1:33

    • 19.

      Reduce the presentation file size

      3:11

    • 20.

      Compress videos to reduce file size

      1:24

    • 21.

      Linking to videos rather than embedding them

      1:19

    • 22.

      Use custom slide sizes create images for social media

      2:07

    • 23.

      Using a custom font - installing and embedding

      2:19

    • 24.

      SECTION 3 - NEW FUNCTIONS

      0:09

    • 25.

      Enhance animations for a superior presentation experience

      2:00

    • 26.

      Using multiple animations to add impact to slides

      4:43

    • 27.

      Crop photos to any shape

      2:55

    • 28.

      Remove the background from images

      2:30

    • 29.

      Create circular text using text transforms

      2:24

    • 30.

      Long shadow effect using 3D formatting

      2:43

    • 31.

      Merge Shapes to create custom shapes

      2:21

    • 32.

      Converting charts to shapes for full styling and animation flexibility

      3:49

    • 33.

      Create a looping introduction using two Slide Shows

      4:36

    • 34.

      Record your presentation with narration

      1:28

    • 35.

      Add a live camera stream with cameo

      2:20

    • 36.

      SECTION 4 - ADVANCED INTERACTIONS AND ANIMATIONS

      0:09

    • 37.

      Creating an interactive menu

      2:58

    • 38.

      Interactive triggers that respond to user actions

      3:02

    • 39.

      Chart animation - reveal your chart in any order

      4:50

    • 40.

      Chart highlighting - pick out certain data to tell your story

      2:15

    • 41.

      Motion paths - bring your content to life with this animation

      5:06

    • 42.

      Make interactive and dynamic presentations using Slide Zoom

      2:58

    • 43.

      Amazing animations using the Morph transition

      5:08

    • 44.

      Using the Morph transition to animate text

      2:19

    • 45.

      Loop multiple animations using bookmarks

      6:13

    • 46.

      Smooth morphing between shapes using object tagging

      4:04

    • 47.

      Summary

      0:23

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About This Class

PowerPoint can be used to create captivating and impactful presentations. However, mastering PowerPoint's vast array of features and tools can be overwhelming. This course is designed to equip you with the essential tips and tricks to unlock the full potential of PowerPoint.

These are all genuine and useful tips that I have used during my 20 years as a presentation designer.

Does it take you too much time to achieve good results in PowerPoint?

Do you ever see impressive PowerPoint content and wander how it is created?

Then this course is for you.

This course gives you practical strategies and techniques to optimize your productivity in PowerPoint, while showing you advanced features and tools to create visually stunning and engaging presentations.

In part 1 I will show you how to speed up everyday common tasks including quickly applying formatting, converting bullets to high impact graphics in seconds and setting default styles and colour themes.

In part 2 will help you optimize your presentations AND your time. The tips will cover, sizing and positioning multiple images with just a few clicks, using custom slide size to create images for social media and how to make your presentation more professional with custom fonts.

In part 3 you will learn new functions aimed at at improving your slide design such as removing background from photos and creating circular text for example; and also improving your presenting with live video and looping introductions.

In part 4 we will focus on more advanced interactions and animations, we cover 'Motion Paths', the Morph transition, Slide Zoom, and adding interactivity to your presentation to captivate your audience.

Whether you're a beginner or an experienced user, this course will provide you with valuable insights to take your PowerPoint presentations to the next level.

These tips range from simple techniques that will really boost your productivity, to more advanced examples which use PowerPoint in ways you may not have seen before.

I hope you enjoy the course, and please get in touch with me if you have any questions.

Meet Your Teacher

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Alan Lomer

POWERPOINT DESIGNER AND TEACHER

Teacher

Hi, I'm Alan and I am here to help you master PowerPoint. My goal is to help you take your presentations to the next level, engage your audience & get your message across with maximum impact.

Everything you need to create stunning presentations can be done inside PowerPoint and I am here to help you do this.

I have been designing for over 30 years and have helped hundreds of people and companies tell their story through slide presentations.

I will help you gain an understanding of presentation design skills that took me years to learn and develop.

Throughout the courses I will give you simple effective advice to help you design better presentations.

I hope you enjoy the courses.

See full profile

Level: All Levels

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Transcripts

1. Course Introduction: Welcome to this Powerpoint tips and tricks course. Powerpoints can be used to create captivating and impactful presentations. However, mastering Powerpoints, vast ray of features and tools can be overwhelming. This course is designed to equip you with the essential tips and tricks to unlock the full potential of Powerpoint. These are all genuine and useful tips that I have used during my 20 years as a presentation designer. Does it take you too much time to achieve good results in Powerpoint? Do you ever see impressive Powerpoint content And wonder how it is created? Then this course is for you. This course contains practical strategies and techniques to optimize your productivity and Powerpoint while showing you advanced features and tools to create visually stunning and engaging presentations. In part one, I will show you how to speed up every day common tasks, including quickly applying, formatting, converting bullets to high impact graphics in seconds, and setting default styles and color themes. In part two, I will help you optimize your presentations and your time. The tips will cover sizing and positioning multiple images with just a few clicks, using custom slide size to create images for social media, and how to make your presentation more professional using custom fonts. In part three, you will learn new functions aimed at improving your slide design. Such as removing backgrounds from photos, creating circular text, and also improving your presenting with live video and looping introductions. The last part will focus on more advanced interactions and animations. We cover motion paths, the morph, transition slide zoom, and adding interactivity to your presentation to captivate your audience. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced user. This course will provide you with valuable insights to take your Powerpoint presentations to the next level. I hope you enjoy the course and please get in touch with me if you have any questions. 3. Format Painter - copy font types, colours, styles and effects: The format painter can save time by copying font types, colors, styles, and effects from one objects to another. Here on the left, I have a circle where I've added various styles. I've added a drop shadow to the text and the circle and made the font fig tree extra bold at 20 point. I've also added a partially transparent outline to the circle. You can see any of these effects by going to format shape and having a look at the colors, the fills, and the outlines along with the shadow options. If I wanted to copy the exact styles and effects used on the left circle to the right circle, I would click on this first, then go to Format Painter, and then just click anywhere on the shape. That's a really quick way of being able to copy the style from one object to another. An even quicker way of doing this is using the shortcut keys, which are control shift C to copy and control shift V to paste. I can click on the source styles that I want to copy. And then hold down Control and Shift, and press C. Then go to the source, hold down Control and Shift, and press V. In this example, we have four items that we want to apply it to. You can click on the Source and then double click Format Painter. And that will have a rectangle blocked around it because now it's always enabled Until I stop it, I can click once, twice, third time, and a fourth time, and basically carry on applying that until I either press Escape or I go up to Format Painter and click it to turn it off. If you have lots of objects such as on this page that you want to apply the style to, you can select all of these by dragging over them. Clicking Control to Group, Then click on your source format painter and apply it to the group that will apply it to every object. Here we have a different shape that we can apply it to. We can press the format painter on the source and then click on the target to apply the style. It won't copy the shape or the size that is by design. It also doesn't copy adjustments made with the yellow markers. In this example, I can go to the format painter when I've clicked on the source, then click on the target. You can see that it's copied all the styles, but it hasn't copied the same rounded corners as the one on the left. And if you wanted to do that, you just have to go and drag this until it looked the same, the format painter and using the shortcut keys, control shift C and control shift V, can be a massive time saver for all your Powerpoint design. 4. Animation Painter - copy single or multiple animations: Animation painter is a great way of copying single or multiple animations between different objects. Here we have a few elements on the page. I'm just quickly going to add two different animations to this box here and show you how easy it is to copy them to different objects. Firstly, I'll make sure I'm in the animation section of the ribbon and click on zoom to add a zoom. Then I want to add a second animation which is a pulse. To do that, you need to go to add animation. You can't click in this section here, otherwise the animation will be replaced. But here you can always add another animation to the same object. We make sure this is selected. Go to add animation and choose Pulse. Then click to reveal the animation pane. I'll make sure this starts after previous. We'll play to show you what we've got. It will zoom out and pulse. If I want to quickly copy that combination of animations from this shape to the other shapes, I can click on it to make sure it's selected. I'm inside the animation section of the ribbon and there's animation painter. Once clicked, I can then click on the target to apply it. You can also double click the animation painter and then click on multiple objects clicking escape or then clicking on the animation painter. Again, we'll stop it being applied from everything you click on. Now when we run this, you'll see it's applied the animation to all the squares. The animation painter will copy a number of settings including all the effects that are added and any settings such as timing or smooth start or end that you've applied. To show this, I'm going to add a motion path and some other effects onto one of these arrows. And also change the settings and the timing. When we're on the animations part of the ribbon, I can go to this little drop down here and choose motion Path line. The default will be to move it down. I will click on it again and make it move left and then go to reverse path direction. This is to make sure that it starts wherever the green triangle is and finishes where the element is on screen, so you know the exact position that you want it to end up. To change the start position, I can click on the green triangle, it becomes a red dot. I hold down shift and drag it over. And I want it to start just about there. I also want this to be the second thing that happens. So I'll drag it up in the animation pane. If we play from there, you'll see that the square comes up first and then the arrow moves across. But because of the way we've done the motion path, we also need to add something like a fade to make sure it's not visible before it's animated. To do that, we go to add animation and choose fade. I'm now going to drag up this animation so it happens before the motion path. And then set the motion path to happen with previous. Now when we run it, the arrow won't be on screen until we click to reveal the animation. I'm finally going to add a third animation to this, which is a pulse after previous, and drag it up to its correct position. Then change the settings in this by double clicking, making sure it's got a smooth end. Going to timing, and setting this to 1 second. We'll just play that to make sure it's right. That's looking really good. I've added three different animations and changed a couple of settings that would take quite a while to do if we wanted to apply it to everything. But with the animation painter, I can just click on the arrow, pick animation Painter, and then click the other arrow. And that will apply all of the effects, all of the settings. In this example, I would want this animation to happen last. I can click on these and drag them down by using the animation painter, we can make real quick copies of multiple animations and multiple settings to save time and speed up our workflow. Finally, you can use a shortcut key combination to enable the animation painter to show this. I'll just delete the animations from this square. And to do that I delete them from the animation pane here. And then to copy the animations from this, I can click on it, hold down Alt Shift, and click C. Then move over to the target that we want to apply the animations to. And click. I can now press Escape to turn off the animation painter. Either by clicking to enable the animation painter or using all shift C, we can quickly copy animations from objects to other objects. 5. The Quick Access Toolbar allows convenient access to any command: The Quick Access toolbar can speed up your creation of any Powerpoint document. It allows you to set up any function from Powerpoint and make it just one click away. By default, the Quick Access toolbar will just include three things, save, undo, and redo. It will be in the top left corner. To change these settings, we can either go to this drop down box here that says Customized Quick Access Toolbar, or go to File Select Options, and then change any settings from inside the Quick access toolbar section. If for any reason that you've got your quick access toolbar completely turned off, there's always an option to tick it back on and show it here. I would recommend that you change the toolbar position to below the ribbon and make sure that always show command labels is turned off. Now we click okay and you can see it's put the quick access toolbar down here, which is actually much better than having to go up the top all the time and looks a lot cleaner when you have a lot added to add anything you like. For example, I can go down to something like a Range, a line, and then pick something that I use a lot like a line center. I can write. Click on it and choose Add to Quick Access toolbar that will just put it there. Now I can move this anywhere over to any side and always just be able to click back on this straightaway and it will align it to the center. Just that alone would save three or four clicks every time I wanted to align something. If I decided I didn't want something that's in this quick access toolbar, I can always write, click, and choose to remove it. If you'd like to use the Quick Access Toolbar I'm using throughout this course. You can easily import it on any window system. There's a link to it in the resources for this lesson, port it. We can either go to this drop down and choose more commands and then import. Or as before I mentioned, we can go to File and Options. And it's the same box will appear here. If I go to the import box and choose Import Customization file, you can then select my file, It's called Powerpoint customizations, exported UI. I can click on that, press open and it will say, do you want to replace all existing ribbon and quick access toolbar customizations for this program? I'll click yes. Now if I click okay, you can see that all of the common things that I use all the time are available with just one easy click. Because these options are always in the same place. You don't even have to remember which section of the ribbon these functions came under. I would definitely recommend using the Quick Access toolbar. If you want a good place to start with a lot of commonly used functions, you can easily import mine as I'm using it throughout in all these lessons. 6. Set the default shape style: Set as default shape or set as default text box to save time by creating every text or shape item with the same colors, fonts, and other style settings. For example, when you start a new presentation, click to add a shape and then add it anywhere. I'm just going to type default shape here, it will look like this. But for my design, I might want to use different colors or fonts, or styles. If I click control D to duplicate that, I'm just going to create the look I want for my shape over this side. I want it to be fig tree extra bold. I'll set that. And a little bigger I'm going to set it to have no outline. And then right click and choose Format Shape. I'm going to add a gradient fill. I can click to drag these away. I'm going to set my gradient fill to be green at the top, the darker green at the bottom. Just adjust the brightness sliding. I also want my default shape to have a shadow, subtle drop shadow, so I can select one of the presets such as outer. Then I'm going to change the transparency to 80% and the blur to ten and leave the other settings as they are. That looks good. If I want this to be the default shape or any shape or any graphic I've created, I can always write Click at any time and choose Set as Default Shape. Now if I had a new blank slide, I can go to any Shape, click anywhere, and it will create a shape with the same colors, the same shadow, and the same fonts. And it can be any shape you choose from the Shapes menu. The same applies for a default text box. If we grab the text box here and type anything, this will be how the default text looks when you create a new presentation. But if I want it to be the font that I'm using, which is Fig tree extra bold, you can type that. I can make other changes, such as aligning it to the center by going into the text options and text box. I can change it to things like do not auto fit and align it to the middle vertically. I can have a shape which I can put any text on anywhere, and it will have the right font and the right alignment for my presentation. To do that as before, I can right click and this time choose Set as default text box. I can drag this out the way for now. When I add any other text on this slide or any other, it will always come out with this style of text and this alignment and this color using the setters default shape and setters default text can be a massive timesaver. As once you've decided on your font and colors, it's super easy to create many more objects with those same styles. 7. Resizing shapes with keyboard modifiers: You can resize any shapes by holding down certain keys. And that will help you either keep them in proportion so they're the correct aspect ratio or allow you to easily size them from the center. Here we have an example where I've just drawn two shapes and added one icon. If we want to resize the first shape and keep it a perfect square, we want to pick it up from the corner. But if I don't hold down any keys and click on this corner Point to resize it, I can easily stretch it and make it taller or shorter than I want. It's a problem when people want to keep a perfect circle such as this one here. And if you drag from this corner, you can easily stretch it up so it doesn't look rise at all or it almost becomes an oval. I'll just hit control Z to undo those. Now we'll make sure that when I resize this, I will hold down Shift on the keyboard as I click to drag the corner point. And it will keep it a perfect square and keep the aspect ratio the same applies for the circle. If you just want to size this up or down by a little amount, you can hold down Shift on the keyboard and press the up cursor key or the right curse key. You can also, while holding down Shift, click both the up curser key and the right curse key at the same time. And that will change the width and the height at the same time by 10% You can also make it smaller by holding down shift and pressing the left and the down cursor at the same time. You can even hold down the control key as well. Now when I press or right, it will resize it at this time just by 1% If you've got an icon that you've added by going to insert and icons, Powerpoint will actually lock it so that if you drag it from the corner, it will actually size down while keeping the correct ratio. If you just want to size this down, you can just hold down Shift and press either up and down or right and left size any of these. From the center, you can click on the corner point, hold down, control and shift. And as you drank the mouse up and down, it will keep its center point. This is a really useful way for resizing any shapes. As an example, I have four circles here and I might want to size them all down. But keep their center points the same so they're in the same place. I can just select them all. Then hold down control and shift while I'm on the corner. And drag them down to make them smaller. Or drag them up to make them bigger as before. You can also use shift right cursor and up cursor to make them 10% bigger. Or shift down cursor and left cursor to make them 10% smaller. This works especially well when you have a lot of items such as on this page. I can just select them all and hold down Shift and then press down on left arrow. And it will make them all smaller. I'll just control Ed to undo that. I can also click on the corner point of any of them and then hold down control and shift and drag them. And you can see how big they're going to be. Remembering that you can resize shapes by holding down shift and dragging from the corner and control shift to make them resize from the center is a really useful tool to use in Powerpoint. 8. Quick duplication keeping alignment and style: Quickly duplicating Powerpoint elements can save time by allowing you to replicate and reuse existing content while reducing the need for manual recreation. And keeping perfect alignment and distribution. Here we have a single element on the page. In this example, I might want to create a five by five grid of these. If we press control C and then V, as we would normally copy and paste, you'd have to align this, then press control C and V, and have to align this again while making sure that the space between the two items is correct and so on. However, there are two much quicker ways of doing this. The first one, press control D, then drag it into its exact position with the right spacing The next time and subsequent times you press control D, it will be perfectly spaced. This also works if you select multiple items. In this case I can drag it down to here. Then press control D again, we'll just go back to one item. When using control D, it's really useful to have the smart guides turned on. These are turned on by default in Powerpoint, but if for some reason they're turned off, you can always right click off the slide here. Go to gridding guides and make sure that smart guides is ticked on. For the second option, you can click on the object, hold down control, and shift and drag. The control will be making the copy and holding down shift will keep it locked into the Y position. In this case now you can either press control Y or F four. And each time you press it, it will create a duplicate with the exact same spacing that used for the first copy. I can click on all of these. Hold down Control Shift, drag it to the position I want. Then press control Y or four. It will create another copy with exactly the same alignment and spacing in Powerpoint. The spacing between elements is known as the distribution. When you go to the arranged section and align, you'll see it says distribute horizontally or distribute vertically. And that is the spacing between the elements either by using control D to duplicate and then aligning it into position and pressing control D again. Or holding down control and shift and dragging and then pressing control Y or four can considerably speed up your workflow and make it much easier to make multiple elements with the correct alignment style and spacing. 9. Use the Selection Pane to organize and control slide objects: The selection pane is a useful tool that allows you to manage and control the selection and visibility of objects on your slides. It provides a list of all the objects, shapes, images, and other elements present on your slide, making it easier to manage complex slide layouts or presentations with numerous objects. To show an example of how to use the selection pane, I've created three squares on this slide to reveal the selection pane. We go to Home. And then under the drawing section of the ribbon, click on a Range and choose Selection Pane. If I were to drag all of these objects on top of each other, it's now quite difficult to access each shape. You can write, click on these and choose Center Back or Bring to Front. You can also move them out the way. But a quicker and better way of doing that is to use the selection pane which will let you select hide, lock, or re, order any object on the slide. This is particularly helpful when an object is overlapping with other objects or when an object is difficult to select. I'm just going to move these out very slightly and rename them. Then I can show you how we can use the selection pane. If we click on the top red one, that's rectangle six. We can click again where it says rectangle six and then type red. You can do the same for green and the same for blue. Being able to rename them is really helpful, especially when you have a large amount of objects on your slide or you're using animations such as triggers. When renamed, you can easily identify and manipulate these objects by their assigned names. Now I'll select all these, arrange and align them to the center from the selection pane. If we wanted to reveal the blue square, we could just click where it's got the eye symbol here on the red one. And the line appears across it, show that it's hidden. And then the same for the green one. Being able to hide an object temporarily without deleting it makes it convenient for complex animations or interactive presentations. For example, if I wanted to add an animation to each of these squares, I could click on the blue one. Now that I can see it, click on animations, choose something like zoom, and it will appear. Then I can go to the selection pane and make the green one visible. Click on that, click on zoom to add that. Then finally click on the red one to make that visible. And then click on Zoom on that. Now when I have my slide, I can click to reveal each of these on top of each other from the selection pane. We can also change the order. The item at the top of the selection pane is the item that's at the front on your slide. If we wanted the red one to go at the back, I could click on it, drag it all the way down, and then it would be at the back. I could now also change the animation order by going to the animation pane and drag the red one up. The red one comes first. You can now see that in the animation pane, they've got the names that I've given them, which can be really helpful when using complex animations. 10. Fit more text in a shape: It is usually good practice to reduce and simplify on screen text as much as possible. Sometimes when this is not possible, you may need to turn off the automatic text wrapping options in Powerpoint. For example, this third circle where ideally you want to include all this text and keep a consistent appearance. If we write, click on this text and choose Format Shape, then go to Text Options and choose Text Box. There is the option to shrink text on Overflow. This will prevent the text from leaving the circle, but you may want to keep the text size consistent. If we go back to do not auto fit, the first thing to check default margins and we can take the left and right margins down to this has helped. But in some cases, it may be necessary to manually wrap the text. To do this, we can click off Wrap Text in Shape. Now we can click on the text and press Shift Return to wrap it. I'm just clicking in the space areas where I want to wrap it and then pressing Shift and Return. Now I've fitted all the text in, including the long words, and we've kept the text a consistent size. 11. Enhance bullets by converting to SmartArt boxes: You can easily turn a slide from bullet points to something that's better using convert to smart art. Here's the typical six point bullet slide. It's not visually engaging for the audience, which makes it difficult to get your message across. If we simply select it, right click and choose Convert to smart Art, I'll choose more smart art Graphics. And then select the first one, which is called a basic block list. And press Okay. That will immediately convert it into these six boxes which are equal in size and equally spaced, which already I think looks a lot better. This is a great start, but there are also lots of ways we can enhance this format. For example, we could change the shape of these. To do that, we select the first one and then hold down Shift, and subsequently click all the others. Now they're all selected. I can go to Format, Change Shape, and then choose any of these options. I'm going to choose the second option in which is a rectangle with rounded corners. Now I can also go to Shape Outline. And select an outline for these. I'm going to make that a little bit thicker. I'll choose three point. For example, if I wanted to, I could add something like a shadow to these while they're all still selected. I could go to the effect section of Format Shape. Click on any Preset, Select Transparency, and increase that to 80% and five for blur and five for distance. I think this is looking really good. But one thing I think could make it clearer is to separate the subtitle for each box. I can just select this, for example, make it bold and put in a return. I'll quickly just do that for each one of them. Each time I'm just using control B to make the text I've selected bold and adding a return. Now I can use Shift to make sure they're all selected. Go to the size and properties for format shape, then make sure the vertical alignment is at the top and increase the top margin to whatever I want it to be. I think not 0.4 looks pretty good there. We've gone from a basic bullet slide to something that's a lot clearer and has more impact. We can also easily add animation to reveal these one at a time. While it's still smart art, I'm going to animations, adding something basic like a fade, then while the whole thing is still selected, going to affect options and choosing one by one. So now we can reveal one thing at a time on each click. Because it's still smart art, it can be adjusted to any size and it will automatically adjust the spacing and the size of each object. Here is the second typical example with a title and second level text for each bullet point. If I select the text body and right click anywhere inside it and choose Convert Smart Art. Choosing this option here, which is the first in the second row down, is called a horizontal bullet list. Again, Powerpoints created these with exactly the right spacing and the right sizing on each box, which I think already looks a lot better. Again, there are many ways you could enhance the formatting. For example, I can hold down Shift and click to select all these top boxes. Then go to Size and Properties. I'm going to set the vertical position to 0.5 which will move them away from the box a bit. I can now change the formatting of these boxes by clicking once and then holding down Shift and clicking to select the others. I'm going to make these a light gray color with no outline and turn the bullets off. Then I'll go to this little arrow here in paragraph, make sure the indentation is on zero, it all aligns to the left. Then make the font smaller. I'll select 12 point for these. I can also make this box a tiny bit bigger if I want to increase the margins by going into here and entering what I want for all of these, such as 0.25 which I think looks good. I can make the box a tiny bit smaller if I want to. That looks about right. I can also remove the colons from here to make it look a bit cleaner, and select all these and make them bold, and also a little bit taller. 2 centimeters looks good for these. I like these to look consistent across. For each of the ones with just one line. I'm going to hold down Shift and press Return to add a return. They're all on two lines. Now, I think that looks really good. But you can also do things like change the alignment. For example, if I wanted these to all be aligned to the left, you'd easily select them and do that while they're all selected. I'll select shape, outline, and say no outline. Now go and select some different colors for these different sections ll directly from the palette I'm using. I think that's a very nice way of turning a basic bullet slide that has a second level of text into something that looks a lot nicer. Again, it's very easy to add animation to these while they're all selected. We can go to animations, choose something basic like fade, go to Effect Options, and then you can choose how you want them to be revealed. For example, you can choose to have level one by one, which will reveal the top level. Then you can click for more details for the bottom level. You have many layouts available in the smart art design section. By going to Smart Art and then pressing this down arrow, anyone you roll over will allow you to change the smart art into that style. It's definitely a very quick way to be able to take something from a very basic bullet slide into something much more visual and engaging. 12. Create a custom colour theme: Color palettes are important in Powerpoint. Here I'll show you how you can create your own custom color theme to have more control over your Powerpoint colors. Using a predefined set of colors ensures that text graphics and backgrounds complement each other, creating a visually appealing and organized presentation. Remember that while colors are essential, they should be used in moderation and with the purpose to enhance your presentation rather than overwhelm it. The default color themes can be found under design and then variance colors. Most brands will have guidelines that include color palettes, and most Powerpoint templates will include a custom color theme. In this lesson, I will show you how to build a color theme and as a bonus, show you how to select colors from an image using the Eye Dropper tool. Here's an example image that I'm going to use to pick my colors from. I've started with just a black and white color, which I'd always recommend having in your palette. I'm just going to select those, hold down control and shift to make a copy of them. Then I'm going to pick two strong colors from this image. The first one I'm going to select a pink. So I'll go up to shape fill, choose the eye dropper tool and then pick any color from here. As you roll over, it tells you what color you're picking. And then you click and it changes the shape you selected to that color. Do that again, and this time pick the blue from the corner here. Now I'm quickly going to paste in my other colors just to save time. I think the quickest way of setting up the custom theme colors is to click on the box with the color in we want to get. Right click. Go to fill, choose more fill colors. Then I want to copy this hex code here, beginning with hash. You could do it by copying the RGB, but that would require copying three numbers. And here you only have to copy one hex value. I've selected this, I'll press control C to copy it then. Okay, I can now go here and paste it in. This is a useful color reference. We now have the box with the color in it and the hex code for that color. I'll just quickly do it for these other colors. Right click Fill, fill colors. Select control C to copy. Okay? And control V to paste. Now we have all our color values, we can add them into a custom theme. And to do that we go to design. Under the variant section, there's a drop down arrow. And we can go to the color section and then customized colors. From here, you can define six accent colors. You can also change what Powerpoint calls text or background colors. While Powerpoint calls these by different names, they essentially give you up to four more custom colors for your palette. I would advise leaving the first two, black and white, as these are useful to have regardless of the rest of the palette. You can also choose two colors for hyperlinks, but these are less important as these do not appear in the theme colors palette when using the drawing tools. Now to six accent colors. I can either copy and paste each one of these individually, which would mean I have to close this box, select this, press control C, and then go back to variants and colors and customized colors and more colors, and paste it in. And then press okay, there's our first one. Or we can just type them in. So we'll go to Accent, two more colors and just type it in here. So the second one I would type has 23747. Then click Okay. I'll just quickly do that for the others. And for the last two, I'm going to change the text background, dark two and light two. Now I can click at the bottom where it says custom one. Select that and give it a name. And then press. Now when we go to Variances colors, you'll see the custom themes appear at the top. Now when you create any object on any slide, if I just go to Insert Shape, for example, and a big rectangle over this, we can go to Shape Fill, and choose any of the colors from our theme, and also choose lighter or darker variations of these. It can seem quite convoluted to create a color theme in Powerpoint, but once it's done, you'll have a lot of flexibility when you create your slides. And it will speed up your workflow, having access to those colors and variations of those colors. 14. Resize multiple images Using SmartArt or Designer: You can resize and crop multiple images using smart Art or designer. This is a very quick way of getting images from this into something like this. Here I have imported a number of photos from the Powerpoint stock library. They are different sizes and shapes and usually we would need them at a uniform size. We can use smart Art to crop and edit all of them in a single step. If I click control A to select all of these photos, I can now go to Picture Format Picture Layout in the picture style section of the ribbon. Then we can choose a layout that is close to the size and shape you wish to achieve as you roll over these. They'll show you the different options here. We can choose something like captioned pictures. Then I can write, click on this, choose Group Ungroup again. And that will separate everything. I can now click on each of these boxes and delete them. And each of these and delete them. I'm clicking on One and then holding down Shift while I click on the others to multiple select. From here I can drag these down to align them. If we want to make them any bigger, I can select all of them. Roll over one of the corner points, click and then hold down control and shift and drag. There's a very quick way of resizing, cropping, and positioning multiple images using smart art. If you have less photos, you can use the inbuilt designer. Here we have six photos I can go to Home on the ribbon and then choose Designer. From here, you can select any one of these that you think looks good. Powerpoint will automatically resize, crop and align your photos. Here is an example with different shapes that would be difficult and time consuming to reproduce manually. That can be easily achieved with just one click. Using Designer. Here is one last example that I find particularly useful. When we've got four photos, I can go to the designer, scroll down till I find the one we want, then click, and we've got four circular photos that are all perfectly cropped and aligned. If you'd like to, you can even adjust the crop after this has been done by clicking on the photo, then right clicking, and going to crop and adjusting the crop how you would like. This is a really useful design layout to be able to easily achieve, as it's a really good way of comparing four items or describing four different categories or using it as a four part agenda. 15. Replacing images while maintaining formatting and animation: You can easily replace images while maintaining formatting and animation. Here are two photos that have been cropped to a shape. We've had a shadow added, then grouped with some text and animated If you wanted to add a further image on the right to complete the slide, you could import a new image and then style it and add animation. But this isn't a simple task, and care would be needed to make sure you get a consistent look and movement. A better method would be to duplicate and then use the change picture command. Step one, we click on the item we want to duplicate. Click control D to duplicate. Drag it into position, and you'll see the smart guides appear to show you that you've got the correct Y position and the correct gap. And then release the Mae button. You can now right click on the image and choose Change Picture, and then select which one you want. I'm going to select this device and choose this image. I can now change the text depending on the image you've changed it to. You may need to do some fine tuning to do this. You can click once to select the group. Click again to select the image. Right click and choose Crop. For example. If I wanted to make this a little bit bigger, I could hold down control and shift and drag the corner point. Then I can drag it up to make it about the same size as the other fruits. Now we can play this slide again and you'll see that all the animation works by quickly duplicating and using change image. You can save yourself a lot of time compared to creating it from scratch each time. 16. Re-use slides from other presentations and control the formatting: You can combine slides from various presentations while controlling the formatting using a couple of different methods. In this example, we have four slides in this blue theme and we're using Fig tree extra bold as our font. I would like to add a few slides from another presentation. To do that I can code to home on the ribbon and then click on New Slide. And from here choose Re Use Slides. That will open up this side panel. From here I can click Browse and then select the Powerpoint containing the slides that I would like to add. And click Open. That will then display the thumbnails of all the slides in that presentation along with their title. And at the top, it will tell you how many slides that presentation contains. By default, keep source formatting will be turned off. And that will mean that whichever slide I click on, it will be added into my presentation at the current selected place. It will use the formatting of the target presentation that I have open. Which basically means these slides are red here. But when they come into this presentation with this turned off, they'll be blue and follow the style of the open presentation. So for example, if I wanted to add slides after slide three, I could click here and then go to the Re use Slides panel. And I can click on this, then that, and it will add them all into the presentation and convert the formatting to the style of the current open presentation. Often we don't know how the slides have been created that we're adding in. Depending on how they've been created, some of the formatting may not be converted exactly as you want it, but it will be easy to change. You can see the title that's correct and the color style, but this text is still white. If we click here to select everything, I can then go to the font color. Pick up eye dropper, roll over the color that I want to use. And click now, all the formatting looks right. This example I've shown what will happen when you bring in a slide that has a custom color in the title. And you can see this one is yellow. It's just kept the yellow. But we can go to the reset option under home in the slides part of the ribbon and that will convert it back to what it should look like. Also in this example, in my original I didn't have a bullet on this text. And to do that we can just click on it. And then go to the bullet section in the paragraph part of the ribbon on the home section. And that will turn it back in the Business results slide. I can click on this, make it whichever color I want. I'll just choose this blue. With a couple of quick clicks, we've managed to import some slides from a completely different looking presentation and turn them into the exact style we want. If you'd like to bring in the slides exactly as they were in the presentation originally, we can make sure that the keep source formatting box is ticked on. Now if I click on each of the three slides, it will bring them in exactly as the original formatting was. You can also bring in these slides using copy and paste. For example, if I had the red slides here, I can actually click on the top one and then shift click the bottom one, which will select all three. And then press control C to copy. Now I can switch to the deck that I want to copy them into. I can choose where I want to copy them to, which will be 3-4 I'll click here, then if I press control V, it will paste them in with the same format and theme as the slides in the open deck. I'll press control to undo that. If you want to paste them in keeping the exact format of the red slides in that deck, we can write Click and then from Paste Options there is used destination theme which is the default that we've just done. Or keep source formatting, which will bring them in exactly as they were. 17. Dictate text to add content quickly and easily: If you are a Microsoft 365 subscriber, you can use the speech to text dictate function to author content, you'll need a microphone and a reliable Internet connection. Firstly, add a text box anywhere on your slide. Then under the home section on the ribbon, there should be a section called Voice. And inside it an option where you can press Dictate. If you click this drop down, you can see the language it's going to dictate into. And you can select anyone from this list. Click on Dictate, I can dictate this text. Full stop, new line. I start speaking and I can see the text appear full stop. When I click on the microphone again, it will stop recording. You can see that when I read out the words I wanted to appear, I could insert punctuation at any time by saying them explicitly, such as full stop or when I wanted the text to go onto a new line, I simply said new line. This can be a great way to speed up your workflow, especially if you have a lot of text content that you want to add to your slides. 18. Save a chart template for consistent chart styles: You can save and use a chart template to give all your charts a consistent style across all your slides or presentations. This would be the default chart type that Powerpoint would add. Just by going to insert chart, I've made a few alterations, such as adding some key data labels plus and choosing data labels, making some adjustments to the size of the text and the font, and also remove the grid lines. If I decided that I'd like some other charts to also look like this, I can save this as a chart template and then easily apply it. If I click on the chart and then write click anywhere such as in this plot area, I can choose save as template. I can call this something such as blue pattern. Then for example, if I add a new blank slide, I can go to Insert Chart. Templates is the second one down in this list. There's the style that I've just saved. I click okay. It will add a chart in in that style. If I already have a pre existing chart such as this that I'd like to change into that style, I can click anywhere on it. Right click and then choose change chart type. Go to templates and then double click on the blue pattern that we've just created. That will then change the chart that we are on into the new style. By saving a chart template, it's a really quick way of being able to add a consistent look to any number of charts. 19. Reduce the presentation file size: Compressing images is useful when you want to decrease the overall file size of your presentation, making it easier to share or transfer. Here are four images that I want to use on a slide. I've downloaded them all from an online image gallery, and they are high quality and high resolution. However, if I use a lot of images like this in a presentation, the file size can be quite large, making it difficult and slow to share. We can use the compress images function to reduce the size of the file. To compress images, you can click on any image, go to Picture Format, and click Compress Pictures. Powerpoint provides several options such as print, web screen, and e mail. The selected option will determine the level of compression applied. Choose whatever fits your need before you compress the pictures, I would recommend saving a separate copy of your presentation. This will mean that you can always come back to the full quality ones if you need to. If I just want to compress this image, I can make sure that apply only to this picture is ticked on. If that's ticked off, it will compress every single image in the presentation at the moment. I don't want to delete cropped areas of pictures. I'll be showing you what that does in just a few moments. If I wanted to choose the highest quality option, I would select HD and then click Okay. And it would apply it just to this picture. This image is a web setting. At this setting or above. The difference in quality of the image is not very noticeable. There's HD and there's Web. I would generally advise starting it at the highest quality possible. But getting the file size you want and the speed you want from opening the file. This is e mail, the lowest setting. Here you can start to see the effect of compression on the quality of the photo, especially when you're looking at it full screen. You can see, especially along the edges of parts of the photo, there's quite a lot of compression and artifacts. In this example, I've cropped this image to a square shape, which is simply done by going to picture format, then aspect ratio, and choosing square one to one. At the moment, I have different areas of the photo that I can use in the crop when compressing this. If I go to Compress Pictures and choose Delete Cropped Areas of pictures and press Okay. That will actually now remove the crop. If I write, click and choose Crop, you can see that I don't have any other areas of the photo. This can be very useful if you've just focused in on one very small area of a very large image. And you can remove all the extra parts of the photo that you don't want visible. However, you won't ever be able to get those parts of the photo back. It's a good idea that if you might want to adjust the photo, you don't choose that option. As I mentioned before, it's a good idea to save a file where you have the full quality of all the images and you also saved all the cropped areas. You can always go back to it if you need it. 20. Compress videos to reduce file size: When using video files in Powerpoint, your presentation size can become very large. By compressing media in Powerpoint, you can optimize your presentations file size while maintaining an acceptable level of quality. This is particularly useful when you need to share your presentation via e mail or upload it to online platforms with file size limitations. Here's a Powerpoint file with one video in it. To compress the video used in your Powerpoint file, you can go to File Info and then compress Media. When you click on this, you'll have three available options, well, HD, HD or standard. You can choose the compression option that suits your needs. Generally recommend saving a copy of the file and then choosing full HD, which is the highest quality option to maintain quality. If the file size is still too big, you can then go down to the smaller option and so on. If I click Full HD, ten, ATP, Powerpoint will compress all of the video files in your presentation. It will show which slide thereon, the initial size of the video and how much it's saved. By compressing the file, you can click close. Go back to your presentation, view the video, and check you are happy with the quality by having a separate copy, you can always go back to the full quality version. 21. Linking to videos rather than embedding them: When importing video files into Powerpoint, the default is to embed the file. This means that the video will be saved inside the Powerpoint file itself. In some cases, it may be better to link to your video files instead, as videos can significantly increase the file size of your Powerpoint presentation by linking to video files, instead of embedding them, you can keep the file size smaller, making it easier to share and distribute. Linking to video files also allows you to have more flexibility with your presentation. You can easily change or update the linked videos without modifying the Powerpoint file itself. This is particularly useful if you frequently update or replace your videos in presentations. We'd recommend storing presentations and linked videos in the same folder. To link to a file, we'd go to Insert Video. This device, we'd pick our video file. Instead of clicking Insert, we'd go to this little drop down arrow and choose Link to file now Powerpoint or play back the correct file, and it will be a link. If you now move or rename the video files, the links in your presentation will break. It's essential to keep the file structure intact or update the links accordingly. 22. Use custom slide sizes create images for social media: Creating social media graphics using Powerpoint can be a cost effective and simple way to design visually appealing content for your social media platforms. We need to start by determining the specific dimensions required for your social media graphic. Each platform has its own recommended sizes for different types of content, such as profile pictures, cover photos, posts, or stories. Make sure you're aware of the correct dimensions before you begin designing for on screen use. These are described in pixels. For example, a square Instagram post is currently 1080 pixels by 1080 pixels. To change the size of our slide in Powerpoint to that, we can go to Design slide size and then choose custom slide size. This will always display in centimeters, but we can type in X for pixels, I will type 1080 X and then press tab to move to the next 1080 X for the height. Then. Okay. At the moment, I don't have any content. I can choose either of these. But if you've already designed it, you choose the one which works best. Now I've got my square shape. I can add any graphics or design I want to. I can now write, click and choose format background to add any image I want. I'll just take one from the stock library. I can now make this a little bit darker by going to picture corrections and adjusting the brightness down, slightly posting in my text over the top. Now when I save it, I can go to save as something like a PNG would be fine, because that doesn't lower the quality of the image. Click save and just this one to export the slide. Now when I go and view my image on the disc, you'll see it's 1080 by 1080 pixels, which is the perfect size for making a square image post on Instagram or other social media platforms. 23. Using a custom font - installing and embedding: It's normally a good idea to use custom fonts in your presentation so you can add more impact to your slides and move away from using the standard calibri aerial or Times New Roman fonts. These will often make your presentation look boring and similar to other traditional presentations. But by using any custom fonts, you can really bring the slides to life. I would recommend using Google Fonts as a resource, as this currently has over 1,500 fonts. And any of them can be embedded into Powerpoint so that when you send the presentation to anyone else, they will see the font as it should look. To install these, you can simply go to Fonts.google.com find a font that you like. I've used poppins in my example. Click on it and then choose Download Family. This will download all the fonts as a zip file which you can write. Click on choose extract, all, then click on the first font Shift Click it will select all of them. Right click and choose Install. This will install all the variations of the font you've selected. Now when you restart Powerpoint, they'll be installed. Now I have all the variations of poppins installed to save them inside your presentation, so that other people can open them without having to install the font. We can simply go to the save box. More options and then tools and save options. In here, there's an option to embed fonts in the file. We tick this on. And I would normally choose embed all characters, which means that all the characters will be embedded. If other people want to change the presentation and type in different text, then they can do that. We click Okay and then hit Save. Now the fonts will be embedded and anyone that opens this presentation will be able to see the fonts correctly without having to manually install them. 25. Enhance animations for a superior presentation experience: You can enhance your animations to make a better presentation by making some very small tweaks inside Powerpoint. In this example, I've used a fly in animation to build this slide. The animation is perfectly fine as it is, as it's not distracting, but it is used quite a standard way to reveal these boxes. And we can make some small adjustments to make them have a better feel and a better presentation. Firstly, when we're in the animation section of the ribbon, we can click on animation pane to reveal these options. If I click on the first one, then go to the last and hold down Shift and click. I've selected all the animations. Now I can write click on them, use Effect options and drag the smooth end all the way from the left to the right. And that will mean it will slow down at the end of the animation to give it a nice smooth effect. The other thing I'll do is increase the timing slightly from not 0.5 to one. You can set any duration for these, but something like this will give a good effect in most cases when you're using the smooth end option. I'll now click Okay. Now we've changed the smooth end. That will give it a more premium feel, which will mimic the look of high end motion graphics. Now I'm going to select each one in order, change it to with previous and give it a small delay. What this will do is it will make all the animations happen at once, but in a staggered way with a small delay between them. Rather than waiting for each animation to happen before the other one starts, we'll go down by one choose with previous, and then click to increase the delay by a quarter of a second. Then finally on the last one, exactly the same with previous and up the delay by quarter of a second. Now when we run this, we get a smooth staggered feel that works really well. 26. Using multiple animations to add impact to slides: You can add multiple animations to a single item to add impact to your slides. For many presentation needs, just one animation per object is sufficient. However, it is possible to add multiple animations to each object and control when each animation happens using the settings in the animation pane. In this case, I would like each of these panels to build onto the screen and then to highlight in turn as the presenter talks through each point. First I will select Go to Animations and add a fly in. While these are all selected, I can write click Go to Effect Options and then Drag to give them the smooth end. While they're still all selected, I can select start after previous. Now they will all reveal in sequence one after the other. That looks good. Now I want to highlight each one in turn. As I talk about it, I'll select them all again. This time we go to add animation. Because if we click on any animations here, it will simply replace the animation. We go to add animation under the emphasis section. I'm going to choose fill color from here. While these are all selected, I can choose any color that I want it to go. As we talk about it, I'm going to select this bright blue. It will preview what's going to happen while these four animations are still selected. I'm going to choose on Click. Each time I click, one of these boxes will turn to bright blue. This looks good, but as a final option, I'm going to fade back each of the boxes after I've talked about them. Each box here will have three animations on it. Firstly, I'll select the three that I want to fade back effectively. We're going to click once. Stage one will go bright as we talk about it. Then when we click again and stage two goes bright, I want stage one to fade back. I'll go to add animation fill color. Then for this I'm going to select a very light blue, which is effectively fading it right back. And you can see it preview there. All we have to do now is drag these into the right order and make sure that they all happen with previous. While the three are selected, I'm going to choose with previous. Now I just have to drag them into the correct order. When stage two is bright and highlighted, I want stage one to be faded back. I'll drag this one up to after we click on stage two. Then this one up to after we click on stage three. Now when I run this, click once the first one will highlight, click again the second or highlight, and the first one will fade right back. That works well, but I'd like them all to be a little bit quicker. It's a good idea to make the animation fairly short when you're presenting. In this way, the audience is not waiting for the information. A good principle for animation is to make sure that it's not distracting and that it supports the story you are trying to tell. With each slide, click on the top one here, which is the first color, and then hold down Shift on the bottom. It will select them all and I'm going to reduce the duration down to 0.5 Now everything will feel really snappy and reveal at a nice speed. Firstly, the fly in animations will happen. Then we get half a second where one will highlight and the others will fade back. This is a really good way of aligning the audience with your message as you present it. If on the final click I'd like to make these all bright blue, it's as simple as selecting the first three, going to add animation, fill color, and then choosing the bright blue option. I'm also going to make this the duration of 0.5 of a second. It's the same as the others. Now when I play this slide, we'll reveal the four boxes. Each click will make one become bright blue and the others fade back. Then on the final click, they'll all come back by adding multiple animations to the same shape. Using add animation, you can really add impact to your slides and help get your message across. 27. Crop photos to any shape: Images in Powerpoints do not have to be rectangular. They can be any shape. To crop an image to any of the inbuilt shapes, simply click on the shape, go to Picture Format, and choose crop and then crop to shape. First example, I'll choose Rectangle, rounded corners. If the shape has adjustable yellow round handles, such as with this one, you can drag these to adjust the shape after the crop. If I click on the yellow dot and then drag to the left, I can reduce how rounded the corners are. If I click on the yellow dot and drag to the right, it will increase how rounded the corners are, all the way to this. To reset the picture, you can go to the adjust section under picture format and choose Reset picture. If you'd like to crop to a circle, you'll need to do two steps. Firstly, you go to crop to Shape and then choose the first one in basic shapes, which is oval. Then crop aspect ratio one to one. You can do these in either order and that will crop to a perfect circle. After you've cropped this, you can still make adjustments to the visible area. To do that, you can right click and choose. If I now hold down Shift, I can drag to the left or the right while keeping the Y position the same. I can also click on the corner point and drag to increase the size or decrease the size. You can also click on the main area that's visible And adjust the image so it's visible in the exact parts you want it to be. I'll now go back to the first image I had and show you how you can crop to any custom shape. You simply draw the shape or import it from elsewhere. In this example, I'm using a cloud shape, then you can use merged shapes. I can just drag this cloud under here. Click on the corner point while holding Shift And drag it out so that it keeps the correct aspect ratio. Then click on the Image first, and then hold down Shift and click on the Cloud. Go to Shape, Format, choose Merge Shapes, and click Intersect. Again, you can write click anywhere on this image, choose Crop. And then adjust the crop to show which parts are shown at any point while the image to a shape, you can write, click and change it. In this example I'll just choose stock images, type what I'm looking for and then double click and it will change it straight into that shape. If we write, click and choose Crop, we can move the crop inside the shape or adjust it to focus on the area we'd like. 28. Remove the background from images: If you have an image that doesn't have a transparent background, you can remove it so that it can be used as a cutout on any background. Here is an image I've downloaded from the stock library, but I do not want the green background. To get rid of this, we can click on the image, go to Picture Format, then choose Color. In the adjust section of the ribbon right near the bottom, there's an option called set Transparent color. When I click on this, I can pick any color that I want to be transparent if I just controls there to undo and do that one more time. When you click on different areas, you'll get slightly different results. But because this color is close to solid, green, clicking anywhere will get you a pretty good result. Now this image can be used on any color background. For example, if I just quickly paste in some graphics, send them to the back. I can now bring this up and size it down slightly, holding down control and shift as I drag the corner in. There's my slide. By using set transparent color, we can easily remove backgrounds when they are a similar color. If you want to use an image with many background colors, such as this one here, we need to use a different technique. For this, we can click on the picture, go to Picture Format, and then on the left of the adjust section in the ribbon, there's an option to remove Background. Now Powerpoint has colored everything that it thinks you want to remove, bright pink. But we can add or remove those areas as we wish. Using these tools, mark areas to keep and mark areas to remove. If I click on Mark Areas to remove and just draw in this section, it can be extremely rough. Powerpoint will automatically select areas that it thinks you want to remove. That's looking great. But if, for example, there was an area that you removed that you didn't want to remove, you can simply click Mark Areas to Keep and draw over that. It will add them back in. This looks good, so we'll click on Keep Changes. Now I could paste in a graphic as before, right click, send it back, and then drag my image into position. There's two powerful ways you can remove the backgrounds from images. Doing this will give you a lot of flexibility when it comes to designing your slides that contain photos. 29. Create circular text using text transforms: You can create circular text using text transforms. Adding editable, circular text can be really useful in some designs. Here we have a circle. We can go up to the drawing section in the home part of the ribbon. Click on Oval click and drag and hold down shift to keep it a perfect circle. Then type our text in. Then we can go to Shape Format in the word art style section of the ribbon. Go to Text Effects, and then under Transform. And then go down to the follow path section. And choose the third one along circle. I can now go to Shape Fill and say no pill, shape, outline, no outline. Drag my text onto the circle and make sure it's aligned perfectly. Now if I hold down control and shift while dragging the edge, I can enlarge it. Do it again until it's exactly the right size to fit round. I'll just do it a tiny bit more while the text is round. We can select it all and then press Increase front size to make it take up the entirety of the circle because it's still text. You can type anything here. You can also apply other warping text effects. So if you go to shape, format, text effects and transform, you have a number of warp effects in this section. Here we could, for example, select in row three on Warp, This one here called warped circle, expand it up by dragging it from the top. I'll just make a copy of this by holding down control and shift and pressing drag. And show you a couple of other effects for this one. I'm going to choose the third one across on the second row called ring inside. Remember that you can drag these to make them any size you want. You can type anything. One final example, you can go to Shape Format, Text Effects, Transform, select something like this, which is cascade up. You can see that you can apply a number of different warp effects, but it's a good idea to make sure that the text is still readable and that adding the effect improves the design and gets the look you want. 30. Long shadow effect using 3D formatting: Let's make this stylish long shadow effect using gradient fills and some three D formatting. We'll quickly add some text, align it to the center, and make it have a gradient fill. For that, we'll go to Text Options and choose gradient fill. For this, I've just got two gradient stops, one choosing this default color, light blue, and the other one on the other end choosing the default color purple. If you want to add gradient stops, you can click anywhere, and if you want to remove them, you can click and drag them up or down. To add the shadow effect, we go to text options, then make sure we choose text effects. Go to three D rotation presets, and choose the very bottom one in the oblique section called oblique, bottom right. This will not look as if it's changed anything, but it will have rotated it in a way where we can add the depth which is what will show as the shadow. In this example, we'll go to three D format now, type in a very long depth. I'll type something like 1,500 Now we can reposition this if we want to. I'll just zoom out a little bit and drag it up. That already looks really good. But you can also just have these plane if you want the shadows. For example, if I went to depth and change it from automatic to something like black. You could also add a color contour if you want. There's an example of how the contour would look. I'll just turn the contour off for a second by selecting zero point If you wanted the shadow to have a flat look and just be one single color so you can see there's different lighting in here. We need to make sure we go to three D format lighting and then go to the special category at the bottom and choose flat. Then you can go to Material. At the moment it's on warm Matt, and I can change it just to Matt. That will give us a solid shadow. If you want to add a color background such as black, you can then go in and change the text shadow by going to text options, text effects, going to the depth and changing it to any color you think looks good. Using this method, you can get some great shadows and three D effects from any text. 31. Merge Shapes to create custom shapes: Merged shapes allows you to combine two or more shapes into a single shape. By merging shapes, you can create complex shapes that are not readily available in the shape library. Here we have two shapes that I've just drawn, a square and a circle. I'll just overlay the circle on top of the square. I'll click on the square first, then hold down Shift and click on the circle. Then go to Shape Format and Merge Shapes. Each option will create a different result by combining or altering the shapes in various ways. You can experiment with these options to achieve the desired outcome. Just by rolling over the different modes, you can see what it's going to do before you click on it. For example, if we choose union, this will combine two or more shapes into a single shape. Merging all overlapping areas or press control Z to undo that intersect will keep only the overlapping areas of the selected shape and discard the rest. Subtract will subtract the overlapping areas of one shape from another fragment will break apart overlapping areas into separate shapes. Finally, combine like union, this will combine the shapes, but this will remove the overlapping areas. As an example of how we can use this, I'm going to create a jigsaw piece as a shape to do this, I've created two orange circles and two purple circles and put them on a square in the right place. If I click on the square, then hold down Shift and click on the orange circle. And then the other orange circle, I can go to Shape Format, Merge Shapes, and then choose a union. Now I can hold down Shift and click on the purple circle. And then the other purple circle go to Shape Format, Merge Shapes, and then subtract. Now we have just one piece, and we can use it for any design we want. Color it in any way we want or add any effects. 32. Converting charts to shapes for full styling and animation flexibility: In Powerpoint, you can create a wide range of charts to visually represent data and make your presentations more engaging and informative. If you want to move away from standard chart types to something more bespoken original, you can use this technique to convert your charts to shapes. Here is a standard pie chart. I've simply removed the key titles and labels just to simplify this example. But you can see that if I write Click, you can change chart type or edit the data as you can with any live chart in Powerpoint. To convert this to a shape, I'd click on it to select it, control X to cut, then go to Paste, Paste special, then choose Picture SVG, which stands for Scalable Vector Graphic. And click okay. I'll now go to the corner, Hold down control and shift and size this down a bit, because we've now pasted this in as an SVG. I can write, click and choose Convert to Shape. Now I can write, click again, go to Group and choose Ungroup. These are now individual shapes. From here, you can manipulate these shapes in any way you want, just like any other shape in Powerpoint. For example, we could make these shapes three D and make a staggered three D chart. We could animate it in, in a way that you couldn't do in a live Powerpoint chart. If we write, click Go to Format Shape. I'll just rotate this. I'm going to give it 300 degrees rotation. Set the material to warm matt and the lighting to the second one in which is balance. Now I'll set the outline to no outline and add a depth of say, 80 point. I'll now quickly apply those settings to the other shapes while adjusting the depth slightly to make this staggered three D chart. For this, I'll reduce it to 60, 40 on this 120 on this one, setting the material and the lighting the same each time. Now I can drag them into position. Now put them in the correct order so I can write, click and send this to the back. And then right click and send this to the back. And then right click and send this to the back. Now I can drag them into position using the cursor keys for some fine adjustments if needed. That looks good. I'll put it roughly in the middle. And now quickly add some animation. For example, we could add fly in, select the animation pane, right click, choose effect options, and drag up and give a smooth end. Increase the time to 2 seconds. And then simply change the direction. So this could come from the top, this from the right, this from the bottom, and this from the left. Now when we run that, they'll all smoothly revealing from the side an effect that we couldn't get when using a live chart in Powerpoint. One thing to bear in mind is that you cannot edit the data as you would with a standard chart. I'd always recommend keeping a copy of the original chart on a different slide or in a different presentation in case you need to edit it. But by converting charts into shapes, you can get some very powerful effects that will add impact to your slides. 33. Create a looping introduction using two Slide Shows: It's common to display an introductory or welcome slide while your audience arrives for a presentation. But if you want something more impactful, you can set up any number of slides to loop automatically until you start your presentation. Here I have three simple photo slides that will act as a looping intro on slides 23 and 4. Then I have three generic slides that will represent the main presentation. Firstly, we'll set the intro slides to advance automatically. I'll go to transitions, then I'll select slide two, Hold down shift and select slide four. Then select on mouse click and tick on after 2 seconds. This means that slides 23 and 4 will advance after 2 seconds. Now we can go to the slide show option on the ribbon. Then choose Set up Slide Show. I'm going to select the slides I want to loop. I'll go from slide two in the show slide section to slide four. I also want to turn on loop continuously until escape under the advanced slide section. It will default to use timings if present, because we've just set 2 seconds to advance on each slide. Now if I press okay, I can run the presentation, and this should loop slides 23 and 4. Now we can create a custom slide show for the main presentation, which will be slides 56 and 7. To do that, while we are still under the slide show section, we can click on custom slide show and then custom shows. We don't have any at the moment. We'll click New. I want to select slide 56.7 and press Add. I can give this a name if I want. I will call it main presentation. There's three slides in there, and we'll click okay. And co finally add a button that we can click to get into our main presentation. From our looping intro, I've added a rounded corner rectangle with the word start on it. I now want to make this a button which you can click to go into the main presentation. To do that, we use hyperlinks. We'll click on this. Then we can right click. We can choose this option here, which is a hyperlink. Then insert Link. By default it will go to an existing file or web page, but we want place in this document. If we scroll down under Custom Shows, you can see the main presentation that we've just created. We'll click that and click okay. Now when we run from this slide, we can click on this button and it will go straight into the main presentation. That's really good. But we could also copy and paste this start button to the other slides. In the introduction, all press control C go to this slide control V, page up to go to this slide and control V. If we play it from the start, it will loop round those three photo slides. And I can click on the Start button at any time to get to the main presentation. I think this works really well if you want to change this Start button so it's not visible, we can click on it. Format, Shape, Bill, set the transparency to 100% Remove the start text by clicking on it and deleting. Then we can drag this up to the top left corner, make sure it's the whole width of the page and the whole height. Now when we run this, we can click anywhere and it will go straight into your presentation as before. It's a good idea to copy and paste this to the other slides. In the rolling intro, I can click on this button, press control C A. Delete this one that we don't want anymore. Control V to paste. Page up again, click on this one and delete and control V to paste for the final time. Now we can run this, it will loop through the slides and we can click on any of them to get to the main presentation. 34. Record your presentation with narration: You can record your presentation with the narration. Which is great if you just want to send off your presentation to someone else and to have your voice explaining what's happening in the presentation. For example, if we start on this slide, you can go to the top right here and press Record, and then this window will appear. You can choose whether you want video one or off. For this example, I'm just going to use audio. On the first couple of slides I can start recording. Now we're looking at the four stage plan. Stage one is define stage two is to plan. Use these highlighters if I wish to draw out and highlight and mark certain points. Now I press Stop and I can go to choose where to export the video, and then click Export. After a few moments, the video will be ready and can be used in your presentation or sent to anyone that you want to view the presentation with your audio or video. Now we're looking at the four stage plan. Stage one is define. 35. Add a live camera stream with cameo: You can use the cameo feature to add your live video directly onto the slide. With this, you have flexibility on how the video will appear. For example, if I go onto this first slide, then go to Insert. You'll see this camera section here with the cameo option. You can insert it to this slide or all slides, but I'm going to make it slightly different on each slide. For this example, I'll choose this slide. By default, it will give you this circular shape. If you click it will turn on the camera. Now I can go to the shape section, Camera shape, and choose something like rectangle. Then I can drag this up to the corner, drag it down to the bottom. And then drag it across to change the shape as I want. Now if we are on the presentation, I can be talking, introducing myself and introducing the presentation at the same time. If we go onto the next slide, as an example, I can insert cameo. This slide, drag it into position. Then I can go to Camera shape and change it to rounded corner rectangle. And drag this little yellow dot to change how rounded the corners are, I can size it up so it's the same size as the item below. Then I could copy and paste. Go onto my next slide where stage two is highlighted. Paste my video, and then move it across. On this I could select transitions morph. And as we go between the slides, it will morph the video across. If I play from the previous slide here, I could be talking about stage one. And then click and then go straight over and start talking about stage two as it lights up. This is a really useful way of being able to present and have your video next to the point you're discussing and your audience is following. In this example, I've got a graph and I'll show you how can add a circular video just by going to insert Cameo this slide. Then I'm going to drag this up here, hold down the corner, and drag it out until it's about the right size. Now when I run this slide, I'll be presented next to the graph where I can discuss the story and the message about this content. So by using Cameo to add video to your slide gives you a powerful and flexible option of adding your live video feed so you can talk about your slides and be right in the middle of the content. 37. Creating an interactive menu: Most presentations will flow in a linear fashion from the first slide to the last. But it is possible to create an interactive presentation using buttons and links. An interactive menu is a great way to give your audience more control over their viewing experience. And make your presentation more dynamic and engaging. Here's a presentation with just four slides, The first being an interactive menu. Then the three slides that the menu jumps to with a back button. At the moment, it's just the graphics and texts that are in. And now we'll add the links. We'll go to the first slide, which is the interactive menu. Right click on our first box, Choose Link, and then select Insert Link. By default, it will link to an existing file or web page, but we want to choose place in this document and then slide two. We'll just quickly add the links to these other two. Again, click to select, right click, choose link, and then insert Link. This will go to slide three. This will go to slide four. That's now made links that when we click on any of these, it will go to that slide. I now want to make the back button work so I can write click, add a link to that, and make that go to the interactive menu. Once I've added that link to the back button, I can now copy and paste it onto the other two slides. Click on it, control C. Then I'm clicking page down to go to the next slide, control V to paste, page down to the next slide, control V to paste again. Now when I play this, I can go to any of the slides and click back. If we go to the slide, I can press control A to select all the slides and then turn off on mouse click. This will mean that if you click on anywhere other than the buttons, it doesn't advance the slide. For example, I could click anywhere here and it wouldn't advance. Lastly, we could add some transitions to add movement to this interactive menu. For the menu page itself, I could click the default for that would be from bottom, but I'm going to make the menu come from the top. Then select the three content slides. Click the first one, hold down Shift, and click the last one. For these, I'm going to use the push from bottom as the default. If I play that, clicking on any of these buttons, we'll scroll the screen up. And clicking the back button will scroll it back down. Which is a really nice effect for your interactive menu. 38. Interactive triggers that respond to user actions: By using triggers, you can effectively create interactive presentations that respond to user actions, enhancing audience engagement and making your presentations more dynamic and memorable. Here is a simple example where these answers will be revealed. On the click of a mouse, I will quickly paste in this big square that has a question mark on it, and then drag this across over the top of story until it snaps into place. If I press control D and drag this one into place, and then control D again, the third one will go into place. Now I'm going to add animation. And then we'll add the triggers so that when these panels with the question mark clicked on, they will fade off to reveal the answers below. Firstly, we'll add animation to all of these three panels. I can click on the first one and then hold down Shift and click on the second and third. Then go to the animation section. We're going to select an exit. Animation. Animations come in these four categories we want to choose in the exit section. Fade. When I play this and click, they'll all fade off. Now we want to make them interactive so that when we click on each one of them, just that one alone fades off to reveal the answer below. I'm going to be using the selection pane to make this easier because from there we can rename these objects. We'll go to home, Arrange and choose Selection pane. Now we can rename each of these. I can click on this, click on the one that's highlighted. To rename control A, select the text in it so I can replace it. I'm going to type blue box left. It can be called anything as long as it's easy to remember and easy to reference. Then blue box center, then blue box. Right now these are named. We can now add the triggers. We click on the one on the left, go to Animations, go to the advanced animation section of the ribbon and choose Trigger. We're going to select on click. You can now see how useful it is to have these renamed to something that you can easily reference which ones they are. We'll choose blue box left. Now when we run this and click on the blue box on the left, it fades off. We'll just quickly add the same trigger option to the center and right box. We'll click on this, go to trigger on, click off and choose blue box center. Then click on the right one. Go to trigger on, click off and choose blue box. Right. Now when I click on any of these, it will fade off to reveal the answer below. Using triggers is a great way to make parts of your presentation interactive and engage your audience. 39. Chart animation - reveal your chart in any order: You can use some clever chart animation techniques to reveal your chart in any order. Here is a typical chart comparing figures for different companies. A typical animation style to use on this would be a wipe with the direction from bottom. To do this, we could click on the chart, go to our animations, and simply click Wipe. The default from bottom direction will be added. If we now go into effect options and go into the sequence section, I can select by element in category. Now when we run this, as I click, each of the elements in the category will be revealed. This is useful so that the speaker can talk through each competitor and add information if necessary. If we go to the animation pane and click these arrows to reveal the expanded contents, we can actually click on any of these categories. Change the start if we want it to happen automatically. We can change the duration if we wanted to. We could even change the effects of each individual bar. However, the limitation is that we can't actually change the order of how these bars reveal. Which we would be able to do with all other types of object in the animation pane. If for example you wanted to show the our company bar first followed by your competitors with better figures and then show the rest of the market. Then it would look like this wouldn't be possible inside Powerpoint. But there is a clever way of doing this. The way to achieve it is to add multiple animations to the bars. We've already added one lot of animation for this one. I want the, our company one to come up first. I'm just going to delete all the other animations apart from that one. I firstly want to delete the animation on the last 3 bars. That will be animation nine to animation 11 in the animation pane. To delete those, I will click on number nine, then hold down shift and click on number 11. Then I can click delete. Now I can delete the bars before the hour company bar. So I can click on item number two in the animation pane. Hold down shift, and click on item number seven and then click delete. Now when I click to play this, the only thing that will be animated is the bottom bar and the hour company bar. Now we're going to add the next animation, which will be these 3 bars, company 89.10 To do that, we will need to go to Add animation, which will add a secondary animation. We can click Add, then go to Wipe. I will click these arrows to expand the contents. For this one, I don't need the background. I only want to keep the final three which are 1012. For this, I'll click on number nine, then hold down Shift and click on number three, and then click Delete. I also want 89.10 to come up just on one click. I'm going to click on number four here. And then hold down shift on number five and click with previous. Now when I run that, I'll first click to reveal the bottom bar, then the hour company, then 89.10 Finally I want to add one more lot of animation to add in the first six. We'll do that in the same way we must always go to add animation. To add an extra animation, I'll choose wipe. I'll click on these two arrows to expand the contents. For this one, I want to delete the first one because that's just the x axis at the bottom. Then I want to delete the last four, which are animations of these 4 bars from our company to company ten. To do that I'll click on number 13 and then hold down Shift and click on number ten and press Delete. I also want animations five to nine to come in with previous. I'm going to click on number five, down shift, and click on number nine, and then change it to with Previous. Now when we play this, the first click will reveal the bottom bar. Then I can click again and reveal our company. I will talk about that. And then I will click to reveal the companies that are ahead, talk about those. And then click to reveal the companies that are below. By using the technique of adding animation and deleting the ones you don't want, it can create a very powerful way of revealing the data in the order you want to talk about it. 40. Chart highlighting - pick out certain data to tell your story: You can use chart animations in Powerpoint to highlight certain data to help tell your story. Here's the typical chart comparing figures for different companies. While this gives a good overview of the competitive landscape, it is often necessary to pick out certain bits of key data to tell your story. Powerpoint animation options are a little limited here. For example, you can't use the recoloring options such as fill color, object color, or color pulse. But a nice way to highlight certain bars is to use the Transparency option. Now we can go to Effect Options and choose by category. Then I can click to expand the contents and reveal all the animations. If I click on item number two, which is the first bar, hold down Shift, and click on item 11, which is the last bar. I can then write click Go to Effect Options and choose amount 75% I will also select number three to number 11 and make sure that happens with previous. I don't need the background to have an effect, so I can delete that at the moment when we run it. When we click, all of them will fade back. I just want to remove the fading back for the ones I want to keep highlighted In this example, it will be company four and company six. I'll delete them before also. I'll click on company six and category six is known as here. And click delete on that too. Now when I run it and click company four and company six will stay the full color and everything else will fade back, which will really help draw attention to that key data. If I wanted to add any extra animation to those two, I could add something like these, call out boxes. Now if I play that, I can introduce the information that we're presenting. Then click to focus in on these two data points by fading the other bars back. Rather than trying to further highlight the 2 bars, you're keeping the slide clear and simplifying the visual so the audience can concentrate on your message. It's also one of the few emphasis effects that Powerpoint will let you apply to a chart. 41. Motion paths - bring your content to life with this animation: You can use the motion path animation to bring your content to life. They can be quite tricky to use, but in this example, I'll show you how you can use them quickly and easily to add impact to your slides. Here we have an arrow and if I click on it and go to Animations, we can go to Add animation and choose Motion Paths Line. By default, this will add an animation to move it down the page. We can click on it and choose Effect Options and make it go to the right. The green triangle is the start point and the red triangle is the endpoint. When you click on this line, the colors will reverse. Now if you hold onto the small red dot and drag, this will be the endpoint of your animation. If you hold shift, it will lock it to keep it in line. If I wanted the endpoint of the animation to be there, I could let go. Then play that slide. Then it would move smoothly from left to right. A smooth end and a smooth start is automatically added. But this can be changed if you want to revealing the animation pane. And then double clicking on this to show the effect options which show a smooth start and a smooth end. For this example, we'll just add some smart art. I'll go to Insert Smart Art, choose Cycle. And select this first one, which is a basic cycle. I'm just going to type in some numbers here to keep this very simple. Then while it's selected, we can right click and choose Group. Group. Then the same again, right click group, group. That will just convert it into individual shapes that we can animate. While I'm here, I'm just quickly going to change the font to the one we're using. Then change all the colors to this blue shift. Click to select all the arrows and change them to green. That's our starting point of this process cycle. I can click on the blue and choose an animation such as a zoom. Then I'll show you how to add the motion path to all these arrows. We'll click on the arrow, go to Add animation, and choose Motion Path, and it will move down by default. I find that the easiest way to use motion paths in this example is to click on the end point and drag it to where you want it to start, and then go to Effect Options and choose reverse path direction. You can see that's coming in nicely. Now, this is just the quickest way of doing it. I think when I play this, you'll see that the circle comes out nicely and then the arrow moves. But the one thing it doesn't do is actually start not visible. To make that work, we can click on the arrow, go to add animation, and choose an A peer. Then we can drag down the motion path in the animation pane so it's underneath the appeer. Make sure that we make it start with previous. Now the circle will reveal from the center, and then the green arrow will appear at the same time as the motion path happens. Then finally, we write to click and choose Center Back to make sure that it starts behind the circle. Now when we play that, the circle will appear and then the arrow will smoothly appear from underneath a circle. To quickly copy those to the other arrows, we can use the animation painter. I'll just add the zoom to this as that's easy to do. Then to copy the multiple animations that are applied to this, we just need to click on Animation Painter and then click on the arrow. All we have to do now is just adjust the start point, which will be this green triangle that when clicked on turns into a small red circle. And then drag it to here and make sure that we click on it. And again choose center back. Now you can see that we've added that animation. This will smoothly appear, the second one will appear, and then the arrow will appear from behind the circle. With a smooth animation. From that, we can quickly apply it to the others. Again, we'll add a zoom to this one. We can click on the objects we want to copy the animation from. Click on animation painter. Click on the new arrow, then just adjust its start point, which is this green triangle that when clicked on becomes a small red circle. Drag it to here. Click on it again, right click, and send it back. Then we have a really nice looking animation. I'll just very quickly apply it to these other two. Now the animation is applied to every circle and every arrow. Then when I play that, it will look great. 42. Make interactive and dynamic presentations using Slide Zoom: You can make your slides more interactive and dynamic by using the slide zoom feature. In this example, I'll just set up the four slides I'm going to zoom between. And I'll quickly paste in my text and insert a shape. I'm going to use the tear drop shape. Click anywhere. I'm going to make this the same blue as the text. Give it no outline. Hold down, shift to rotate it, right, click format Shape and make this 17 centimeters by 17 centimeters. Then align it to the bottom corner. I'm now going to add one text letter to it so I can click anywhere, type my text, make it the correct font I want. And 200 point size and white. Then align it to the center and middle of this. There's my first slide. We need three other slides that I'll just copy in here to save time. Now I can go to the Slide Sorter. Click in the gap between slide 1.2 and say I want a new slide, I'm going to write. Click and choose Layout Blank for this. Then this is the slide that I'll insert my slide zoom on. So I'll go to insert slide zoom. I'll select the four slides here and press Insert. I want each one of these to be exactly a quarter of the slide. I can put this up in the corner and then drag it out, that's a perfect quarter. Do the same with these. Then I want to go to the zoom section of the ribbon and make sure that zoom border is set to no outline for each one of them in the zoom section. You also have the ability to return to zoom or set the duration. If you have returned to click, then when you click on this, it will zoom in and click again, and it will 0. You can either use it that way, or if return to zoom is turned off, I can play and actually just advance through one by one. But you can see that by using the slide zoom, you can make a powerful interactive and engaging slide and help your audience focus on the content that you're talking about. 43. Amazing animations using the Morph transition: You can create amazing animations using the morph transition. The morph transition allows for smooth and visually appealing animations and transitions between slides. You can use morph to move objects, change colors, zoom in, or all of these at the same time. Unlike most of the animations you will use in Powerpoint, morph is a transition. A transition is an effect between slides, whereas animations are on a single slide. In the transition section of the ribbon, the morph transition is the first option available. The content you want to animate should be present on more than one slide, but arranged differently. You can move, resize, or modify objects to achieve the desired effect. To show you simply how to use the morph transition, I will animate this square in two different ways. If I just wanted to use an animtum for this, I could go to animations and choose something like fly in. You can change the direction that would fly in from the left. I'm going to click on this and delete the animation, recreate that effect using morph. And to do that, we'd go into our slide sorter, press control D to duplicate. Click on the second slide, go to transitions and make sure morph is selected. Now we can go back to the first slide and move, or resize this square anywhere. For example, I can hold down shift and move it off to the left. Now when I play from slide one, I click the square smoothly, moves in. It also works in reverse, so if I click back a slide, it will smoothly slide out to the left. We can also change the color and the size and anything else. For example, if I change this to blue and made it really big, then go from slide one, it would fade in, changing from green to blue and increasing in size. When you click back, it will actually reverse because Powerpoint automatically creates a smooth animation that transforms the objects from their positions on the first slide to their positions on the second slide. You can animate many objects quickly and easily. In this example, we have a slide two with all this information on, on slide one, the center part of the slide is zoomed in and everything else has been moved off. When we play this, as long as slide two has the transition morph set, when I click to advance the slide, all the elements will smoothly move in as before. It will also work in reverse. So we can zoom them out again. We can speed up or slow down the effect by changing the duration on the second slide. For example, if we want to make it a lot snappier and faster, we can set it down to 1 second. If we wanted to make it slower and smoother, we could put it up to 3 seconds. Let's use this simple diagram to show you some uses for the morph transition. This is just a basic cycle taken from the smart art. If we wanted to zoom into this and reveal more information, we could click on the slide, Press control D. Then go on to slide two and make sure that the morph transition is turned on. Now I can out a bit, I'm holding control and using the mouse wheel, I'm going to move this down. And then holding control and shift, I'm going to size it up down a bit more. And control and shift to size up a bit more. Now I'm quickly going to paste in my extra information. When I click to advance to the next slide, it will zoom in and reveal the other information. We'll do one more slide for stage two. I'll control D to duplicate the slide. I'll move the graphic over. Stage two is the part we're zooming into. I'll paste in my text. Now when we play from the beginning, it will zoom in stage one, the other information will appear, then it will fade off and move across to stage two. By using morph in this way, you can get some really powerful and impactful slides where you help your audience focus on the section you're talking about. If you wanted to zoom back to the five part cycle at the end, that would be as simple as pressing control D on this first slide, dragging it to the end and making sure that morph is selected. And you can see it will zoom back. Now when we play from slide one, it will zoom in stage one planning, move across, the next section of text will fade up and then it will zoom back out. Using morph can be a great way of adding powerful animation to any slides. 44. Using the Morph transition to animate text: The morph transition allows for smooth and visually appealing animations of shapes and objects between slides, but it can also be used for some great text animations. We'll start with some simple text, now we'll go to the slide thumbnail sorter. Click on the slide, press control D to duplicate and then type in some additional text on the second slide. I'll quickly change the color of this. If I go to Transitions and choose morph and run that from slide one, the default morph transition will fade out the text and replace the text with the text on slide two. But if we go to the effect options and choose words, then it will smoothly animate the text and fade in the new text. We'll just run that and we'll see that the text will move apart smoothly because it's on transition words. And the new text will fade up, which gives a really nice effect. We'll now add in a new slide, and we'll use the characters option instead. For this, we'll start with just one word control D to dupe clear the slide. On the second slide I'm going to change it to this also adjust the color. Now if we select the second of these two slides, go to Transitions and choose Morph. Again, the default will fade between them, but if we now click on Effect Options, we can choose Characters. And you'll see that the characters will move smoothly along to the place on the second slide. Again, a really nice effect. You can also go back a slide and get a smooth animation in reverse. In this example, I've used an anagram. But if I make a second example just by adding in some different characters, then play between this, you'll see that the ones that aren't used will fade off and fade on. The ones that are used will move smoothly into their new position. By using the morph transition and changing effects options to either words or characters, you can get some really powerful effects for your text slides. 45. Loop multiple animations using bookmarks: While Powerpoint allows you to loop a single animation until the end of the slide, it does not let you loop an animation sequence on a slide. You cannot play through a sequence of animations and then loop through that sequence of animations repeatedly on the same slide. But there is a way you can do this using bookmarks to show you what I mean. Let's take this simple circle. What I want to do is to smoothly fade this in, wait for a second, and then smoothly fade out again. And to loop these actions until the user clicks to move onto the next slide. It is easy enough to use a fade in. We'll go animations fade. Then with the animation pane open, double click. Go to timing. I'm going to select 2 seconds. Then under repeat, I can choose until end of slide. This will just loop a single animation. But the problem with this is it's just a single animation and it's flicking off very suddenly rather than fading off. If I wanted to smoothly fade the circle off rather than have it suddenly disappear, we could add a fade out animation. We could click on it, go to add animation, and choose fade out. We could set this to after previous problem is in the first animation because the timing actually says repeat until end of slide. It will never actually get to the second animation. What will happen here is that Powerpoint will try to fade in the circle repeatedly and never get to the fade out animation. This is because the Powerpoint animation tools do not support the looping of a sequence of animations. I think this puts a big limitation on what you can achieve. But using bookmarks, there is a workaround to do this using bookmarks. Firstly, we have to record some audio. I'll go to Insert Audio, Record Audio. For this, we just want 4 seconds of silence. There's our 4 seconds of silence. It doesn't have to be exact. It's just creating a file that we can use to add bookmarks to which will help time and loop our animations. We'll click on the audio file. I can hit Play. It's actually 5 seconds and 22 long. If we want to trim it, we can always go to playback, trim audio, and just drag it down to 4 seconds. Under audio options, we can go to volume and chose mute just to make sure that there's no sound playing. I'm also going to tick on hide during show because we don't want to see this bar here with the sound as it's played back, start automatically and loop until stopped. Now I want to add two bookmarks, one at 1 second and one at three. So I can just drag this play bar to about 1 second. And then click Add Bookmark in the bookmark section in the playback part of the ribbon. Now I can drag this 3 seconds add bookmark again. Now I've got two bookmarks. One there called bookmark 1.1, there called bookmark two. Now we want to set those animations to happen so that the circle fades in on bookmark one and out on bookmark two. Then because the sound file is looping until it's stopped, it will repeat the sequence of animations. It will continually fade in, fade out, and then fade in and fade out, and carry on until we leave the slide in the animation pane. I'm going to double click on this, which is the fade in. Go to timing. And the important part triggers, we want to start the effect on play of bookmark one, okay? Then we go to the fade out and double click on that. Timing triggers for this, we want to start the effect on play of bookmark two, which will be the fade out. Now when we play from this slide, it will fade in on 1 second, fade out on 3 seconds, and then fade in on 1 second again, which will create this pulsing loop. Looping this circle. Fading in and out is just an example. But here I'll show some slides where I think this works really well. Here is an example of a map and the locations we want. Fade on one at a time, and then fade off and then fade back on on a loop. This can give a really nice effect and help draw your viewers attention to the points you're making. If I just jump out into the editors, you can see what's happening here. Just zoom out slightly. If we roll over this section here, we can see the sound I've put in these bookmarks, the first six, fade on these dots and the name. Then bookmark seven, fade them all off. You can see they're all set up here with triggers. If I click on any of these, go to timing. The triggers drop down is expanded and start effect on play of bookmark seven by using a looped sound file, which can just be silence easily recorded in Powerpoint. You can loop any sequence of animations, which is a very powerful hack to get around the fact that that option isn't built directly into Powerpoint. 46. Smooth morphing between shapes using object tagging: The morph transition is very useful because Powerpoint automatically creates a smooth animation that transforms the objects from the first slide to the second slide. It works out which objects are on each slide and how to transform them. For example, size, color, position, et cetera, to create a smooth animation. But by default, when using the morph transition, Powerpoint won't smoothly morph between two different shapes, it would just fade between them. However, you can get smooth morphing between shapes using the morph transition and object tagging. To illustrate this, I will create a simple animation with a blue circle and a green square. I want the blue circle to morph to a square and the green square to morph to a circle. To do that, I'll press control D to duplicate the slide. Go onto the second slide, and make sure that the morph transition is selected. I'll now click on this shape, go to Edit Shape, change shape, and change it to a square. And this shape, edit shape, change shape, and change it to a circle. Now, when I run this from slide one, you can see that Powerpoint does a good job of moving the positions and the colors of shapes, but this is not what I want to show in this case. If I just wanted the blue circle on the left to smoothly morph into a square. And then the same with the square on the right to smoothly morph into a circle. We firstly need to give these a name. And to do that we can go to a range in the drawing section and choose selection pane. Once we have this visible, we can give these objects a name to force Powerpoint to morph between the shapes. We're going to use two exclamation marks at the beginning of the name, I might say exclamation mark. Exclamation mark blue for this one. Exclamation mark, exclamation mark green. Then I'll give these the same name on slide one. Then when we run the slide, you can see it smoothly morphs between the shapes, giving a really nice and powerful effect. This can only be done giving these fixed names with two exclamation marks at the beginning, which is called morph object tagging. Using this technique, you can morph from nearly any shape to any other shape across different slides. I'm just going to paste in some examples. Here on these six slides, I have six different shapes, and each one of them is called exclamation, Exclamation mark shape. You can always check the names of these in the selection pane. If it's closed, you can always go back to the home section. And then under a range, we can go to the selection pane and it will make it visible. Again, these are all called exclamation. Exclamation mark shape. That will be the same for the shape on each one of these slides. As long as when you select all these slides and go to transitions, the morph is selected. It will smoothly morph between all the shapes. Now if I run it from slide three and then advance, you can see it smoothly morph between the shapes, which gives a really nice effect. It's easy to change any of these shapes at any time. Once they're working with morph object tagging, you can simply go to Shape, format, edit shape, change shape, and then pick any shape you want to from these available shapes. Powerpoint will then automatically morph between the shapes. You can see that Powerpoint will automatically fade between the colors as well. Whatever color we make this as we play through it, Powerpoint will smoothly fade between the colors while changing the shape with morph. 47. Summary: Congratulations on finishing this course. I hope you found many of these tips and tricks useful, and you can implement them to speed up your workflow. I also hope you found some inspiration in the ideas shown, and now you can put this into practice to create some amazing slides. If you've enjoyed the course, please leave a review. And if you have any feedback, please get in touch.