PowerPoint For Beginners - Create Professional Slides Easily | Alan Lomer | Skillshare
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PowerPoint For Beginners - Create Professional Slides Easily

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

      2:23

    • 2.

      Interface Basics

      3:36

    • 3.

      Styling A Simple Title Slide

      10:25

    • 4.

      Creating An Agenda Slide

      9:18

    • 5.

      Formatting A Text List

      6:17

    • 6.

      Enhance A Text Slide Using Panels

      8:26

    • 7.

      A Photo And Text Slide

      11:31

    • 8.

      Simple Bar Chart

      10:25

    • 9.

      Team Members Slide

      11:47

    • 10.

      Comparison Table

      10:58

    • 11.

      Using Video Clips

      8:25

    • 12.

      Add Impact With Icons

      10:52

    • 13.

      SmartArt Diagrams

      6:08

    • 14.

      Compile The Slide Show

      6:31

    • 15.

      Completing The Course

      0:39

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About This Class

This beginner's guide is designed to help you get started with PowerPoint, even if you have little to no prior experience with the software. Whether you're a student gearing up for a presentation, a professional looking to enhance your communication skills, or someone simply interested in learning a new tool, you've come to the right place.

We'll walk you through the basics of PowerPoint, from navigating the interface to creating slides, adding content, and delivering your presentation. Even if you've never used PowerPoint before, don't worry – we'll walk you through everything you need to know to create polished and professional presentations.

We'll take you through many widely used slide concepts, and give you clear step by step instructions on how to create each layout. All of the examples are included for download.

We will help you understand:

  • Text formatting and alignment

  • The various interface views and layouts

  • How to format the slide background

  • The Format Painter and how it will save you time

  • The stock photo & SmartArt libraries

  • How to crop and resize a photo and combine it with text

  • The various chart types, how to edit the chart data and customize the chart

  • Tables and the various size, margin and border settings

  • How to use icons and different styling options

  • Slide layouts, the slide master and choosing a colour theme

  • Adding simple entrance animations

  • Various ways of inserting video clips

  • Video sizing, formatting and playback options

  • How to re-order you slides and add presenting notes

  • Re-using your slides and copy and pasting between presentations

  • How to include transitions between slides

You'll learn essential tips, tricks, and best practices to create slides that captivate your audience and effectively convey your ideas.

By the end of this course you'll gain knowledge and confidence to produce professional-quality presentations in no time.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

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: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Course Introduction: Thank you. This beginners course is designed to help you get started with PowerPoint by taking you through many widely used slide concepts. Each one showing you how to use specific features and functions, even if you have no prior experience with the software. We'll walk you through the basics of PowerPoint from navigating the interface to creating slides with text, images, charts, graphs, videos, and animations. We will give you clear step by step instructions on how to create each layout. We'll start by creating a simple title slide from scratch. We will cover text formatting and alignment and how to format a slide background. Building this agenda slide will help you understand slide layouts, the slide master, and choosing a color theme. We will also investigate the stock photo and Smart art libraries. We will format a text slide and cover the basics of alignment, distribution, and text margins. The format painter will allow you to format multiple items quickly and consistently. I will show you how to crop and resize a photo from the stock library and combine it with text. I will cover the drop a tool and show you the importance of maintaining clarity. We will look at the various chart types at how to edit the chart data, and how to customize and improve the look of the chart. Tables can be used for many layout tasks in PowerPoint, and here we will compare two products and cover the various size, margin, and border settings. We will look at the various ways of inserting video clips onto your slides and the various sizing, formatting, and playback options. We will use icons and Smart art to show simple visual representations and add interest to your content. Finally, I will also show you how to reorder your slides, add presenting notes, reuse your slides, copy and paste between presentations, and other basic uses of the interface. Even if you've never used PowerPoint before, don't worry. We'll walk you through everything you need to know. By the end of this course, you'll be able to easily create polished and professional presentations in PowerPoint. 2. Interface Basics: When you open the PowerPoint application, it will look like this. You can open an existing presentation, but we're going to start a new blank presentation, which you can do by clicking here. We're straight into what's called the normal view. Here, we can edit slides and navigate thumbnails on the left hand side. This is a title slide that's been put in by default, for example, I can click to add title and type slide one. To add in a new slide. I can go up to the top on the home section of the ribbon, click on new slide, and choose one of the available layouts. I'm going to choose title and content and type slide two here, and bullet text here. To add another slide, I can go up to the top and choose new slide again. Or while slide two is selected, I can press Control D, or right click and choose duplicate slide to make an exact copy of that slide. I can now type slide three on this. And if we want to rearrange any of our slides, I can simply click on this slide in the sorter on the left and drag it up. To put this slide back, I can press Control Z, which will undo the previous action. To play these slides. We can go here where it says slide show and click, and that will play from the currently selected slide. Or if you press F five, it will play from the beginning. You can also go to slide show and from beginning in the ribbon. Using the cursor keys or clicking on the slide will advance. Pressing escape will get you back to the normal view. At the bottom, there are also another couple of views. This one here is the slide sorter, and you can use that to get an overview of your slides and also see some other details. Slides can also be arranged in here. I'll press Control Z again to undo that and deleted, copied, or have other things applied to them, such as transitions. If we go back to the bottom, we can choose this option here, which takes us back to the normal view. In this bottom window, we can type notes by clicking and typing directly into this area. These notes are not visible when the presentation is played. And when you roll over this line, you can size this up or down. If you size it right to the bottom, it will hide the notes in the normal view. We can get them back by rolling over the area until it shows an up and down arrow, clicking and dragging up. We can navigate between our slides, either by clicking on these thumbnails or by pressing page down and page up, or by using the mouse wheel. You can zoom in and out of your slides by clicking on this bar and dragging it left or right. You can also hold down control and use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. 3. Styling A Simple Title Slide: In this lesson, I'll be showing you how you can create powerful title slides such as this. So when we start a new presentation, we'll go to File, New, and choose blank. You can see that the default layout is a title slide, where it says, click to add Title is a placeholder, and click to Add subtitle is also another placeholder. So if I click in this box, I can now type in the title. There's my title. And now I can click to add the subtitle. So the first thing we could do is change it to a font we like and add bold where we think it would improve the text. So if we click on this top part of the title, make sure that either all of the text is selected or the box by clicking on one of the circles on the outside, and then we can choose any font we want. If you type the first few characters, it will go to that font. And I'm going to choose fig tree Extra bold. And for this font. Again, you can either click and drag to select all the text or simply click on one of the circles or the line outside to select the whole box. Then go to the fonts drop down on the home section of the ribbon. Type the first few characters of the font you want, or find it in the drop down list and click. I also want to make this subtitle a little smaller. And to do that, we can click on this smaller A here. When you roll over that, you'll see it says what it does, decrease font size. You can also use control shift and left arrow. You can even just use control and left square bracket. If you want to move these up or down, you can hold down shift and click on the text above, and now that's selected both. And while both are selected, if I wanted to move them up or down, while keeping the position across the same, I can hold down shift, click, and then drag my mouse up or down. If I want to add any more text, I can go to the drawing box, click on Text box, and click to add it anywhere. Type in the text. Click to make sure it's all selected. I'll change it to the same font. Then I'll go to a range that's also on the drawing section, a line and a line center. To see it full screen at any point. We can either click this button here, which says slide show in the bottom right hand corner, or press F five. Pressing Escape, will get you back to the slide editor. If you'd like to change the color of the background, we can right click anywhere and choose format background. A menu will pop up at the side. And now we can choose a different color for the background. I'm going to pick this blue. When designing slides with text, contrast is very important. If we have a dark background, I'd usually like a white text or a very light text. And if I have a light background, I would usually use black or a very dark text, and we can select all of the text to change it to white all at once. To do that, we can either click on one, hold down shift, and click on another. And while shift is still held down, click on the third one. And then to change it to white, we can go to this little A here in the font section, click to drop it down and choose white. The other way of selecting it would be to hold your mouse down anywhere on the slide and drag across. And then let go, and they'll all be selected. If you wanted to add something like a gradient fill, you have the options here. In the format background section that we revealed earlier. We can go to something like gradient fill, and that will allow you to select different colors. And in this example, it goes from a darker blue to a lighter blue at the top. But we can change that to any color we want. If you want to add a picture into the background, we can select picture or texture fill from this format background option. If I click insert, you can choose the picture from anyway you want. But stock images is a good option if you have PowerPoint 365. I click here. You can type in anything into this box, such as blue texture. Click there, and then click insert, and it will add in this nice full screen background. You can also add some basic effects to this text. See if we click on it, click on the corner to make sure it's all selected. Go to something like shape effects and shadow. We can select offset bottom right, which is the first preset, which adds a basic drop shadow. F five again, to view the slide full screen. For our last part of the graphic, I'll show you how you can add a panel behind the text to make it stand out even more. So while on the home section of the ribbon, in drawing, there's this option, rectangle. We can click it. Then by clicking and dragging, we're effectively drawing a rectangle over this whole title. You can let go, and afterwards, you can adjust it by moving these handles. I want this to be black. So I'm going to select the color from this right hand format shape menu and choose black. I also don't want it to have an outline. So I click on the line section. More options are revealed, and I can choose no line. I do want it to have some transparency, which is effectively the amount that you can see through it. And you can either drag this slider up or type in the number into the box. I'm going to choose 70%, but I do want it to be behind the text to make the text as clear as possible, and to do that. We just have to right click on our shape. Go to where it says center back and click. I'm also just going to align it to the center. And because we're already in the shape format section of the ribbon, I can go to a line and a line center. That looks good. But if, for example, you wanted something like a rounded corner rectangle, it's easy to change without having to redraw it. So as we're already on the shape format, section of the ribbon, we can go to edit shape in the insert shape section, change shape. And this second one here is a rounded corner rectangle. This little yellow dot will allow you to adjust how round the corners are. So if I drag it to the right, it increases the amount of roundness. If I drag it to the left, it decreases. I also think I want to move the title down very slightly, so I can click anywhere, drag over the whole title, and let go. Then, as long as you hold down shift, you can click on this and drag it up and down to move it into the position you want. That looks good. And finally, we'll add a small bit of animation to reveal the title in a nice way. And so for this, I'm going to add a Zoom animation to the panel, then the text will fade out. To do that, we can just click on the panel. Click on Animations in the top menu bar, and all these different animations will appear. I'm going to choose Zoom. Then I'll click on this text, and choose Fade. Click on this text and choose Fade. And click on this text and choose Fade. We've now added four animations that you can see by the numbers on these little tooltips here. One is the panel, T is this unlocking text, three is the subtitle, and four is the presentation by text. While you're in the animation section of the ribbon, in the advanced animation section, there's a button called animation pane. When you click this, it will toggle the animation pane visible or not visible. So we'll click to make it visible. Now you can see the order that everything's appearing in, and all I want to do is make sure these all happen one after the other. So I can either click on each one of them and click on Start and choose after previous, or I can click on the first one. Hold down shift. Click on the last one. Go to where it says, start and select after previous. Now you can see a nice timeline of everything that's going to happen in the animation. First of all, the panel will zoom in, then the title will fade in, then the subtitle, then the text box at the bottom. So if we press the five to play this, you can see the animations happening in the order we've set. 4. Creating An Agenda Slide: In this lesson, I'll show you how to create a simple agenda slide from basic text using the inbuilt Smart art feature. If we right to click on this slide, we can go to the layout option. Here, the second option is called Title and Content. If we click that, We'll have a placeholder for a title and a placeholder for some content below. This is the default layout from the slide Master. If you go to view, Slide Master, you'll see the different layouts that are available by default. In the previous lesson, we used this title slide layout, and in this one, we're going to be using title and content layout. So we can close the master view. Now I'm quickly going to add some content. I'll click to add title. I've just quickly pasted in some text, and then click to add text here, and I've pasted in four bullets. Now we have these. We can click to make sure it's selected. Right click and choose Convert to Smart art. If we go to more Smart art graphics, then the second option list, we'll have all of these available. You can choose any one you want. But for this example, we'll be looking at a horizontal bullet list and click. So this can work quite nicely for your agenda, especially if you have additional subtext in the section below. So now I'm going to quickly type in some text. Now I'm going to make the text in those a little bit smaller. And to do that, I can make sure this box is selected by clicking on one of the outside circles, and then clicking this A with the down arrow above it, which makes the text smaller. I'll do the same for this one for this one. And finally, this one, I'm going to select a new font. For the title, I'm going to select fig tree. And you can choose a new font, either by typing the name of the font you want to use in the box. Sometimes you only need the first few characters, or by clicking this drop down arrow and choosing it from a list. I'm also going to make this bold. And there not on the font color section, I'm going to choose one of the theme colors, which is this dark teal color. I also want to change the font for this. So I'll click to make sure it's selected, click on one of the outer handles to make sure everything is selected, and then change the font name here. I'm also going to line all the text to the left. To do that, I can go to this section here in paragraph and click a line left or press Control A. So from any of the options to change color, we have the theme colors available. And to change these, you can choose design. Then go to the variant section, click this down arrow, and then colors. These are all the default ones. You can choose customize at the bottom if you wish to change them. For now, we're going to stick with the default ones. I'm going to choose this one called green. When you choose a different color theme, anything that used the previous color theme in your presentation will change to the new one. Now we can choose different colors for different boxes from our color theme. So we can click to make sure it's selected, then go to shape fill. Pick a color, and also change the outline in this case because this has an outline to the same color. Now we can pick another color for this. And again, change the outline to the same color. Then finally, this one. And for this title, I'm going to choose this darker green at the top, and finally align it to the middle. To do that, you can either click center in this paragraph section or control A. This looks good but as the four boxes below are still smart, we can easily change these to different styles. To show these, I'm going to quickly remove this subtext. Now once the Smart art is selected. We can go to Smart art Design, and then choose any other option. You can choose whichever layout you like. But often the simpler ones work best, such as this Trapezium list. Once it is selected, I'm going to take the size of the text down slightly, so it all fits on. Clicking at the bottom middle here and dragging up to resize slightly. Then click on each of the shapes individually and set vertical alignment to middle. That looks good. I'd like main topics to be on two lines, so it looks the same as the others. And to do that, I can just click to put the cursor in front of the T. Then hold down shift and press return. This looks good. But if you want to change any of the shapes, you can click on these, go to format, change shape, and then pick anything from here. I'm going to pick the second option in, which is called rectangle rounded corners. I could do the same for all of these shapes. I just want to take the text down set fits in. If we go back to Smart art Design, some of these layouts will allow you to use photos. So if you choose more layouts, there's a section called picture. And for this example, we'll choose bending picture, semi transparent text, and click k. Again, I'm going to take the size of the text down so it fits nicely. While it's selected, we can size it down to ten. I don't need the return here anymore. And now I can choose any pictures I want for these by clicking on this little icon in the middle. You can select any image you want. PowerPoint will load it in and crop it and size it to make it look good. If you want to change the color of any of these boxes, you can click on them and change them to any color you want. For example, this one is quite difficult to see. So we can click on that. You can either adjust the transparency here or change the color. So if we go to shape fill, I can pick any color for this one. These boxes are all aligned to the middle, as we can see if we go right click, Mat shape, text options. And then this option here for textbox, that it's aligned to the middle. But because it has a return in it, it's actually pushing it up to the top. So if I click here, press delete, you can see it's now aligning it to the middle. To make sure you press delete on the line that's down at the bottom. Now, everything is vertically aligned to the middle. Pressing Shift F five, will play the slide show from this slide. These look good. But that's a final option. We're just going to add animation. So as the presenter clicks, each one comes out one by one. To do that, while it's selected, we can go to animations, choose Fade, and importantly, under effect options, choose one by one. I'll click animation pane here, and then click these dots, and it will tell you what's happening. But basically, you have four clicks, and each one of them will reveal one of these. So when we play this with Shift F five to play the slide, each time I click, one of these fades on. 5. Formatting A Text List: Let's look at how to lay out a slide, that is a simple list of text content. So we'll start with this layout, which you can get to by going to new slide, title and content. I'll type in our title. And then we can type in our text. I'm just going to quickly pay them in to save time. So now to format it and make it look a little clearer. We can use things like colors and bold text, as well as adjusting the line spacing and putting them in columns. So, firstly, we'll choose a color scheme. And to do that, we can go to design variance colors, and I'm going to pick violet two. We can now set the default fonts. So for that, under the design section again, click this drop down arrow under variance, go to Fonts, and choose customized fonts. I can pick a font I want for the heading and a font I want for the body, and it will display in this sample window. We can also type this in. So I'm going to choose fig tree Extra bold for the titles. And fig tory for the body. You can also save these if you want. I'm going to call it fitory. Now I'm going to change this to a numbered list. Firstly, I want to make sure it's all selected. So we can either click at the beginning and drag across to select everything. Or once you click inside the box, you can then click on one of these outer circles, and that will select everything as well. Once that's selected, make sure we're on the home section of the ribbon, and in the paragraph area, we can click on this option here, which creates a numbered list. Now I'm going to select the first words of each by holding down the mouse here and dragging across and then change it to one of my predefined colors. And I'm also going to make this bold by clicking this B here. You can also press Control B. Now I'm going to select this one, change the color again. Control B for bold, and the same again here and below. Now I'm going to add a return so that the description for each part is underneath. If we just click, to add the mouse cursor here and press return, you'll see it adds another number because it thinks that that's what we want to do. But we want to add a soft return, so we can press backspace to get this back to where it was, or controls to do, and then hold down shift and press return. We'll just do that for these other three. Shift and return each time. You'll see how the text size has reduced slightly. This is because the shrink tex on overflow setting is the default. I'll show you where that is. If I write click and then choose format shape. We can go to text options and then text box. And here's the option. Shrink text on overflow. So the more text that's in it, it will actually shrink the size of the text to fit in the box. This can be a useful tool to prevent your text from going out of the slide or the box. But in this example, we will turn it off so we can have full control over the size of the text. So for that, I'm going to choose do not auto fit. Now once it's all selected, I can take this down to 16 by either typing or pressing the down arrow. That's the size I want my body text. I'd like the four subtitles to be bigger. So I can select them and then press up up and up three times on each. You can also use control and write square bracket. Or you can go to this box that pops up here and increase font size or type it in this box. We're now going to change the line spacing, so we can click on our text, click on one of the outer circles to make sure it's all selected, and then go to the spacing options which are here or here. So we can click this dropdown. Choose one of the presets that it will show you a preview for, or click line spacing options, which will take you to the same place as this arrow here. I'm going to change the line spacing to one and the spacing before to 18. This is the amount of spacing that is before each of the numbers. So if I click okay, you'll see that it's added a small gap in between each of the numbers, which makes it clearer to read and easier to understand. This looks good, but we could also put it in two columns if we wanted to. So we can click on the text. Then go to text options, text box, and then at the bottom, there's a button called Columns. If we click on that, I can type two columns, and I want some spacing between the columns. I'll click two for that as well. And finally, we can click here and press return to move number three into the next column. And I want to move this down a bit, so I can click here. Hold down shift, which will lock the exposition and drag down. Okay. 6. Enhance A Text Slide Using Panels: Now, we'll look at having some panels on the screen to put your text content into. So firstly, we'll move this text out the way. I'll hold down shift and drag it to the right. Now I can scroll back over to here. Go to the drawing section in the home part of the ribbon and click on a rectangle. For this, you can also go to insert, shapes, and choose rectangle. Now you can either just click somewhere, which will add a square. Or if I now go back to the rectangle tool and select it again, click and hold down the mouse, and drag it out until it's the size I want it to be, and then let go of the mouse. I can now duplicate this shape. Control D. Drag it into the position I want. You'll see these smart guides appear. And then when I drop it by letting go of the mouse, the next time I press Control D, it will duplicate in exactly the right place, and then finally, control D again. To align all of these into the middle. I can click on the first one, hold down shift while clicking the others, when they're all selected, control G to group. Then go to a range, align, a line center. I'm also going to center the title, so I can click on the title, then go to this option here, Center text. For these panels, I can now ungroup them. Group group. And while they're still selected, I can go to Shape Outline and select no outline, and then shape fill and select this light color here. Now I'm going to paste in the text from the text that I moved over to the right into one of the boxes. So we can select that. Control C to copy. Go back to our box, and then control V to paste. That's now pasted the text into this box, so it's just one item. I want the text to be black. Foe font size, so I'm going to click in there in type 14 and also centered. I don't want it to be a numbered list, so I'm going to click here to turn that off. I also want this to be 28 point, so I'll select it and click up to size it to 28. And I also don't want the colon, so I can click and delete that. Now we can right click, choose format shape, text options, text box, and change the margins as we wish. I'm going to change these to 0.5. And clicking tab on the keyboard, we'll move you to the next box. 0.5. The top I'm going to set to 2 centimeters. And finally, I want to choose vertical alignment top. I'm going to click here in front of the W, press back space, and then click return to create a nice space between the subtitle and the body text. I'm now going to do that for the others. So I'm going to select them. Control C to copy, select the box, Control V to paste. Now, we've already got the formatting for the margins and the colors correct in box one. We can just use the format painter to copy that across to the others. And if I want to apply the format to both of these, I can double click the format painter, click once, click twice, then press escape. Now I want to select this and make it 14 point. I not bold. Then delete the colon. Go to the first character here, press backspace, and then return. Just going to select these and do the same thing. Now these look good, especially because the body text always starts at the same vertical position. I'm going to change these title colors. And to do that, you can either click on the left and drag a cross, or because they're one word, you can double click on it, and it will select it. And now you can change the color as you wish. Just do that for these other ones as well. And finally, for this slide, I'm going to add a circle with a number in to put above this at the top part of the box. So to do that, we go to drawing. We click on O val, and then clicking anywhere will create a perfect circle. I now one, and it will put the number one in there. I can make it smaller by holding down shift while clicking and dragging on one of the corners. That's a good size. I also want to make this bold and have no outline. So I'll go to shape outline and select no outline. This is already in the right position. But if it wasn't, if it's down here, for example, I can just click and drag, and it will show the smart guides as you get into the right position. Now we can duplicate this for the other three circles. Control D, drag it into position. Let go, and before you press anything else, control D and control D, again, we'll put the other two in the right position. Now we can change the colors and type in the different numbers. Between click in type two, three, four. I can also click on these panels and resize them slightly because they're a bit longer than they need to be. And to do all of those at the same time, we first select one of the panels, hold down shift, and click on all the others. Then if I click in this middle one of any of the panels, I can drag up to where I want it to be, which is about there. I can now click anywhere on the slide, drag across, make sure they're all covered, hold down shift, and drag them down. And now when we press F five to view this slide, it all looks good. If we wanted to add some simple animation, I could make sure nothing selected by clicking anywhere on the slide. Then click on the circle, go to animations, and choose something like Zoom. Then click on the box, and choose something like Fade. I want it to start after previous. So I'll just play that so you can see the first one animating. So when you click, the circle will zoom in, and the box will fade. We can apply that to the others. So you click on the circle, go to animations. Click Zoom. Click on the box, Fade, and choose after previous. Just do that for these last two, Zoom for the circle, Fade for the box, making sure that you choose after previous. You can also click on the animation pane. It will reveal the animations you've added and show you the order they're in and allow you to make changes. The final one, soon for the circle, Fade for the box and start after previous. Now, if you run that slide from the beginning, each click will oom up one of the circles and fade in the box underneath. 7. A Photo And Text Slide: Here, we will create a slide with some text and a photo. So we'll start with the layout that's title and content. We'll type our title and I'll quickly paste in some text. So firstly, I want to change the background color. So we can right click anywhere. Go to format background. It's on solid fill. Select color, and then choose any color that we like the look of. Now I want to change the font for both of these, so we can click to select the first one. Hold down shift, and click on the other block of text. Now we can select the font we want. I'm going to choose fig tree. And for this top one, I'm going to use the extra bold variation. For this text, I want it to be size 18. So make sure it's all selected by pressing one of the circles on the outside. Then go to this text selection. We can actually click in here and just type 18. Now if I click on this circle in the vertical center and drag it across, it will resize it to a smaller wrapped paragraph. I also don't want this to have a bullet, so I can go into the poagraph section and click on this toggle, and it will remove the bullet. I also want this text to be wrapped. And now I can move this bottom bit down. So if I hold down shift and then click on this outline, I can move the mouse down, and it will lock the x position. So effectively, it will allow me to move it up and down while keeping it in the same position across the slide. I also want to move this one down a bit. Again, hold down shift, click my mouse down, and drag the mouse down. Now we can add a photo, so we'll go to Insert, pictures, stock images. I'm going to type mountains. Click on any image you like, and click insert. We can align this to the right side of the slide by going to the arranged section, clicking on a line, and choosing a line right. We can now crop the image to half of the width. For this, it helps to have the ruler turned on. Here's my ruler here. But if it isn't turned on, you can always go to view, make sure that ruler is ticked. Now I go to picture format and choose Crop. Or we can just right click and use the menu above crop. Dragging the black handles that are either corner points or straight points, will crop the image or dragging the circles that are just outside the black handles, will resize the image. So I want this black handle here. So I'll just carefully roll over, and now I can drag it to the right. I want to snap it just there, where it's a zero on the ruler. That is exactly half the screen. So now that's cropped, but I also want to adjust the image, so the focus is on the center, which on this is this person standing on the rock. And to do that, I can hold down shift, click with the mouse, keep it held down, and move across. That's about right. Now we can press return, and the image will be cropped correctly and in the right position. So I'll just press Shift five to run the slide show of that. I want to change where my text wraps very slightly, so I can click on this and bring it in a little bit more. I would also like to increase the line spacing, which is basically the gap between each of these lines vertically. To do that, we can go up to the paragraph section. Click on this drop down. You can choose any of these presets, or you can go to line spacing options, but you can type in exactly what you want. At the moment, we have ten point spacing before a paragraph and zero point after and a line spacing of uh 0.9. You can select different options in here. But often, I will use multiple and just adjust it until I think it looks good. So something like 1.2, it's normally a nice slightly spaced option that looks good on text like this. I think that looks really good, and it's nice and easy to read. It's important to provide enough contrast between the text and the background. So where we've used this light blue and the dark text, that's a good amount of contrast. If, for example, we chose a dark background such as this, I would recommend using a bright colored text. So for the title, we could click on this, click on the outer circle to make sure it's all selected. Then go to my text color and choose a nice light color. And for this text, I could do the same but choose a white color. So that looks really good, and it provides enough contrast. We could also fade these in one at a time. So if we click on the first one, hold down Shift, click on the second. While shift is still held down, click on the image. Then go to animations and choose Fade and set the start to after previous. And then under advanced animation, if we click on animation pane, we'll see the order, things will come out. I can click on the title, which will fade up for half a second. Then the welcome text, which will fade up for half a second, then the picture. Your photos don't have to be rectangular. They can be cropped to any shape. So, for example, if we click on this photo, go to picture format, crop and cropped shape, we can select any shape we'd like to use for this here. If we zoom out a little bit, either by pressing the minus here or holding down control and using your mouse wheel to move down, we can see this little yellow dot, and you can click on this and drag it to the left, and that will adjust the crop. At any point, you can remove the crop or change the shape. We're going to crop and selecting rectangle. Another impact for way to use photos is using a photo covering the entire slide. So I'm going to delete this image and then add it in again as a background. So I'll click on this image to make sure it's selected. Click delete. Then right, click on the background, and choose format background, and go over to the right and select picture or texture fill. Then insert stock images, and we'll find the same image. That's nice. But there are some challenges with readability here because there are some light parts of the photo, and it makes it a bit harder to read the text. If you want to use a full screen image and put text over the top, it's important to choose an image that works well. So if we go back to insert over the side here, stock images, I'm going to type camping night and then click on this photo here, and insert. Now, we can move the text over to the right. To do that, I can click on the text, hold down shift, select the other text. Then hold down shift, and as I drag to the right, it will lock the position. I'm going to make all the text white. Then just select this part, and make it bold by clicking the B in the font section, making it one size smaller. Clicking on this top part, hold down shift and drag down. And for the title, we can drag it down to here. Now we're using the darker areas of the photo, to put the white text on, to help with its readability, while still having a lot of impact and emotion in the photo. If we did want to stick with the original photo, there are some other options to help make this more readable. If we click on this text, click on the circle outside, I can actually fill this in with a color such as black. Now we can change the transparency of this black and to do that. We want to make sure it's selected, and we go to format shape, and this box will appear at the side. And under the fill options for the shape options, we can adjust the transparency, either by dragging this slider to the right or by selecting this and typing. I'm going to select 30%, which works quite well because we can see the photo coming through, but the text is very clear and easy to read. However, the text comes very close to the edge, and I think it's better with a margin. And to do that, while the format shape options are open, we can go to text options, and then this text box option below, and I can type in whatever I want for these margins. So I'm going to select 1 centimeter for each To do this, I can just type one and press tab, and it will move to the next box. So that's a nice margin around all other text. I'm just going to move the box up very slightly. Now when I press F five. That works well, and it's very clear to read. If we wanted to, we could also move it to the other side. Again, we roll over it, hold down shift. Then click with the mouse and keep the mouse down and drag to the right. We could do the same with the title. We could also make the title darker to make that stand out. And one thing that I like to do here is to choose a color that's from the photo. So, for example, while this is selected, we can go to font font color. Then roll down to where it says, eye dropper. Click on that. And then wherever I click now, it will take the color from that, such as this dark teal part of the water. So Shift F five, we'll run our slide. If we wanted to, as an alternative, we could use a lighter colored text box. So this time, I could click on the box, go to Shape Fill and select white. And for the text, I could use black. And if we wanted to, we can make it bold. And we always have the option under the shape option section and fill of adjusting the transparency as we choose. So higher up, you'll better see through it more and lower down, it will be more opaque. 8. Simple Bar Chart: In this lesson, we will create a bar chart that is impactful and can tell a story. So we'll start with the default layout, which is title and content. I'll click to add title and type this in. And in the center of the box that says, click to add text. There are a number of icons. This one on the second row on the far right, inserts a chart. There are many different variations of chart that you can add, such as Pie chart, line chart, and so many others. We're going to start with the first one that's selected to give you an idea of how you can start with a default chart and make some simple improvements to be able to clearly show your data. So if we click on k, that will add the default chart in. This window here is where we can add the data to be displayed on the chart. If we change any of these numbers, it will instantly be reflected on the chart. If you close this window, you can get back to it at any time by right clicking on the chart and choosing edit data. We can resize this by going to the bottom corner and dragging down. And the blue area that's selected here is the data that's displayed in the chart. So you could have a large set of data and then isolate a smaller set of values to display. For simplicity, I will resize this box, so we just have the first series of data. To do that, you can click on this bottom right hand corner and drag it over to the left, and then let go. To add more text or data, you can simply type into the relevant boxes, and PowerPoint will expand the selection as you type in the text or data. So for this example, I will add the months into Column A, which is the first column, and then the sales figures into Column B, which is the second column. So in column A, I'll make sure that I'm selected on Category one and start typing in the months. Each time, pressing return to go to the next line. Now I can enter my data in the second column, which is column B. Now we can close this window. And while the graph is selected, I'm going to type in the font I want to use which is fig tree Extra bold. I also want the title to be in fig tree Extra Bold. So I'll click to select the title. Then click on one of these outer circle handles and type fig tree Extra bold in the box. You can also press this down arrow and go to one of the recently used fonts, which is fig tree Extra Bold. Yeah. I'm going to change the background by right clicking on the background, and choosing format background, then going to solid fill and selecting this mid gray here. Now I want this text to be white, so I'll select it, and then go up to font color and choose white. I also want this text to be white, so I'll make sure the whole graph is selected by clicking it and then clicking this out to handle, and then going to white. Now we can remove some of the elements that we don't need. For example, this title here says Series one, but we have the title above that we want. So we can click on it. Then click delete. The same for the legend at the bottom here. Click on it, and click Delete. I also want these months on the horizontal access to be bigger, so I can click on them and then go to the increased font size button and adjust it to whatever I want. I'm going to use 24 point. I also want to add some data labels on the top of each of these bars. To do that, when the graph is selected, we can go to this plus button in the top right of the graph that can add, remove or change the chart elements. I want to add data labels. Now I've added them. I can get rid of the vertical axis, so I can click on them, click delete and the same for these grid lines. So I can click on them to select them and click delete. I'm now going to change the color of these bars, so I can click on the bars and select this bright orange. I'm also going to reduce the gap in between the bars, which you can do by clicking on the bars, and going to format data series. If this box isn't shown on the right, we can always right click and choose Format Data Series. I'm going to change the gap width to 50%. I'm also going to increase the font size of these data labels, so we can click on them and then press increase font size. I'm going to make these 18 point. Now let's adjust how these display, to make them clearer, and make the message stronger. So we need to go to format data labels, which is shown on the right. And if it's not, you can always click on the data label and then select format data labels, and this will appear on the side. If we click to reveal number, we have an option for format code. There are many different options available here. And in format code, we can type in anything we want. So I'm going to type in that I want to pound sign. Then a hash symbol, which is the number that's shown for the data that we have, then a 0.0, a comma, and a K. So when I add this, we can now clearly see what all the values are. So by displaying these figures in thousands of pounds, it makes it very easy to see what we're presenting. We can also highlight individual figures if we choose to. For example, if I wanted to highlight these lower summer months, I could click to select all the bars, then click again just on the individual bar and then go to the color and change it. I can now click on this single bar and do the same and this single bar and do the same. So by changing those colors, I've highlighted them, and it will allow your audience to focus in on this specific data. I'm actually going to add in a panel to draw attention to this. So if we go to the drawing menu at the top and choose a rectangle with rounded corners, and then drag this out. I'm going to fill this in with a lighter gray. No shape outline. Then type out my message. I want to make this all fitory. So I'll click on the outside, and I can go to my recently used fonts. I'm going to make this bit not so bold and just use the standard fity. I'm also going to make it a little bit smaller. And then this ale bit bigger. Finally, I'm just going to use a triangle to actually draw attention to this area below. So for that, we go to the drawing menu, click on triangle. Click anywhere. I want to turn this around, so I can hold down shift. Click on the circular arrow at the top and drag the mouse around. And I also want it to be a bit smaller, so I can hold down shift and drag in from the side. I'm also going to make this a very light color. White will do, shape outline, none. I'm now going to position this in the middle and then drag this into the middle, holding down shift. If you want, you can resize this triangle. To whatever size do you think looks good? I could click on this center dot at the top and drag down, and that would make a slightly flatter arrow. That looks good. Now I can select the box, hold down shift, select the arrow, and control G. We'll group these together for when we add the animation. So if I click on the graph, go to animations and add something like a wipe. I can change the effect options to make these come in by element in series. So one at a time. I think these look better when they appear a bit quicker. And to change that. We can make sure that the animation paint is selected as it should be if you've just added the animation. And I can click these arrows here to expand the contents, and you'll see that everything's selected. That's all of these bars. I can change the duration to something like a quarter of a second. So now when I run that, each bar will appear in about a quarter of a second. I'm also going to change the start to after previous. That will mean that everything happens automatically. That looks good. I want the final thing to appear to be this panel. For this, I'm going to add an animation that's a Zoom. So if I was presenting this slide, I'd say, here's a comparison of the monthly sales revenue. And you'll notice that sales revenue is low during the summer months. Using the methods of highlighting individual data, deleting elements that aren't needed and using things like panels to highlight key messages can really bring your slides to life and help you visualize your story. 9. Team Members Slide: Now, let's create a team members slide. A team member slide is a common layout in business presentations that introduces your core team members and their expertise. It is similar to the previously created text list layout, but this time we'll be dealing with team photos and making sure they look clear and consistent. So from new blank presentation, we'll right click, choose layout. And for this, we can just choose title only as the rest of it is going to be manually created. So we'll click to add title. Type in our title. I want to center that. So I click on one of the outer circles, and go to home and choose this center inside the paragraph menu or press Control e. Because we set the default fonts last time, we can go to design and under variance, choose fonts, and select the fig tree combination that we created in a previous lesson. I'm also going to go back to variance and choose a color theme. For this, I'm going to pick Violet two. Now we can set the colors. So I'll right click on the background, choose format background, go to solid fill, and pick one of the colors. I'm just going to pick a dark version of this blue. And now I want to make the title white. So I can click on it, click on any circle on the outside. Then go to home. And in this font section, click on the colors, and choose white. For this example, we're going to have five team members and to set up where the text goes for this, I'm going to go to the drawing section and choose a rounded corner rectangle, which is the second option in rectangles. Now I can click and drag it. I can use this little yellow dot. Click on it and drag it to the left to reduce how rounded the corners are. We don't have to get the size exactly right because we can resize them in a minute. But that's pretty close to the size we want for each of these five team members. I'm going to start by setting this to a black fill, so we can go up to shape fill, choose black, and shape outline. No outline. Now press Control D, which will create a duplicate. And when I drag it into position, you'll see the smart guides appear. And when I let go, if I now press Control D, Control D and Control D, I'll now have five panels. We can select all of these by clicking off them, dragging across all of them, and then letting go and either right clicking and going to group and group or pressing Control G. Now, if I hold down shift, click and drag from the top right corner, I resize them so they'll fit on the page. I can now go to a range, a line and a line center, and they'll be centered on the slide. Now we can ungroup them, either by right clicking, going to group, and clicking on Ungroup, or Shift Control G. We can now add some text into each box. And to do that, you can click and type. I'm going to quickly paste in some texts to save time. I would recommend using a similar amount of text for each team member to keep things clear and easy to read. So I'm quickly going to paste in the text that I created earlier for pressing Control V in this box. Then I can click on one of the outer arrows and size it down to the size I want, which for now will be 12. I'm just going to quickly do that to the other panels. Now I want to align the text to the top of the panel. And to do that, we'll click, drag over all the panels. Make sure we've got format shape visible. To do that, you can just right click and hit format object. And then go to text options. Vertical alignment top. Actually want a bigger top margin because I'm going to put the photo up there. So for this section top margin, I'm going to click and type 2.4. Now I'm going to add a photo of one of the team. I'm going to use the inbuilt stock library for this. But when using your own photos, try to use photos with similar lighting, position, and style, to keep it looking professional and consistent. So I'll go to Insert, pictures, stock images. I'm going to type portrait. And click to add that photo and insert. I can click on the top right hand corner and drag across and down to resize this. I can click on it, put it into position, and then go to crop, which is under the picture format section and select an aspect ratio of one to one, which is a square. I can now click off that. I want it to be a tiny bit smaller. So again, I can click on the top right hand corner and drag it down a bit. This is about right. In this designer I want it to be a circle, so I can go back to the picture format menu, back to crop and choose crop to shape and select val. And because we've previously selected an aspect ratio of one to one, it's made it a perfect circle. I can now drag this into position. If you want this to be a bit smaller, you can hold down control and shift and drag from any corner, and that will resize it from the center. I'm now going to select all the panels by clicking and dragging across them. And in format shape. Again, you can always go to format object if this panel is not available. And under format shape, I'm going to choose 80% transparency, which will make the panels blend in nicely with the background. I'm also going to select the name in the roll, so we can go to here, click and hold the mouse down and drag until we get to the end and make this 16 point by clicking the larger A with the little arrow pointing up. Now I just want to select the name, and I'm going to make this a light blue. This provides some contrast between the name and the details and makes everything clearer to read. I'm going to do the same to these. 16 point for each of them, and then make the name blue. Ideally, we'd want each one of these to take up the same amount of lines so that the description of the role starts in exactly the same place. And for that, we can go here, click, and hold down shift and press return. And so for these, we could take down the font size by one to make it. And that would mean they would fit in, and I can also make them bold with control. So I'm going to make these all foe Control B for bold. And again, for this one, shift and return. And that will make sure that the description for each one starts in exactly the right place. I can now make each one of these a light blue color, clicking, selecting, and going to the color. Now, we can create the other photos for the rest of the team members. So we can click on this photo, press Control D to duplicate, and then drag it into position. The smart guides will appear. Control D, will duplicate it again, and control D and Control D again. And I want to make sure these are all at the same height. So I can select them all, go to a range, a line and a line top. Now we have these photos. We can change them, right click on the image, choose change picture, and then if you have the photos on your device, the computer, you can choose this device, but I'm just going to choose them from the stock photos for this example. To make adjustments to this photo, you can right click and choose crop. In this example, I want to make it a little bit bigger so I can hold down control and shift, click on the top right corner circle and drag. This will size up the picture from the center. And then I can click inside and drag down. So it's in the right position. I want to make the heads on each of the people about the same size. It doesn't have to be exact, but getting as close as possible will give you a better result. So again, hold down control and shift to size from the center, click on the corner circle, and drag up. That's about right. Now, I'll just hold down shift and drag down. So on the next picture. Again, click on the picture, right, click on it, change picture, and then choose your new picture. If you want to make the picture bigger or smaller, or adjust the cropping, you can right click, go to crop, and then hold down control and shift and drag from the corner to size up and move it about by dragging up down, left or right inside. We'll do the same for these last two. Right click, crop, hold down shift, and drag to the right. If we play the slide show now, these look really good. But if you wanted them to come up one by one, for example, on a click, we want to group the photo and the panel as one item. And to do that, you can either click and drag over both of them and press Control G, or you can click on the ph and then hold down shift and click on the panel and then contro G to. Control G, Control G, Control G. Now we want to select all of them. Go to animations fade and set start to be on click. Now when we play the slide show, each click will reveal each team member. 10. Comparison Table: Tables are a useful tool for presenting text information and numerical data. They are made up of cells arranged in rows and columns, and have a lot of customization options. Before we add this table, we'll quickly go to design. Click on this drop down box in the variance section. Change the fonts to our fit tory bold that we set up in the previous lesson, and then go to variance again, click the dropdown box again, go to colors, and I'm going to choose green yellow. I'll now right, click on the background, go to layout, and choose title and content. I'm going to be comparing two products. Okay. I can insert a table. To do that, you can go to insert and either choose table here and then drag down. Or you can simply go to the table in this placeholder and say insert table, and then it will actually give you the number of columns and number of rows you want to add. I want to have three columns and five rows. So I can type three columns, five rows and click. You can now type in text to any of these cells by clicking in them and typing. Tab will take you to the next cell across. By default, the first row is in bold with white text, and it's on a darker color. And this is set in the theme and the style. The lower rows use lighter colors. You can use the cursors to move across and enter the text in any cell you want. I'm quickly going to paste in some texts to save time. And while the table is selected, we can go to table design, and you can pick any of these styles from the preset menu. If you press this down arrow, you'll see there are a lot available. By default, it's used medium Str two, accent one. For example, I could select something like this, medium Style one, accent five, and it would change it to this format, automatically without me having to change a lot of individual settings. Under your table style options, which are here in the table design section, there are six main settings that you can select on or off, such as banded rows. There are also effects that you can add and quick styles that you can add to the text. But often, these can negatively affect the readability, especially with a lot of text, so I would keep it clear and simple to make it look the most professional. You can remove the borders from any cell. So for example, if I select these two cells, go to borders and select no border, that would remove the borders from that cell. With the pen, you can actually draw in the borders if you wish or select them from the borders menu. So in the draw border section, we'll make sure draw table is selected by clicking on it. Then I can click anywhere on one of the edges, draw across, and it will actually draw a border for me. This current one's in black. But you can actually choose any pen color In this example, we'll just pick a bright green, so you can see what we're doing, and then just draw down. So you have a lot of flexibility in the colors you can use and the borders. If I wanted to reset all of these now, I could press escape to leave the drawer option. Make sure the whole thing selected by clicking on one of the outer circles. Select no border. Choose the pen color. I'm actually going to pick this Aqua accent five, which is the same one, and then choose all borders. While the table is selected, we can go to layout, and from here, you can change the margins, the alignment, and the spacing of every cell. Again, I would keep it simple. And for example, we can go to cell margins and change it to wide. And this adds a nice space around each cell and makes it easier to read, especially when there's lots of information. If you wish, you can customize the margins to any size from cell margins, there's an option for custom margins. For now, we're going to stick with this default wide setting. You can also click and drag to size these. So if we roll over this column border, the cursor changes, I can click and drag to the left or right, and it will resize. So if I drag it to the left, it's resize this. So it's made the first column a little bit smaller and the second one bigger. I like having the first column smaller, but I'd like the second and third column to be the same width. To do this, we can simply click here, drag to make sure both columns are selected, and then go to where it says, Distribute columns and click. That's effectively resized these two columns to make them exactly the same width. If we click in this column, it will say the width up here, 11.22, and we can click in this column, and that will also be 11.22. You can always check or manually adjust the width or the height from these options. So now we'll show slide show. That looks pretty good and pretty clear. But we can take it a little bit further. So in my example, I'm going to select the whole table by going to one of the outer circles and clicking on it and then selecting no borders. I'm then going to click here and drag up to change the color of this cell. I'm going to change this to a light green and all the texts to white. So I'll go home. Click on the text here and change it to white. I'm going to click on this one and select Shape fill, no fill. Then I'm going to select this. And I want this to be a darker green. You can either do this from shape fill here, or you can go to table design and choose it from shading here. Again, I want the text to be white, so I'll go home, click on the white text for the font color. I'm going to add an extra column for some space in between these two. So I can click in here, right click. Choose insert, and then choose columns to the left. I want this to have no fill, so I'll go to shape fill and choose no fill, and then click here on the column border and drag in to reduce the amount of space. I still want each of these to be the same width. So I can click on the column, go to layout, and then choose width 11, and click on this one for this first column for vaccine one and make that width 11 by typing it in. I want this column to be a tiny bit thinner. So I'll click on width and just type down. So something like 1 centimeter will do. Then I'll click on this circle on the right side in the vertical center and drag it slightly to the right. And this is just so that the who can get it text will fit in. I can align the table in the center by going to a line center up here. And when I view this slide in slid how, it looks pretty good, but there's a couple more things I want to do. Firstly, I want to put a thin white border between the cells, so I can just click here, drag up. Go to table design, select white for the pen color and choose borders inside horizontal border. So now when I run that, you can see the border, and it looks really nice and separates it nicely. We can increase the margins if we want. So when these are all selected, I can go to layout, sell margins, custom margins, and then on the left and the right, I'm going to type uh 0.7, just to give it a bit more space. Where there's texts like this, where there's one character at the end, which would be better on a second line. I can hold down shift and press return. This all looks good to me now, and there's one final thing I want to add, which is just an icon at the top. And to fit these in, I'm going to make the top row 4.5 centimeters, so I can click anywhere in the top row, go to layout, and increase this to 4.5. We can just click in here and type 4.5. Now I'm going to change this text and actually make it this green color, and make the shape fill no fil. I'm going to make the text a little bigger. And then do the same for this side. So I'll change it to the color I want. Set the shape fill to be none. Then while the text is selected, make it a little bigger. I also want this to be vertically centered. I'm going to make sure that both of these are selected by clicking and dragging. Then under layout, go to this second option in alignment, which is to vertically center the text. I can now hold down shift, roll the cursor over to this bounding box for the table, drag up, and this will drag the whole thing up. That's about the right position. I'll view the slide show. That looks good. We'll now just add in our illustration. So we'll go to Insert icons. To get to the illustrations option, which is here. I'm going to type in test, and then select this. Insert, clicking on the corner and dragging. We'll resize this to make it smaller. And if you go to home and then choose Shape fill, it will actually only fill the high light color in these inbuilt PowerPoint illustrations. So I can select the light green, put it in the position that I want. And then if I click and hold on this and then press control and shift, I can drag, and that will make a copy that I can put here. And for this, I'll go to Shapefll and pick the darker green. So I think this looks really good, and it's a really powerful and professional way to compare two different things using the inbuilt PowerPoint tables, which will help you with alignment and being able to change the settings quickly and easily. 11. Using Video Clips: Let's look at how to include video in your presentation and the options for playing it back. I will start with a very simple text layout, but this time, illustrate the text with a video clip, rather than a photo. So we'll go to Insert, and then from the media section, choose Video and click the Dropdown. Here we have three options. If you choose the top one, this device, you can access any video from your computer. And you can click this device. Select the video file you want, and then click Insert. If you want to add video from YouTube or Video, you can click here for online. You can enter the address for the video, and it will be added. For this example, I will use the Ibuilt Video Stock library. We can type anything into our search field. Click the video and then click insert. The video can be resized just like a photo, so we can click on it. Click and hold down the corner and drag in. Then we can align it by going to home, arrange a line, a line center. Under the playback tab, when the video is selected, there are various options. By default, the video will play automatically and continually loop until you go onto the next slide. This video has no sound, but if your video has a sound track, you can choose the playback volume, including the option to mute it here. If you choose in click sequence next to the start option, the video will only play when you click through the slide in the same way that simple entrance animations work. There is also the option to hide your video until you click to start it. And an option to play back the video full screen, regardless of how it is sized and positioned on the screen. So if I select this, play full screen, then I run the slide from here. It will play back full screen. If you'd like to play the video without the media control bar here, which allows you to scrub through the video or play or pause, we can go to the slide show section of the ribbon and tick off this box here that says show media controls. This applies to all the video clips in this presentation. If we return to a layout we've used before with the text on the left hand side, I can show you how easy it is to crop and resize the video to any size. So I'll quickly paste in the video that we had from the previous slide, and under playback. I'll make sure that playful screen is turned off. I will drag the video to roughly where I want it. Then click here at the bottom left and drag to the bottom corner until it snaps, then zoom out a little, either by holding down control and using the mouse wheel, or by going to this minus here and clicking zoom out. Now I can hold down shift. Click on the video and drag it over to the right. And then if we go to video format, we can choose crop. If we roll over these black rectangles here, being careful not to roll over the round circle, which will turn the cursor into this double headed arrow. So we're very careful. We put the cursor here, where it changes into this small black icon to show that we're cropping, we can click, hold down the mouse, and drag to the left. And this will be the left hand crop. So, I'm going to leave it back here, and we can do the same on the right. Click, drag in. You'll be to see underneath the video where the edge of the slide is as you drag, so we can leave it right here on the edge. Then, as I'd like the focus point of the video of the person in the Kayak to be right in the center, I can hold down shift, click and drag to the right. That's about right. Now I can click outside the slide. We'll click on the video to make sure it's selected. And on playback, we want it to play automatically. Now we can play this slide. Here's a very nice way of getting a cropped video into your presentation. Just like with photos, the video does not need to be rectangular. We can use the video shape drop down to display the video in any shape we want. So if we go to video format, video shape, you can select any of these. I'm going to choose parallelogram. You have the options to click on this yellow dot and adjust to anything you'd like. You can also recrop this at any time by going to video format, clicking crop, and then dragging these black handles. So any part of the video that you've cropped out is still available, so you can re crop it to any shape or any size at any point. There are also a range of preset video styles that you can choose from. So if you go to video format and click this drop down, you can see that there are a number of options available. Any of these can be further adjusted in the settings. I'm going to choose this one here called rotated white, which adds a nice white border around to make it look like a cut out photo and a drop shadow. Once we've done that, I just want to make it a little smaller. And I can do that from the center by holding down control and shift, clicking on the corner, holding the mouse down, and then dragging in. This can then be positioned anywhere you want. And finally, I will finish with an example where a video is used as a background to a slide. So we click and press delete on this. I'm going to use slightly less text, delete this text and change this text to white, so I'm going to use a darker background. I'm going to hold down shift and drag this up and make it bold by pressing Control B. Now I'm going to go to insert video stock videos. Type in my search term, click the video and then click insert. Then click on it and drag it up to the top left corner until it snaps. Hold down the bottom right corner and drag it to the bottom right corner until it snaps. Then right click, send it back. I'm going to click on this text and drag it out slightly, so it fits over this amount of lines. Then hold down shift, so both text boxes are selected at the same time. Now click on this line and drag up into the left. I'm also going to add a shadow to help the text stand out even more. But generally, if you use a dark video and white text, that works really well, or if you use a light video and dark text, that will also work. It's always good to have a strong contrast between the background and the foreground text. So now I'll click on this and click on this. Right click, format object. Then we go to text options, and I want to select the second option here, which is text effects, and go to shadow. We can select the very first one, which is called offset bottom right. Then adjust the settings as we want to. I'm going to choose ten Blur, two distance and play that. That's looking good. And the black drop shadow helps the text stand out really nicely. 12. Add Impact With Icons: Icons are great when you want to draw attention to particular elements in your content. They also add impact to your slides and make them easier to read and remember. Here is a slide that aims to provide a summary of a business by looking at six key aspects. I'm only using generic text for this example, but it is the type of content where you might use a series of icons to help the viewer identify each section and add some impact. First, let's lay out the content across the page in a way that leaves room for some icons. So here we have a title and six text boxes. I'm going to select all of these by clicking with the mouse away from these text boxes, dragging over the entire content and letting go, which will select everything. I'm now going to click and hold on this middle circle and drag it to the left. Now I'm going to click off, then click on each one, and drag it roughly into position, and then we're going to line them up. I'll first line up the bottom three by clicking away from the content and dragging over again. Then in the shape format section, going to a line and a line middle. Then I'll align the top three, D in the same again, arrange a, a line middle. Now I can pick all of these up and drag them across slightly. This gives me some nice room on the left of each of these to add some icons, and we can fine tune the positions once we add the icons. We're going to use icons from the inbuilt PowerPoint library, so you can click Insert icons, and then choose them from here. You can type anything you want, and the relevant icons will appear. Now we can click on that icon and drag it into position. I will go back to insert icons and choose the next ones. If at any point you want to change these, you can click here and choose Sal icons, unless one of these is relevant, and you can choose that one. So, for example, I could press Control D to duplicate this one, drag it into position. Then click here and choose this. If I click that one, hold down shift, click the second one, and then while shift is still hold down, click the third, they're now all selected. And if I hold the mouse down and hold down Control and shift, I can drag down, and this will actually make a copy of all of them. So I'll just choose the last three icons. This looks pretty good already, but we can add some color and some hierarchy to the text. So making this part of the text a little bigger, which will help make the title stand out against the description text. So we'll make each title at big by selecting it. And if it's one word, you can just double click to do that, then you can go here to raise the size. Or you can press control and write square bracket once it's selected. Now we can add some color to these, so we can select the first icon, go to shape Phil, and then pick the color that you want. And I'm using the color theme from design, variance. Click on the Down arrow, go to colors, and I'm using red violet. I can also do this to the title. Double click to select the word. Then go to home, text fill, and choose the same color. I'm quickly going to choose some different colors from the theme for these other ones. Each time, choosing the same color for the text that I've chosen for the icon. So each time we're clicking on the icon, going to shape fil, picking our color, double clicking to select the word that's the title, or you can click and drag across, and then going to font color, pressing the drop down, and choosing the same color as the icon. Now, we'll go full screen with our slide. A nice clear way of presenting your information using the inbuilt PowerPoint icons. To show you how easy it is to restyle icons, let's create a different look with the same content. This time we'll use a darker background. So if I select everything by pressing Control A, I can go to text and choose white. Then by click off and just select the icons. I can make these white by going to shape fill, and choosing white. Now, if we right click on the background and choose format background, it's on solid fill already. I can go to any color. I'm going to choose this dark gray. I'm going to move all the text down a bit. So we'll click on the first one. Hold down shift. Then click on the remaining text. So they're all selected or down shift and drag down. I'm also going to centerlign this text. So we go to paragraph in the home section, center or press Control E. Now, click on the icons and drag them into position. We might need to make these a little smaller because we're going to add them into circles. Now we can click on the title, and align that to the center. Again, you can choose Control E, and then move it up a little bit. So clicking, holding down shift and dragging up. And I'm also going to raise up the top line of icons. So I'll click away from the content, drag over all of these top icons in the top text. Then move my mas over to this position. Hold down shift, click and drag up. Now I'm going to make the icons a little smaller. So while hold down shift, select them all. Then go to the corner of any one of them, hold down control, and shift, and drag in. Now I'm going to add a circle and put it behind each of the icons. So to do that, we'll go to the drawing section. It will say val, which, if not in the recently used shapes, will always be available as the second basic shape. Then I can click anywhere, and it will add a perfect circle. I want the outline to be white. Now I can drag it into position here. Then right click and choose center back. From here, we can align both of these as the circle is still selected, I can hold down shift, click the icon. Then go to a line center. I can also align middle. Some icons may not look perfectly centered, so you can manually adjust them, so they look just right. So if I hold down shift, I might want to drag this slightly to the right, so I think that looks more central. I'm now going to copy the circle to the other positions. And to do that, I can click on the circle, hold down control and shift and drag. Then right click, sent to back, and make sure that these are aligned. Range, a line, align middle. Range, a line, a line center. Click on the circle, hold down Control and Shift and drag. Then right click, send to back. Make sure they're both selected. Range age, line center, arrange, align. Middle. I'm just going to quickly do that for the other three. We can do that by selecting these top three, again, holding down shift, and clicking to select multiple items. Then hold down Control and Shift and drag down. Right click, send to back. Center up these icons, making sure they're both selected and the same again, a line center and a line middle. Now I want to make sure that the text is all centered underneath a circle. And to do that, I can hold down shift, click here and drag until the smart guides appear, showing it's in the center. We can also apply the color variations as we did in the first part of this example. So I can click on these, then go to Shapefile, and pick my colors. To add a nice bit of variation. And now I want to make sure everything's centered on the page. So I'm going to click away from the content, drag over everything except the title. Then I'm going to group these and center them. So we can either right click on any of the circles and choose group group, or we can press Control G. Then I can go to a range a line, a line c, and that center all the content on the slide. So there's a nice way of making a variation using the same content but with differently styled icons. 13. SmartArt Diagrams: Now I'm going to show you how to create professional looking diagrams quickly and easily using Smart art. We'll start off with this standard layout, which is title and content. I'm just going to quickly paste in a title to save time. Now we can add the Smart art, either by going to these icons in the center and choosing this option here to insert a smart art graphic, or at any time, you can go to insert from the top menu, and then choose Smart art here with the same icon as below. So I'll click to insert a smart art graphic. You can see there's a wide range of customizable us, including lists, processes, cycles, hierarchies, and more. In this example, we're going to use a cycle and select this, which is the first option. Basic cycle and click k. I'm going to choose a color scheme for this. So I can go to design, click this drop down box, then go to colors, and I'm going to select blue. Now, the menu items on the top of the ribbon show Smart art design as an available option. We can click on that, and then from here, we can change colors based on our theme. So I can hit change colors and choose something like this, which is called colorful accent colors, which basically rotates through the colors in the theme. You don't just have the ability to change the format of the whole chart. It's also possible to change the format of individual elements. For example, I could click on one of these stages and actually change the colors of just that by going to home and shape fill. Or I can click something like the arrows and change those. So I might decide, I want to change the arrows to a more subtle gray color. And when one of them selected, I can click on it, then choose this gray, for example, the one in the middle here, and then select the same gray for the others. To do that, you can just click on each of the arrows and then just the paint bucket area of the shape fill, and it will turn it into the same gray color as previously selected. A big advantage of using smart art is that it's very easy to adapt. You might have this basic cycle and decide that you need an extra stage. And you can easily add that in by going to Smart art Design and clicking Add shape. In the create graphic section of the ribbon, and it will add in a new shape and automatically align all of the others. I can now click on this arrow. Go to home and then color that in the same gray. I can also type into this what I want it to be. And I'm quickly going to type in an example word for each of these. If you want, you can always change the order of any of these by clicking on any one of them. Make sure you're in the smart art design section of the ribbon, and then choosing to move up or move down. And for this last one, I can give it a different color by going to home Shapefll, and picking a color from here. If you wish to remove a stage, you can simply click on it and press delete. It's also really easy to change the layout to any of the others in the Smart art library at any time. For example, I can go up to Smart art Design, and then pick anything I want from this. You can go to more layouts. I could click on process, go to the top and select basic process. Then click k, and it would immediately change this. And I can press Control Z, which is undo to go back. If I want to add any animations to these, I can simply go up to animations and choose how I want them to reveal. So, for example, I could click Zoom. That would reveal the whole thing at once, but I can also go to effect options and choose one by one. Now, if I play that slide, I can click to reveal each thing at a time. When you reach the limit of what is possible using Smart art, you can always combine it with other custom content. For example, here, I'm just going to quickly paste in some content, which is a circular image. I'm going to send this image in the middle to the back by clicking it, select it, then right clicking, and choosing sender back. I can make the basic cycle, smart art graphic bigger or smaller, by holding down control and shift, rolling over the corner circle, clicking with my left mouse button, and dragging out. That looks good. At the moment, when I view the slide show, I can click for each of the sections to be revealed, but I'd like the extra text to be revealed at the end. And to do that, I can click on one of these, then hold down shift and click on the others. Control G to group, and then under animations, choose Fade. So now, I'll start with this and then reveal one at a time as we set up in the animation. Then click one final time, the other information to be revealed. So by using Smart art, you can easily create complex graphics and easily adjust them to fit into your slide design, and they are flexible enough to make editing quick and simple. 14. Compile The Slide Show: We'll now collect some slides from the previous lessons, put them all together in a presentation, and see how we can reorder those and add transitions and timings. So we've started with a new presentation and no slides. To add some slides from a previous presentation saved, we can go to a new slide from the home section on the ribbon. Then choose reuse slides. From here, we can click Browse. Select the slides that we've saved previously, and click open. These are all the slides that we've made previously. If you had them in individual files, you can actually choose brows and click on each one to add it to one presentation. As soon as you click on any of these, it will add them in. But by default, it won't keep the source formatting, which means it will use the theme and the styles from this empty blank presentation and not from the ones that we created in these slides. To get it to keep the source formatting, we need to make sure that this is ticked on. So I'll delete this slide by making sure it's selected by clicking on the thumbnail and then click delete. I'll now go and make sure this box is ticked on. Now I can click on any one of these, and it will add it in with the correct formatting. You can also copy and paste. So for example, if this pathway to success slide wasn't in this deck, I could open the deck I want to copy it from. Make sure it's selected. Press Control C, or right click and choose copy. Then go to the deck that I want to copy it into. Position my cursor where I want it to be added, right click, and it's important here again to choose keep source formatting. So the second option. Can also go up to paste in the home section, on the ribbon, and choose the same option, Heap source formatting. It's now copied it into my slide deck, keeping the exact formatting that I want. If we click on these four squares, that will go into the slide sorter. Any slides can be easily moved about in the slide sorter, simply by clicking on them, keeping the mouse held down, and dragging to the position you want it to be in. You can always press Control Z to undo the previous action. I'm going to click on Slide one and press delete as that's just a black slide from when we created our new presentation. If you want to move multiple slides, you can click to select the first one, and either control click to select subsequent ones, or I click on the first one again. You can hold down shift, and that will select every slide between the first one you clicked and the last one. I can now click and hold on any of these selected slides and drag And I haven't released to my mouse button yet. And you can see there's a little five and red lines around it, which shows that I have five slides selected, and wherever I drop these, that's where they will appear. I'll press Control Z, just to undo that and return to our previous order. To play this presentation. We can go to the bottom and click slide show, and that will play from the current slide that's selected. Shift F five will also do this. So if we wanted to play from this slide here about, let's compare these two products, I can click on it and press Shift F five. You can also go to slide show on the top of the ribbon and choose from current slide. Underneath the slides, if you see a little star, that means it's got some animation on it or a transition. And if you see an amount of time, that means how long it will stay on that slide. In the transitions section of the ribbon, we can go to advanced slide and see that it says after 2 seconds, and it's ticked on in the timing section. So for example, if I wanted all these slides to play through automatically after 2 seconds, we can select them all. Either by clicking the first one, holding down shift, and clicking the last one, or control A will do the same thing. Now under advanced slide, I can tick on the after box. Type in two and press return. And if I press F five to play that from the beginning, each slide will appear, and 2 seconds later, it will go to the next slide. I'll press escape to exit back into the slide sorter. And it's very easy to turn that off. You can see that at the moment every one of them has this 2 seconds time applied. If I press control A and this box, the time will disappear. And then if I play that from the start by pressing, I can advance manually. When any slide selected, you can also choose a transition. For example, if we wanted to fade between every one of these slides, we could press control A and then choose Fade. And then every slide will fade to the next slide. You can also press control A and turn off the transitions if you choose to. A 15. Completing The Course: Congratulations on finishing my PowerPoint for Beginners course. I hope you can now understand the basics of PowerPoint and can apply the skills learnt to create quality presentations in PowerPoint. Please get in touch with me at Alan atom UK to tell me how you found the course. I welcome any feedback and would love to hear.