PowerPoint Like a Pro - Design Principles, Key Tips & 20 Inspiring Examples for Better Slides

1. Introduction: Do you feel like your slides just don't look right or fail to make the impact you wanted? In this course, I will show you the design principles that will help you improve your PowerPoint. I'm Alan Loma, and I've worked on thousands of presentations to help make powerful and compelling slides. I've seen time and time again how much better slides can look if these core principles are used. This course will show you these essential design principles and give you the skills to create your own impactful slides. In part one, I will explain the design fundamentals that can transform your slides. For example, how contrast highlights key points and improves readability and how hierarchy directs attention to the most important information first. We'll see white space enhance clarity, making your message easier to understand and more visually appealing, and using repetition which creates consistency, reinforcing your message and brand. Each principle is broken down with clear examples, followed by easy step by step walk throughs that you can apply immediately. In Part two, I will walk you through how I use these principles in creating slides. This will include transforming bullet points into engaging layouts using smart art. Simplifying slides by reducing on screen content for more impact. Grabbing attention with bold figures, icons and visual hierarchy. Designing better tables, charts, maps, and timelines. Visualizing processes and workflows with clarity. Explore interactive and dynamic features. Slide Zoom for interactive navigation. Links, highlights, and custom animations for deeper engagement. Whatever type of presentation you are designing, this course will give you the skills and confidence to make slides that truly connect and inspire. 2. PART 1 - PRINCIPLES - Contrast: Here, we will give you an overview of a number of design principles that can really make a difference when designing your slides. Contrast is one of the most powerful principles of design. It's all about creating difference to draw attention and organize information. In this very simple example, you can see how a lack of contrast can make things difficult to read. Good contrast can improve readability as it makes text or elements easier to distinguish. Here, there is a contrast between the color of the box and the text, but also contrast in font weight and size between the titles and the body text. Contrast can also add visual interest as it keeps designs from looking flat or monotonous. To give an example of contrast, we're going to start with a mid blue background that is a gradient. So I can right click format background, gradient fill, and I'm going to use this mid blue to a slightly darker blue. And I'll quickly paste in three different colors of text. So when choosing colors, particularly for text, it is important to create a high level of contrast. In this case, the black text is readable, but it lacks impact. The pink color makes the text quite difficult to read. So we could start with this white option, paste in our body text, and then add a photo on the right hand side. To do that, we'll go to insert pictures, stock images, type workplace. Select the photo we want to use and click Insert. I've chosen this photo because most of the content that we want to show in it is on the right hand side, and it will balance out nicely. Firstly, we'll align this to the right by going to arrange a line right. Then we can right, click crop. Click on this small black handle on the left and drag it in. Then press return. So now we have a photo and text on the left hand side that has good contrast and stands out well against the background. At the bottom, we could add a contrasting color panel such as this, which will help draw attention and distinction to the main point of the slide. This is a shape, a rounded corner rectangle with fully rounded corners and a gradient fill. And for this, we've used a pink color and an orange because it contrasts well with the blue background. So this really helps it stand out, and we've kept the text white because that works really well on these colors too. 3. Balance: Balance in design is all about creating a sense of visual stability, making sure no part of the design feels too heavy or light compared to the rest. The most obvious example of balance is symmetrical balance where both sides are the same or very similar. Elements can be different but arranged to feel balanced visually like this example. This is called asymmetrical balance. So for this example of showing balance, I'll add an image in the background, and then we'll add some text on the left or right. So we'll go to insert pictures, stock images. I'll type product. And I'm going to choose this one here, which gives us a nice area where we can add our content on the left. But first, we need to crop it by 16 to nine to fit the screen. So to do that, we can click on it, go to picture format, crop aspect ratio, and choose 16 to nine. Now we can press Return, drag it up to the top left. Click on the bottom corner and drag down to the bottom right until it snaps into place. Now we have a nice full screen image that fits perfectly on our slide. I'll now just paste in some texts that I made earlier and then we'll run that. You can see that adding it on the left visually balances the products on the right so that neither side feels heavier or more dominant than the other. If we wanted to, we could make sure the image is selected, then go to a range, rotate and choose flip horizontal. This will then put the content of the image on the left, and we could therefore select the text and move it to the right. I've held down Shift to keep its Y position locked. And now when we run that, you can see that that's also really nicely balanced. I'll now show you one example where the images cropped in on the left. So we'll add a new slide. Go to Insert, pictures, stock images. And for this, I'll type makeup. Select this image here, insert. And with this, I want to size it down a little bit, so I'll click and drag the corner and click and drag this corner. I can now align it to the middle. Hold down shift and drag it to the left. That gives it a nice border, and now we can crop it to make sure it's only covering half the page, so we can add text on the right. So we'll right click, choose crop. Then go to these slim black handles, not the circles, as they will resize it, but the slim black handles and drag in, which will crop it. That's about right for my design. Press return. And if you want, you can always make adjustments after this has been cropped. For example, I can choose crop again, hold down shift, and drag in any part of the photo that I want to see. We can also flip it as we did before by going to arrange, rotate, and choosing either flip vertical or flip horizontal. For the background, we can right click format background and pick any color from here using the eyedrop at all. So for example, if we roll over this light pink, then I can post in my text and give it a nice dark color, such as black. So again, the balance of this looks really nice with the image on the left and the text on the right. As with an image such as this, it would be quite busy if you wanted to try and put text on it, and this makes a nicer option. My final example in balance, I'll create a new slide. This one, we're not going to be flipping, so we could go to format background picture, insert, stock images. I typed coconu for this and use this image here where we can add text at the top and bottom. And now I'll just quickly paste in my text. That looks really good. You can also select a color from the image to use as your text color. So while it's still selected, I can go to Eyedropper. For example, roll over here for a mid green. So there's a really nice way of balancing out the text with the images. In this case, they work well above and below the elements in our photo. 4. Emphasis: Emphasis in design is about making one element stand out. It's how you guide the viewer's eye to the most important part of the design first. Although this may look like a clear, well designed table, without emphasis, everything competes for attention and nothing stands out. With good emphasis, your message is clear and easy to understand, such as how your solution compares favorably with the competition. Here is a fairly generic comparison table. We're going to use emphasis to draw attention to the figures that reinforce our message. So we can remove the table. And I'm going to paste in three panels, one for each of the companies mentioned in the table. And these are black panels, rounded corner rectangles that I've set the transparency to 90% and then just added some text. So in the first part of this example, we want to emphasize one figure, which will be the growth. We'll change the title to make our message clearer and present what we're going to talk about in this slide, which is all about growth. I'm going to type in a big figure to show emphasis for the growth so we can add our text. Type in 8.5%. I'm going to make this bold, big tree and white. And then I'm going to make the 8.5 62 point and the percent 32. And underneath, I'm going to write growth. And this doesn't need to be in bold. I'll give it a G and make it a bit smaller. 18 point and make sure everything's selected by clicking on one of the outer points and then centering it all. So that's a really nice way of presenting emphasis for that key figure. So I can delete the growth from here now. I'm also going to copy this Control and Shift and drag until it's in the center, then Control Y to do it again and type in the new figures. Then again, we can delete them from here. I can now select these, hold down shift, and move them down by dragging when the cursors on the edge of this box. And behind each of these figures, I'm going to put a circle. So if we click on Oval, click anywhere, I'm going to make this pink with a 15 point line. And I'm going to set the outline to the same color, but give it a 50% transparency. And I'm going to make this 5.5 centimeters high and 5.5 centimeters wide, and then send it to the back. I'm going to move these down a tiny bit more just to give it a nice amount of space. I'm going to position this aligned with the center of this, so we'll click on this, hold down shift, click on this, and then go to arrange aligned center. Now I can right click, send that to back, and then right click and send that to back. I can now drag down the text a bit, do the other ones at the same time. I'm also going to make a copy of this. These ones that I don't want to draw as much attention to, but we can compare them. I'm going to make them a dark gray. Again, choosing the same color for the outline. Right, click, center back, and then right click center back. I'll press Control Shift and drag to do this final one. And then the same before, send that to the back. Right click on this and send that. Now we have some really nice emphasis on the growth for each of the competitors, but the our company growth is the one that stands out the most. By changing the key figure that we draw attention to, we can change the message and the story of the slide. So for example, if we write sales falling short of targets, we can focus on the sales instead. Again, I can delete these. Hold down control and shift while my cursor is over the edge of the frame of this text and drag to make a copy, type in my new figure. I can expand this to make sure it doesn't wrap by holding down Control and shift and dragging from this middle point and then adding a return by pressing Shift return in there. Again, control and shift to drag. Now we can delete these and put back in our growth figures. These two slides have the same content, but by changing which figure you emphasize, you can change the message you are telling with the slide. In this first example, we draw attention to the growth figure and compare it against the competitors. And in the second example, we talk about how the sales are falling short of targets and look at the sales figure, which we draw emphasis to there. 5. Hierachy: Hierarchy is all about visual order and communication clarity. It is creating a visual ranking of information, which means what to look at first, second, and so on. So here, the viewer's eye is drawn to the titles and description first, and later the supporting details can be read. There are many ways to create a hierarchy, such as using shapes, color, shading, font size, or weight. Here is a typical chapter heading slide describing what content will be covered in the next section. We're going to add some visual hierarchy to show which information is important and guide the audience's eyes. So the most important part of the content is telling the audience what information is going to be covered next, which is the current state of the market. So I'm going to cut this out, move this up a bit, move this down a bit, and paste my text in, align this to the left by making sure they're both selected. Align left. And for this, I'm going to make it 48 point. Bold and wrap it after state. Now I can move it up a bit. You can see that adds quite a lot of impact and makes it much clearer and easier to read. With a Chapter three, I'm going to make this a little bit smaller, fill it in with this color, change the shape to a rounded corner rectangle. Click and drag this yellow dot all way to the right. If I right click on this and choose format. I can align it to the middle and the center by going to home and choosing center or pressing Control E, and then click and drag this in slightly. I can also make sure that this is aligned with the top of the image, so I can click, hold down shift, click on the text, and then drag it down until the smart guides appear, and that's a good position to have that in. I'm just also going to add a tiny bit more space, so I can click and drag this down very slightly. So the chapter number is less important, and then we have the details of what's going to be answered in the section, which can be below. I can remove that text, drag this up. I'm going to make this a little smaller, click to drag it out, and also add some line spacing. To do that, we can go to this drop down here and choose something like 1.5. For the duration, I'm going to add a small icon. Of this timer and make it the same color as the chapter block above. So the duration is less important, but it can be a nice addition to reassure the audience, particularly during longer presentations. So I'm going to resize this so it's quite a bit smaller 16 points. Make sure it's aligned to the middle of the box. Then size this down. I can hold control and shift and drag from the corner. I'm going to align both of these by making sure they're selected, I'm going to arrange a line middle. I'll hold down Shift and click and drag here. And I'm also going to make this text, make sure it's all selected by clicking outside, the same color, and add a small panel behind it. Something like this with no outline, something like a black fill. Right click center back and set the transparency on this to something like 90%. This just adds a nice little outline, but quite subtle, so it's differentiated from the other content. So now we've used visual hierarchy to break up our elements into different parts where some are bigger and some are smaller to help draw attention to the relevant content. 6. Proportion: Proportion in design is all about the size relationship between elements, how big or small things are in comparison to each other and to the whole. And here is an example of proportion. The slide title is the main message of the slide and is therefore the largest and boldest to draw attention immediately. The subtitle is the next most important, so it's slightly smaller than the title. The details in the boxes support the title claim. Each point is of equal importance, so they are equally sized and spaced. The logo adds branding without being too distracting. References, if required, should be small and away from the main content to keep the look clear and uncluttered. Most graphs use the design principle of proportion. For example, in a bar chart, longer bars represent larger values, which is called data driven proportion. And here we've simplified the graph and removed unnecessary details to show the principle of proportion clearly. However, we can go further with the design to use proportion to draw attention to the relevant area. In this example, we want to draw attention to this 86% in the south, so we could click here and size this up. I'm going to make this 54. I can now click and drag this up to the top and the number, I'm going to make 80. I'm now going to make this bold. Click on the outside to make sure it's all selected on the circle and then click bold or Control B. I'm now going to hold down Shift and drag this down slightly. So now the larger text label increases the effect of proportion and it guides the viewers attention to this largest figure first. This really helps with your story and your messaging as you present this data. In this slide, we are using proportion by making the three most important markets larger. Which I've done with both the circle and the text size. In relation to the other labels, this emphasizes their importance. And another example of proportion on this size is that the title is much larger and more important than the reference text. So this is using proportion to support the visual hierarchy. I would always recommend having the reference text quite small. In this example, we could also use emphasis to support the proportion, such as low lighting the other areas that we don't want to draw as much attention to. So for example, I could click Hold downshift and subsequently click on all of these. Then select any color I want, such as this lighter blue, and that would help draw attention to just the three main big data points while the others are still available but knocked back. And for a final example of this, we're looking at proportional contrast, where the brightness of each circle is in proportion to its importance. And this can be either done by clicking and choosing a softer variation of the color from your palette, or you can go to transparency and adjust the slider to whatever you think looks good. So there are a few examples of how you can use proportion to really highlight your key data. 7. Repetition: Repetition is the intentional reuse of elements like colors, shapes, fonts, and lines throughout a design or across a set of materials. It creates unity and consistency and can build a visual identity and stops your presentation from looking generic. So here we have a simple comparison slide where the main key takeaway is highlighted in light blue. A later slide with four bits of information could use a similar element to create a cohesive visual style. Here is a title slide for a presentation featuring an image on the right and text details on the left. A distinctive title font has been chosen, along with an easier to read font for body text. There are a nice selection of colors and a prominent gradient line element under the title. And here we have a typical four item content slide. And for repetition, I'm going to take elements from the front slide with a colorful design and apply them to this slide for a consistent look. Firstly, I'll set the background color to a solid fill and pick the purple, the same as we used on the front page. Now I'm going to choose the fonts that I used on the front for the titles and set it to the yellow color, the same one, again, that I used on the titles. And for this part, I'm going to make fig tree. Now I can set the shape to have no fill. Then I'm going to add the gradient line, so I can click here, click and drag to add the gradient line. And for this, I want it to have no outline, and for the fill, I want it to have a gradient fill. I've chosen from the yellow color to a teal color. That looks nice. We're just going to apply that to the other four, and we can do that in a couple of ways. Firstly, I can select this text. Then go to Format Painter. Double click Format Painter, and then click and drag across this text. Click and Drag, click and drag. Then press Escape to exit from Format Painter. We can also do the same thing with this. So you can click any of this text. As long as you've selected some text that's figtry and the right font size, then you can apply it to other parts. So double click Format Painter. Select that, that, then that. Press escape to exit from the format painter. Then we'll select all three of these. Click on one, hold down shift, and click on the other subsequent two, and then set Shapefil to noFill. Now we can copy this and to do that, we can hold down Control and Shift click and drag, which will lock the Y position, and then when we let go, we can press Control Y and Control Y again and just drag this into position, holding Shift. I think that now looks really good. We have re used the color scheme, the combination of title and body fonts, and the gradient line to create a consistent look that maintains the distinctive visual identity. Here's a different type of content where we can repeat the same visual elements. So firstly, I'll set the title. I'll type the first few letters, press return. Make it yellow. Click on the background and set that to a solid purple. For this, I'm going to make it white. And for these, I'm going to fill them in with our gradient as before. But this time, I'm going to set the angle to 90 degrees, so it's straight up, which I think looks good on a vertical bar chart. And finally, I'm going to set these to white, big tree, bold, and make them a little bigger. Then we'll set the horizontal axis to white. Again, make it fig tree, bold and a little bigger. Now, we've re used the elements from the branding to make this slide have much more impact. So we've used the color scheme and the fonts to keep consistency and applied the gradient to the graph. 8. Variety / Unity: Variety refers to the use of different elements to create visual interest and contrast so that the design doesn't feel repetitive or dull. Unity is the sense that all elements in a design work together so that visuals match in tone, style, and layout across all slides and pages. Across the presentation, you need a balance. Use variety to keep things interesting and unity to make it all feel like one clear cohesive experience. These three slides use the same fonts, colors and shapes, but mix things up while still keeping the overall design cohesive. Here, we will take a previous example and show how you can add variation while maintaining unity. So here's our previous example, and we want to keep the colors, but we want to provide variation for other slides. So firstly, we can control D on this slide to duplicate it. I'm going to change the background to a neutral gray for now, just so I can see what I'm working with when I change the text. So firstly, I'm going to select each of these titles and change them to the purple color. Then I'm going to click on the background and change that to yellow. I'm now going to select each of the body text sections and change that to black. This creates a good contrast. And for these, I'm going to click on this yellow here and change it to a darker color such as this orange. We can copy and paste this format simply by going to Format Painter and clicking like that. We double click Format Painter, we can apply it twice, and then we'll press Escape. So there's a really nice variation that works perfectly with this previous slide. This provides unity but with a good variety, creating a perfect balance in your presentation. Here, we've chosen a color outside of the color scheme and introduced a new font. Whilst this does not look terrible, too much variety means that it does not feel part of the same design as the other slides. So I'll show you how you can provide more variation while keeping similar design. We can delete this slide and we can duplicate this slide. And I'm going to make a few changes. Firstly, we have slightly less text. Then I make a copy of all of these elements by selecting them all while holding down Shift to multiple select items. Then press Control and Shift and drag down. Now I'm going to Control A select everything. Move my cursor over one of these vertical lines, hold down shift, click, and move down. This looks good, but I'm also going to add a small icon above it. So I'll go to insert icons, type something suitable for each one. Click Insert, and I want to make this icon the yellow color so it matches with the text. I'll hold down Shift, click and drag on this corner point to make it a bit smaller. Now I can duplicate it into the four places and change the icon. To do that, we can press Control D, drag where we want it to go, and then press Control D and Control D again. Now we can right click on each one of these and choose change graphic from icons and type in the word we want and choose the replacement icon for this section. Now we have another really nicely designed slide, which gives perfect variety while keeping the unity of the design. It looks on brand. It works well with the other slides, but it is good variety because it introduces icons and a slightly different layout. For one last layout or press Control D, I'm going to keep these icons and the text, but remove these eight rectangles with the gradient on. So I'll click on all of these while holding down shift, press delete. For this layout, I'm only going to use three sections, so I'll click and delete this one. I'm also going to center the text, so I'll make sure it's all selected, press Control E. I'm going to hold down shift and drag this into position. This I'll put in the center, so I can click on it, go to arrange in line center, and then this one I can put at the right space apart. I can also click and drag these icons above here. Now I'm going to add a circle behind each one of these, so we'll click on Oval. Click anywhere, choose the color we want. I'm going to use yellow for this first one with no shape outline. I'm going to make this 7 centimeters by 7 centimeters. And I'm going to color these purple and this purple. And then we'll see those when we drag this and put it to the back. So we'll right click, choose center back. Now I'll just make sure it's all centered. To do that, we can click and drag it until the smart guide appears in the center. I also want this to have an outline, which I'll have as the same color, ten point and 50% transparency. I'm also going to add one more return to push these down a bit away from the circles. So that looks good. I'm now going to press Control D, drag it into position. Right, click, center back. Control D again. Right, click, center back. This one, I'm going to make a mid blue, the same for the outline. And then I can color these purple. Go align it to the middle. And this one, I'm going to make an orange. Again, the same for the outline. And then make this purple. I now just want to move this across a little, so we'll make sure they're both selected. Hover over this line, hold down shift, and drag to the right. If we want to make the textbox a bit wider, we can make sure they're all selected. Hover over this circle here, press control and shift and drag, and it will make them a bit wider. And I think that looks slightly better. If I want to add a title, I can press Control A to select everything, hold down shift, and drag it down, and then add a title anywhere at the top. Operas control aid, select it all. Make it the yellow color we're working with and the font. Align it to the center and then make it the size we want, which is 40 points, drag it up a little bit. There we go. Now we have a really nice slide that's on brand, but provides enough variety while keeping the unity of the colors, fonts, and styles. So here we have four really nicely designed slides that look like they all fit in this presentation. The design has unity, but they all have variation to keep the presentation interesting. 9. Movement: Movement in design refers to the visual path the viewer's eye follows across a composition. It guides attention, leading the viewer from one element to another in a deliberate flow. It directs focus to important content first and keeps the viewer engaged with the layout. Here is an example of linear movement to each stage from left to right. Here, the movement is from the most important points in the middle outwards to the supporting content. Movement can create a visual path for the viewer to follow. Here we have a nice design, but it could be improved with some movement. So for this example, we could add an upward curve with an arrow at the end to show movement. This will create a visual path for the viewer to follow. And the upward arrow often suggests improvement, momentum, or forward motion. And this upwards arrow was created using a large arc which you can add from here in basic shapes and then extending it by dragging the yellow dots to the right place and also making it 150 point wide, and then adding an isoscelese triangle on the end. So from our previous slide, we could take these three elements for the step, the main text, and the text underneath. I'm firstly going to drag this into position and center this. Now I'm going to add a circle for Discover, and I can use this text here for that. We can go to shape format, shape, fill, and choose the color we want. Then I can go to edit shape, change shape, choose oval, and set the height to the same as the width, and I'm going to make this 4.4 by 4.4. I also want the Discover text to be near the bottom because I'm going to add an icon on this, so I can adjust the top margin to push this down. To about here. Drag this into position, drag the step into position. Then I can add an icon for Discover, insert icon. I type search, use this magnifying glass. And I'm going to choose white as the fill color for this and place it over the top and make it a bit smaller by holding down control and shift and dragging in from the corner. So now we have our first step, and I'm quickly going to paste in the others to save time. These are simply made with Iosles triangles chosen from there and squashed and rotated. So there the arrow naturally links up each step guiding the viewer to look in order and understand the narrative flow. Here is the same content, but this layout shows four distinct steps. There is still movement from left to right, but the viewer is encouraged to move step by step and understand each step before moving to the next. So here we'll start with the title, the step number, and text, and also the icon we had, and the name of the step. Underneath, I've added a rectangle with a gradient that goes from solid dark gray to 100% transparent. So it looks like it's fading off. On top of this, we're going to add an isometric shape. And to do that, we can click rectangle, click anywhere, set the size. I'm going to make this 4.4 by 4.4. And I'm going to choose the fill color of the green that I want for this first step with no outline. Then go to the three D options under Effex. I'm going to go to three D rotation and select this option here under the parallel subsection called isometric top up. I'm now going to go to three D format and then type 20 under depth. I'm also going to change this to a rounded corner rectangle via edit shape, chain shape, and then drag this yellow dot to the left to make it less rounded. That's great. I'm now going to drag it into position here. You can use the curse keys for some fine adjustment. And then right click choose center back and then right click on this gray and choose center back. I can now move the text and this icon up to the middle and the number and this text down a bit. So I think that looks really nice and is the first of our steps. I'm going to do some fine adjustment on this shape here, as you can see, it's just slightly off. Now it's perfect. And to save time, I'm quickly going to post in my other steps. So now this is more structured and clear. Although it's less fluid and dynamic than the previous arrow, it suggests four separate processes rather than them being part of the same continuous process. As always in PowerPoint, once you've created something like this, it's really easy to modify and reuse for similar content. 10. White Space: White space refers to the empty or unused areas in a design. The spaces between and around text, images, or other elements. White space improves readability, draws attention to important info, and can make dense content feel less overwhelming. In this example, there are virtually no margins on these panels, and the text is right up to the edge. Smaller text with bigger margins is easier to read and easier to understand. Here, everything looks busy with virtually no margins or space between any of the elements. So by adjusting it, something like this, it's a lot easier to read and understand. So here is a slide where we have four pieces of information, and we want a photo to illustrate each one. At this point, the slide feels cluttered and hard to read, and we should be adding some white space, which basically means space around the elements for them to be seen clearly and for it not to look cluttered. So firstly, let's choose a background color. And I'm going to choose a dark gray. Now let's change the fonts. I'm going to use fig tree for all of these and make the title white and bold. The title has gone on to three lines, and there's not enough white space at the top or bottom of it. So we could reduce the font size or perhaps edit the title down. In this example, I'll be splitting it into a title and a smaller subtitle, so we could take out the colon, select this part of the text. I'm going to make this 18. Press return your cursor here. And for this part of the text, I'm going to make it 36. Now, it fits nicely on two lines, and it looks a lot clearer, having the main part of the title big, and then the subtitle smaller. So now I'm going to select all these boxes, and I want to make them a bit narrower to increase the space between them. So I can click on this white dot here and click and drag to the left. That's a nice amount of space. I can now space them back out. So for this, I can click and drag to the right, which is going to be here. Then make sure they're all selected. Go to range, align, and distribute horizontally, which means create the equal space between each of the elements. Now we can take our font size down. Something like 13 would probably be about right. I can align the text to the top. And then click and drag up. This is looking a lot better, but there are still a few things I'd like to change. While these are selected, I hold down shift. Position my mouse here and drag down. We'll click and drag these photos up into position. I want to make sure that each one of them is the size of this box. So I can click and drag down and align it to the left. I'm holding shift drag. Then I'm dragging from the corner. Shift to drag so the lefts are aligned. Drag from the corner so it's the right size. Now I can select all of these by dragging over them. Hold down shift and drag down. Now I'm going to choose no fill for this and then crop the pictures very slightly so they're a bit less tall. To do that, we can right click on a picture, go to crop drag up, position this anywhere you want by holding down Shift and dragging it. And I'm going to make sure that these have no outline as well. And we can see that in the first example, there's some really nice white space around each of the elements. I'm just going to crop these as well. So right click crop a smart guide will appear when it gets to the same position as the cropped image on the left, then we can press Return and do the same again for this one. Finally, I'm going to select everything. We can select all of this and group it, including this text, Control G, and then go to range a line center. I can drag this over as well. Now there's a nice balance between the elements, and we've created a nice amount of whitespace between each of the photos. 11. PART 2 - CONSIDERATIONS - Typography: The primary role of typography is to make your message readable and understandable. So you should use clear legible fonts at appropriate sizes and in clean layouts. Always follow brand guidelines if you have them and use consistent font stars and sizes throughout your presentation to give a polished, cohesive look. Try to limit yourself to one or two fonts and avoid using the PowerPoint defaults, such as Aerial, Calibri, aptos, et cetera. You can add variety by adding different weights and sizes. Using embeddable fonts, such as Google fonts preserves your presentations, design and readability across different devices and systems. So to install these, you can simply go to fonts.google.com. Find a font that you like. I've used pop ins in my example. Click on it, and then choose Download family. This will download all the fonts as a zip file, which you can right, click on, choose Extract All. Then click on the first font, Shift click. It will select all of them, right click and choose Install. This will install all the variations of the font you've selected. And now when you restart PowerPoint, they'll be installed. So now I have all the variations of pop ins installed. And to save them inside your presentation so that other people can open them without having to install the font, we can simply go to the save box, more options, and then tools and save options. In here, there's an option to embed fonts in the file. So we tick this on, and I would normally choose embed all characters, which means that all the characters will be embedded. So if other people want to change the presentation and type in different text, then they can do that. We click Okay, and then hit Save. Now the fonts will be embedded, and anyone that opens this presentation will be able to see the fonts correctly without having to manually install them. 12. Colour Schemes: Using a well thought out color scheme is essential for creating effective, professional and visually appealing presentations. You should follow brand color guidelines to maintain your brand identity. It's good practice to include black and white or close to in your color scheme, as they are very useful because they are easy to read on most background colors or images. Try to use color purposefully. You could use brighter colors to highlight key messages and use light, dark contrast for text over backgrounds. I here's how to create a custom color theme in PowerPoint. For our theme, we will need ten colors, which I have here along with their hex values. Using hex values, I think is the easiest way to create a color theme in PowerPoint. So we'll go to the design part of the ribbon and then under the part that says variance here, we can click this drop down and go to colors. From there, right at the bottom, it says customized colors. From here, you can define six regular or accent colors, and you can also change what PowerPoint calls text background colors. And while PowerPoint calls these by different names, they essentially give you up to four more custom colors for your palette. I would advise leaving the first two black and white as they are now, as it's useful to have each of these colors ready by default, regardless of the rest of your color palette. You can also choose two colors at the end here for hyperlinks, but these are less important as they don't appear in the theme color palette when using the drawing tools. So if we firstly go to text background, dark two, and then more colors, we can type in the hex value here. Because you now can't get to the text behind, I like to copy these into something like notepad before I create this theme and then copy them all in. So each time, I'm going to the drop down, selecting more colors, and pasting in my hex value, and then pressing Okay. Now I have all my colors entered in. We can give this theme a name, my new color palette and click Save. And now we have a color palette that can be applied to any element. For example, if I just set all of these to black and the text to white, I can now select any of these and make them any color in my theme. And the same applies for outlines. Each color has a number of lighter available options, and you can also reuse this palette for future presentations, ensuring that color usage is consistent time after time. 13. Alignment: Alignment can bring structure and order to your presentation and provides clarity, professionalism, and impact. Poor alignment can make a presentation feel amateur or careless, regardless of content. PowerPoint has grid lines, guides, and rulers to help with alignment. But the more useful tools are the alignment tools and smart guides. Using consistent alignment across slides ties the whole deck together. Let's align these five boxes into two rows to illustrate how easy the tools are to use. First, let's create some guides on the left and right. We can do that by going to view and then clicking here guides. You can also right click anywhere that isn't on an object, and then go to Grids and Guides and tick it on from there. So if we move the cursor over this guide in the center, you can see that it changes to these arrows and we can click, hold it down and drag to the left and then drop it anywhere you want. I want it to be on 15, which you can see in the small tool tip. I now want to add another one for the right hand side, so we can right click Grids and Guides and choose Add Vertical Guide. Again, we'll click drag to the right and drop it on 15. We don't need this guide in the middle, so we can right click on it and choose Delete. So firstly, we'll drag this box to the left. Holding it down Shift, we'll lock its vertical position, and then we can click and drag. It will snap to the left hand guide. We can now click and drag this. The smart guides will appear when it's the right height, and then we can drag it to the right, and again, it will snap to the right hand guide. We can now drag this middle one. The smart guides will appear to show it's perfectly in the center. If it was slightly down, we can always select all of these items and then go to a range, a line and choose a line top. We can now click and drag this one down. It's now the same height as this one, but if I hold down shift, I can drag it up a bit. That's about right. Now I can select all of these by clicking and dragging over all of them, then go to range, align, distribute horizontally, which effectively sets it to have exactly the same horizontal space between all of the elements. 14. Animation: Animations are easy to add using PowerPoint and can enhance communication and engagement, but they must be added thoughtfully. They can be used to focus attention, reveal information gradually, or illustrate processes, movement, or timelines. Too many effects can be distracting or look unprofessional, so it is best to stick to simple, consistent animations. Long or elaborate animations, slow down the flow and waste valuable time. Short, purposeful animations can boost your presentations impact while keeping it professional and efficient. For most presentations, exit animations are unnecessary. You can use a simple slide transition instead. Let's animate this slide with simple short animations. First, we will add a simple Zoom on each photo and set it to on click so we can talk through each point in turn. So we'll click on our first image. Then holding down Shift, click on our subsequent images in this order. And then in the animation section on the ribbon, we're going to choose Zoom. Immediately after, we're going to choose on click. And this will set each one of them to appear on a click. And you can see that in this small tooltip here, which says one, two, three, and four. So when we run that, the first click will reveal the first picture and so on. Then we'll group the arrow with the dark blue box so we can animate them together. This will simplify the animation and mean that there are less animations in your animation pane. You can always toggle this on or off at any point. So if you click animation pane, you can see what we're doing. So we'll click on this blue box, hold down Shift, click on the arrow, and press Control G to group. We'll do this for each one. I now we have four grouped objects. And for each one of these, as before, I'm going to select them all, choose fade. And for these, I want them to happen after previous. So I want this photo to appear, and then after that, without having to click again, I want this to appear. To do that, we can change the order in the animation pane. So if we click on this one here, you'll see it's highlighted it in the animation pane, and we want to drag it up to happen after the first picture is revealed. And I'm going to do the same for each one of these, Okay make sure that they're all set to after previous. So I'll select after previous on this one. So now, they'll all appear after the previous element, and you can see that by this small clock icon underneath each of the mice icon saying that there's going to be a click. So now when we run this, each one will appear, and the blue box will fade on afterwards. For the last part of each animation, we're going to reveal each one of these key points at the bottom. To do that, we can go to animations. And for this, we're going to choose fly in. While these are all selected, I can right click Go to Effect Options and choose Smooth End, which effectively slows down the animation as they come in, which gives it a nice effect. I can now drag these into the order I want them to. So this one is going to appear after the blue box and the first photo. And then I can click and drag these ones in order as well. Now they're all in the correct order. I can make sure they're all selected and choose after previous. So here you can see the order of how everything's going to happen. The picture will zoom in on a click. After that, automatically, the blue box will fade up, and then after that automatically, this panel here with the keypoint on will fly in with a smooth end. The result is a professional and snappy animation which doesn't distract from the slide content. 15. Using The Screen Effectively: Using the screen area effectively in presentation design is essential for clarity, impact, and audience engagement. If you have lots of content, it's a good idea to simplify text to reduce clutter and allow enough white space. When presenting, you shouldn't just read the slide. You can use the notes panel for a script or extra information. If you have less content, then large text and visuals are easy to read and understand. Spreading content appropriately across the slide can add to the sense of balance and look more polished and inviting while remaining clear and easy to follow. 16. Visualise Your Content: Visualizing your content is important because people understand, remember, and engage with visuals far better than with text alone. PowerPoint has many tools to turn your content into impactful visuals. You can use Smart art for processes, cycles, hierarchies or relationships. Use charts and graphs to visualize numeric data. Use maps for geographical data. Use images or illustrations to support ideas or add impact, and use icons and shapes to add clarity and reinforce text. 17. PART 3 - EXAMPLES - Convert Bullets To Smart Art: A slide filled with bullet points can look cluttered and make it harder for your audience to focus on the content. Bulet points usually create a linear, monotonous presentation that can lack visual impact. Here we'll convert some bullets to smart art to easily create something more visual and memorable. So here's a very basic example, which is just a list of bullet points. So to convert these to Smart Art, we can simply click on the text to select the box, right click and choose Convert to Smart Art. On the Mc, you'll need to go to the home section of the ribbon and then choose Convert Smart Art from there. So I'm going to select more SmartArt graphics. Then pick this first one basic blocklist and click Okay. You can choose any of these Smart Art Layouts, and at any point, you can go back to the selection of Layouts and change it to anything you want. But we're going to stick with this basic blocklist for this example. If we go to change colors, we can choose any colors that we like. You can also click on them individually and color them to anything you want. So for this example, I'm going to choose the second option under colorful. I can now change to the font I want to use, and we want to make sure that all six boxes are selected. And to do that, we can click on this outside box. Now I can go to the fonts. I can also click this small A here, which will decrease the font size. We can also go to the Smart art design section when it's selected and add or remove any shapes if we want. So there's an example of adding one, and we can remove it by clicking on it and pressing delete. If you want to, you can also change the shape of all of these boxes. To do that, we want to make sure they're all selected. So we'll click on the first one, then hold down Shift and click on each subsequent one until all six are selected. And now you can go to format, change shape, and pick anything you like. For example, a rectangle with rounded corners. We'll quickly just format the title, so it's more in line with the content. So we'll send to the text. Click on this outside dot to make sure all the text is selected. Choose our font, fig tree, make it bold, and then go to colors and pick one of the colors from these boxes, using the eyedrop at all. That looks good. We'll finally add a simple animation to reveal them one at a time. The animation can make it easier to read and easier for your audience to follow and be aligned with your message. So we'll click on our content to make sure it's all selected. Then go to animations and choose, say something like Zoom. And we'll go to effect options and choose one by one. Now, if we play the slide, we can click to reveal each of the items one by one as we talk about it. So using convert to SmartAt can be a nice way to quickly convert bullets to something more visual. 18. Use A Coloured Background: The standard template in Power Point uses a white background. This can provide a clean and professional look and means the audience keep their attention on the text, images, and charts without distractions. But the background does not always have to be white and can be easily changed to any color or gradient. A colored background can make your presentation more engaging and dynamic. The colors you choose could reflect the theme of your presentation or align with any brand colors or guidelines. It is important to ensure good contrast between the background and the text for readability. So taking this slide from the previous lesson, if we write click and choose format background, we can select solid fill, gradient fill or picture or texture fill. I'm going to click on gradient fill, and I've chosen this gradient, which is a 45 degree linear gradient between this color here from the theme, aqua and the second color, Lavender accent two. The background looks good, but I would change this text to white so we can click on one of the outer circles to make sure everything's selected and then click white. So we could leave these panels in the colors they are or change them all to white. I'm going to change them all to white in this example. So I've selected this one by clicking on it, then hold down Shift and click on the others to select them all. Then we can go to Shapeville and choose white and change the font to any color we want, for example, Aqua accent four. Now the contrast between the foreground and the background is very strong, and it's easy to read the text. We could also use an image in the background so we can right click on the background, format background, choose picture or texture fill, then go to insert stockimages and type whatever we want. For example, selecting this, clicking Insert. I've selected a dark background, and again, the contrast looks really good. It's normally best to avoid overly complex or distracting images and choose ones that look good but don't distract from the content. If, for example, we chose a different image that was quite busy but was relevant to the message, such as this one here, click insert. And while this image is relevant to the content on the screen, it does not necessarily make for a good background, as it's quite bright and could be distracting. One way we could make this more subtle is by using the picture color options, which are here by going to picture under format background, and then choosing picture color, and we can go to recolor, where we can select a number of tints available from our color theme. So I could select this one, Lavender, accent color too dark. And that's a lot clearer and a lot easier to see. If we want to, we can also go to picture corrections and adjust the brightness to make it even darker. So, whichever way you want to use, either by using a darker background and a brighter foreground or the other way around, it's very important to have good contrast between the two. And here you can see that adding an image to the background can help tell your story. 19. Reduce On Screen Content: Here's an example where the main task is to simplify the content to provide more impact. The notes page in PowerPoint can have all this extra information if you need to refer to it during the presentation. So here's our original text slide, which has a lot of text and a very long title and is a lot of information to take in at once if it's being presented. So firstly, I'll take all the content and put it in the notes for reference. I'll click in the title, Control A to select everything, control C to copy, and then Control V to paste. And do the same with the bullets. Control A, Control C, Control V. Firstly, the title can be cut down as it simply repeats what's in the body text. I would recommend using a short and clear title. So we're going to click and drag select all of this and then press delete. I'll make sure this is all selected by clicking on the outer arrow. Choose my font, which will be fig tree, then align it to the center with this option here in paragraph and set it to whatever color you want. Going to choose this blue. And now, if you're presenting this, each bullet can be cut down as well. So I'm going to click here, drag select that first part, press delete. And for this, I'm just going to write highly skilled colleagues. For this second one, just going to write great global locations. Ideally, when presenting slides like this, the key points will come up on the screen, and you can go into the details as you present them. The third one, I'm going to write generous benefits package. Here I'm just selecting that text, clicking Delete and pressing Return, and then deleting this. So it just says 247 backup support. So now we have a more manageable amount of text. We can style it in any way we like. For this example, I'm going to use some simple circles, so I'm going to click and move this over here. Then click on the oval, click anywhere, and I'm going to cut this text by selecting it, Control X, clicking on the circle and Control V. I can now hold down Shift and drag out this corner point, set the font to fig tree and 24. Control E will align it to the center, and we're now going to set the outline by right clicking, going to format shape, selecting the same blue but adjusting the width to ten point and the transparency to 50%. Now we can put this roughly where we want it. We can size it down later if we need to. Control D to duplicate, drag it into position where the smart guides appear at the top and bottom, let go, Control D to duplicate, and Control D again. That's almost the right size. I'm just going to make them a tiny bit smaller so there's a bit more space on the right hand side. To do that, we can select them all, control G to group, then hold down shift, drag in from this corner point. That looks pretty good. We can now go to arrange align center, to align it perfectly in the middle and Shift Control G. Well ungroup, or you can right click and go to group, ungroup. I'm going to move this text slightly out the way. Now I can copy this text into the other circles. So we'll click Control X will cut it. And then if I click on the outside circle, I can go to paste choose keep text only. That will make sure it pass in with the correct format that's already in the circles. So I'll do that again, click, hold down the mouse and drag, Control X to cut. Make sure that the whole circle is selected by clicking on one of the out circles. Then go to paste. Keep text only. Just do this final one. I can get rid of this textbox by clicking and pressing Delete. That looks good. I'm now going to add a panel at the bottom half of the screen. So I'll go to the rectangle option, click anywhere, click on the circles and hold down the mouse and drag this out. I want this to be halfway up here. I'm going to choose no outline. And for the fill, I want this to be 90%, and then I'm going to send it behind. Right click, send it back. And now I'm going to add the grow your career with us text at the bottom. So I'll copy that from the notes. Click and Drag with my textbox. Control V to paste. Change this to a capital, click on the outside circle to make sure it's selected. Change this to the color I want and the font, which is fig tree and 36. Drag this out a bit, center it, and then go to range, a line center to center on the slide. There's our slide. A much nicer way of presenting that text. If you wanted to adapt this slide as a slide that would be read by someone rather than presented, in which case, you would want all of the text and the details, you could do something simple, such as move this text down slightly, select these, hold down shift, move them up a bit, and the same for this. Select this, drag it to the middle again, and now add some text below the circles with the full details in. I'm going to quickly paste in some text for that. And there's a nicely adapted version of that slide, but with all the details in. So this is great if you're sending out the slide to be red, but if you're presenting it, I'd rather present it with just the four circles and talk about the other details. And if I was presenting it, I'd also like to add a basic fade animation to each of the circles so I can click to reveal them as I talk about them. So I'll just press Control Z to get back to my layout, which is just the four circles. Click on the first one, then hold down Shift, click on the second, third and the fourth, then go to animations fade and choose Start on click and then click on the Text Blow and click to choose a Fade animation for that as well. And then we can click and start talking about each of the main key points, the highly skilled colleagues, the great global locations, the generous benefits package, and the 247 backup support. Then as you present it, you can go into details for each of the sections, and finally, we can click to reveal Grow Your career with us. 20. Use Icons For Visual Appeal: Here is a slide that has a bullet for each of the four presentation house rules. This is the type of information where icons can be used as we can choose examples that are easily recognized and can convey the ideas quickly. It may be tempting to find images for these points, but often the problem is that the images are not consistent in style or size. They also may not look good on a darker background as they don't contain any transparency. First, let's position the title and choose a font. So we'll select this, choose fig tree. I'm going to use point size 40, bold, and centered. We can now add a text box for each one of these. I'm just going to move these out of the way. Control and the mouse wheel to zoom out. Then Control X will cut it. I can click on textbox, click anywhere and paste it into that textbox. I'm going to change that textbox to fig tree, 20 point, make it bold and change the color. I'm also going to press Shift and return here, so it's on two lines for consistency with the other three. I also want to send to the text, which is Controlle now we can get the first icon. And to do that, we go to insert icons. I type T. We chose this one, click Insert, drag it into position. We can make it a bit bigger if we want by holding down Control and Shift and dragging from the corner. That's about right. I'll now select both of these by clicking, dragging over them and releasing, press Control D, which will duplicate. And if I drag this into position and the smart guides appear, the next time I press Control D, after I let go of the mouse, it will position them with the correct amount of spacing. So I'll press Control D and Control D again. We can select all of these control G to group and align them to the center by going to a line and a graphics format, the line center, and now Control Shift G to ungroup them. I'm now going to pick up this text. Control X and make sure I paste this just as text format. So go to the paste options by pressing this little down arrow and choosing text only. Again, I'm going to hold down Shift and press Return to get this over two lines. So it's the same for each of the text items. Control X, select paste text only, and add in the return. I can now delete this I also don't need this, paste, text only, Shift Return. Now we can change the icons for the other three. We can do that by right clicking, going to change graphic icons and typing in the word we want to find the icon. So those all look good. The great thing about icons is that they can be easily restyled to fit your presentation. For example, if we change the background, we could go to format background, give it a solid fill of this blue. I can now select the text, change that to white, and then select the icons and choose to shape fill those with white as well. And now they look really good and they work with the background. We can also change the title. I we could also combine these with simple shapes to create an alternative impactful design. So I'm going to add rectangular panels behind each one of these. Before we do that, I'm going to change the colors of these so they stand out on the panels. So there are the colors I'm going to use. I'm going to change the text to a darker blue. Then from the drawing menu, I'll click on a rounded corner rectangle, click and drag. Something like that will be about right. Fill it with white with no outline and click on this yellow circle to adjust how rounded the corners are and drag to the left. That looks good. We can now right click center back. Finally, I'll just align this. So that's about right. You can see that the smart guides appear when I drag it into the middle, or you can select all three of these things, then go to a range, a line and choose a line center. I'll hold down Shift and drag this one out. We can align them all correctly once we've got all four of them, so I'll click on the white panel, Control D to duplicate. Control D, Control D. Shift click to select these other two, right click center back. Now I can align all these by making sure all three are selected. In this case, we can choose a line right first, which will stop the white panel from being moved, and then a line center. The same again for this one. Arrange a line, right first, and then arrange line center. For this one, we can just go to arrange a line center as the text and the icon are already completely over the top of the panel. Now we can select everything, control G group, arrange a line center. And this looks like a really nice way to present these icons and this information. We could now bring these up one by one if we wanted to with some subtle animation. So we'll click on them, Control Shift G to ungroup. And now I want to select just this panel and Control G to group, and then the same for the other three. So each panel is now grouped with the icon and the text, so we can then click on this first panel, hold down Shift, click on the second. While shift is still held down, click on the third and fourth. Then we can go to animations, click on Fade, Choose starts on click. Play the slide. Each time you click, one of the panels will fade up. 21. Grab Attention With Big Figures: Large text naturally draws audience attention to key information, making it clear what they should focus on. Big bold figures can tell your story with more impact than a paragraph explaining the same statistic. Here we have some statistics that we want to visualize for more impact. In this instance, standard PowerPoint graphs, like a Pie chart for the percentages, would not be very effective. These statistics are simple headlines rather than complex datasets requiring the use of charts or graphs. So in this case, we could rewrite each point to isolate the figures and simplify the rest. Then we will enlarge and starle the figures to draw attention and add impact. So firstly, we'll edit the bullet points to allow the big figures to come first. So when we have the 1.5% as a big figure, it will look good and read correctly with the text below. I'll do the same for this one, deleting text and adding to make it read well. And then the third bullet So that looks good for the content. Now let's design it so it looks really nice. I'm going to zoom out a bit by using control and the mouse wheel, select the bullets, control X to cut, control V to paste. Just going to put those out the way so I can use them in a minute. I can now make this text box a little smaller. I can select both of these, change them to the font fig tree. This text, I want to be 18 point and centralgn it and size it down to whatever I want. And then go to arrange a line center to align it to the center of the page. And for this text, I want this to be bold, 40 point, and again, center aligned. I also want to drag this text up a small amount. To keep it locked in the center, I can hold down Shift, click on it, and move the mouse up. Now we can add our big figures. I'm going to select it from the text down there, so control X would cut, Control V would paste. I want this to be 88 point, so I'll click on the out circle. And I want to make it fig tree, 88 and bold. But this percentage, I only want to be 44 point. So I'll click on just the percentage, type 44 point. That's exactly how I want it to look. I can also size this box down a little by clicking on this circle here and dragging it in and then centralging it. I can now add the text underneath, select it, Control X, click anywhere, control V, and I want this to be 18 point bold and figtrey. I can then size it down to whatever I want and align it to the center. I want these to be aligned together, so I can select them both, then go to range, align, align center. This looks good. I find the easiest way to create the other two are to duplicate this one first and then change the text. So Control D will duplicate. I can now drag this into position somewhere about there, press Control D again, and now we have the three big figures. We can just cut and paste them in and make some small changes. So we cut this, select this text here, and go to paste, keep text only. I then want the BN to be 44 point and the dollar to be 44 point. I can press Return so that the subtext is in the correct place. Then we'll select this text, cut it, and paste it in here. For the last figure, it's actually quicker to select this text and type 40 than it is to cut it in. Then we can select this text and paste it in here. We can delete this as we don't need it anymore. Now our figures look good. We can add a background and color the text. So we can right, click format background. I'm going to set the color to a dark green, Control A, select everything, make it all white. Then I'll just select this text and make it a light green. This looks good. I'll just show you how you can make an alternative with a small panel behind each of the figures. And for this alternative, we're going to use white figures, so I'll select them all and choose white. Before we add in the shape, I'm going to add one more return. To move this text down a bit, then I'm going to draw a rounded corner rectangle. So we click on rectangle, rounded corners, and click and drag and adjust it, so it's roughly in the right place. Click on this little yellow dot and drag it to the right, set it to shape outline, no outline, and a gradient fill the shape fill. We can click on these and drag them down or up to remove them. And for the gradient stop on the left, I'm going to make it light green, one on the bottom, I'm going to set the brightness to zero. I can press Control D to make a copy of that, drag it into position. Control D again. Now, I can select all of these by holding down Shift after I've selected the first one and clicking on the other two, right clicking and choosing center back. As this one could do with being a very slight bit wider, we can hold down Control and Shift while they're all selected and drag on this center circle to the right. Great. So there is a nice way of displaying some big figures, which will give your data more impact and make it more memorable. 22. Use A Map For Geographic Data: Using a map in a presentation can be a powerful tool for visual communication. This method is ideal for presenting data geographically, such as sales by region or population density. So here we have some simple data where using a map would work well. Firstly, I'm going to cut this text and put it in the notes for later use. Then I'm going to go to insert, chart, and choose map. So this built in map feature is dynamic and will show the countries that are in this list. For example, if I delete all of these and just leave the United States, that will be the only country that will show. If you add things, it will either show the whole World Map or whatever is the closest region that it recognizes. In this example, we can type anything we want into the series as I'm just going to use it to color the individual countries that we are showing. So those are the three countries that I'm going to show. We can now close this. I can delete the chart title as I don't want that because I'm using a title on my actual slide. And to do that, we simply click Select and press Delete. We can also scale this up. And to do that from the center, I can hold Control and Shift and drag from the corner. If you hold Shift while clicking on the line, you can drag down to the position you want this displayed. Control on the mouse wheel to zoom out a little, and I'm going to scale this up a little bit more. And I also don't want the legend, so I can click on that and press delete. Now I can hold down Shift, drag, and align it wherever I want. That looks about right. I'll play that slide. Yeah, looking good. I'm going to right click center back. Choose a font for this title. So I'm going to use fig tree, 32 point and centered. And then I'll move this up a bit. That's looking good. Now let's change the colors and add the call outs. So if we make sure the maps selected and then click on the US, I can choose a color. I'm going to choose a bright blue for this one. For the UK, I'm going to choose this orange. And for China, I'm going to choose this green. Now I'm going to add five centimeter circles to show the data. So we can click on Oval, click anywhere, type in five by five for this. Make it the same color as the country I'm showing the data for, set it to have no outline. Then we'll type in our text. Control A to select it all. I'm going to make that victory bold, 24, for this, 40. Now if we go to text options, textbox, I can turn this off to stop it wrapping. This looks good. Now I can control D to duplicate it. Set the color I want. Double click, which will just select that individual word and then type UK and the data point that is below in the notes. Control D again. This is for China. Okay so there's a nice way of presenting some data using a map. The map chart type is very flexible and you can have a number of different display options. For example, if we click on this map, format data series will appear, and you can, for example, adjust the map projection to any of these three options, such as the Mercator projection or the Miller or the Robinson. I'm just going to leave mine on automatic. I'll now show you how you can adjust the data just to show Europe. So we could click on the map, right click, choose Edit Data. For example, type France in this first one, Spain in this third one. Now we can close this data window, adjust and resize the map to whatever we want. Click and drag on these circles to put them where we want. And then just change the text. Double click and type the country name. So there's a nice, flexible way of using the dynamic in built maps in PowerPoint to create some impactful geographical data slides. The dynamic maps will have this text in the bottom that says powered by Bing. You can simply put something like a white rectangle over the top so you can't see it. 23. Using Logos To Make A Slide More Visual: Logos can add a visual element to text heavy slides and make slides more engaging and easier to scan. Logos instantly identify the organization, company, or product, and including them makes your slides look polished and trustworthy. Here is a slide that introduces four companies with a bit of background information on each. These could be your competitors or strategic partners or suppliers. But for my example, I'm just using famous tech brands. So here we could convert these four blocks of text into something like this with four panels and the text details nicely laid out across the page. This leaves a nice space to add the logo above the text. Here are some best practices for using company logos. Firstly, you should use high resolution images, preferably SVG, which is a scalable vector graphic and will look good at any size. If you can't get these, then PNG with transparency, will be the next best option. Then you should make sure you have an up to date logo. You can check this by going on the website of the company, and you should avoid stretching the logo. You can keep the logo in proportion by holding shift when resizing it. If it's an SVG, you can simply click on the corner and drag to resize. If it's a selection of PowerPoint shapes, you must make sure you hold down shift. Otherwise, you can stretch the logo like this. So if you hold down shift and drag, you'll resize it from the corner, and if you hold down control and shift, it will resize it from the center or while keeping the proportion. And it's good to use logos on contrasting backgrounds. If necessary, you can place the logo on a white or neutral shape to ensure its visibility without altering it. For example, if all these panels were green and the Google logo was on it, we wouldn't see this part, so it's not good contrast. But you can use something like a white panel behind it, which will help it stand out. Don't recolor or modify the logo unless the brand guidelines permit it. Although many brands will allow white or black versions of their logo. So here's our example where we've converted the large body of text into four panels with four text boxes. Now we can add the logos. And to do that, we can go to insert, pictures, this device, choose your logos, drag it into position, and then scale it up to the right size. If you hold down shift and select the panel behind it, you can also align to center. We'll just add in the other ones. So insert from this device. These SVGs can be got by going to Google and simply typing Google logo or Apple logo and use the words SVG next to it. You'll often get straight to the correct link. When adding multiple logos, we want to keep to a similar size. So in this example, we want this Apple logo to be a similar height to the Google one, which it is now. I can now align that to the center of the gray panel. And then I'll insert my other two logos. If I want this to be a similar size, I can simply lay it over the top, resize it down slightly, and then drag it into position. This one's pretty close already. We want to resize it from the center. We can hold down control and shift and drag out from the corner. So these are now all similar sizes and similar positions. This gives a very consistent and professional look to any slide that's comparing companies. 24. Using Questions To Engage The Audience: You can use the power of a question to introduce your message. This can help build engagement with your audience. In this example, we are looking if people are setting smart goals. We could ask a big question on one slide and then go into details on the following slide. So, for example, on this slide, we could click anywhere to add a textbox. This will be our big question. I'm going to make it Montserrat at 80 point and make the word smart, bold. You can align this to the center, arrange a line center, and the middle, arrange a line, middle. That looks good, but we can also add some animation to reveal the question one character at a time, which makes it look as if it's writing out, which is a really nice effect. To do that, we could go to Animations, click appear. Reveal the animation pane. Double click on this and set animate text to be by letter. By default, there'll be a half second delay between every letter, which is very slow. I would suggest starting with something around naught point naught four for text of this length, and then you can speed it up if you choose. You can also set this to happen with previous, which means that as soon as the slide starts, the question will write out. So there's a really nice way of introducing the question and building some engagement. We can then use another slide for the details. So we can now reveal the slide thumbnails. Click on this first one, press Control D to duplicate it, then set the transition to morph and delete the animation of it writing on the second slide because we don't need that, so click on it in the animation pane and press delete. Now we can click on this and, for example, move it up here. And when we play from slide one, you'll see it writes out and then moves up the top. But we also want to make it smaller. So we'll click on this circle to make sure everything's selected. We'll set this to 36, expand the frame over here. We don't want to return in it. I'll put a space here and then drag it down to the position I want. And as we're using the morph transition, we want to make sure the returns are the same on both slides, so we don't want to return here either. So I'll delete the return, add a space, and now I'm going to zoom out using control in the mouse wheel and then drag the box in to the this way, PowerPoint will smoothly transition between the text on both slides. So it writes out, we click and then it nicely moves to the top while automatically adjusting the text. I'm quickly going to paste in these smart goal panels that I created earlier. These are just made with a rounded corner rectangle with a circle over the top. And then if we play from slide one, we can introduce the powerful question, build some engagement, ask, Are you setting smart goals, and then click to Reveal. I think this is a really nice way of introducing a subject, and I would recommend you look at using questions to engage your audience. 25. Using Screen Space Effectively: Certain types of content will lend itself well to using the area of the screen in a balanced and impactful way. Here, for example, we have two bullets showing some positive and some negative areas of company performance. Splitting the screen into two and using color will help tell this slide story. So firstly, I'm going to take the title, line it to the center. Make it the font fig tree, bold, Control B, and a gray color. I'm going to cut and paste this text into the notes. Control X. Then reveal the notes and paste it in Control V. I'm going to click to delete this. Firstly, I'm going to choose a rounded corner rectangle, click anywhere, and I'm going to make this ten by 13. Click on the little yellow dot and drag it to the left to make it much less rounded. Set the outline to no outline. Choose a green color for this one. I'm going to cut this text and paste it into this box, paste text only. I'm going to make this fig tree font bold. We can take out some of this text to make our points stronger. Now we can change the line spacing on this slightly. I'm going to choose 1.5 and go to text options, textbox and increase the top margin to move it down slightly because we're going to add a tick at the top. Two is about right. I can also up the text if I want to. I could set it to 20 point. Now we'll add a tick from the icons. Double click to add that, drag it into position and make it white. We'll now click drag over this Control D to duplicate and put it into position here. We can center it in a minute. This one, I'm going to make red. Change this icon by right clicking, change graphic and choosing from icons. Now we can post in our text for the negative section by selecting this and choosing post, keep text only. And again, editing the text to make the point stronger by reducing the text. Now we can select this all, control G to group, and then align it to the center of the slide by going to range, align, align center. So there's our first powerful way of using the entire slide to show a comparison between positive and negative. In this example, we have a RAG status for a business, so three main points with info below each one of them. For this, we could split the screen up into three panels and use colors that support the message. So again, we'll align this to the center. Make it fig tree and gray and bold. I'll cut this text into the notes as before. Control X. Reveal the notes and control V. You can delete this text box. I'll click rounded corner rectangle again. And I want this to be 11 by 8.7. Click on the little yellow dot, drag it to the left to reduce the rounded corners. Set it to have no outline and to shape fill this light gray color. I can copy this text in by going to paste text only. I want two different styles of text in this example. I choose fig tree. This main subject title text, I'm going to make green and bold and 24 point. This text, I'm going to make black, 12 point. I'm going to align it to the left, set it to have a custom bullet by clicking on the drop down next to this bullets, choosing bullets and numbering, then customize, then click a dash, and click Okay. I can press return here to add a subsequent bullet. Now I'm going to format the textbox to give it some margins. So we'll go to Text Options, textbox, type whatever you think looks good in here. I'm going to use 0.8 on the left and right. You can press return here. And for the text here, I'm going to select ten as an after. So after each bullet, there's a ten point gap. That looks good. We're just going to add a circle with a tick in it at the top. So I'll click on Oval, click anywhere. I'm going to make this 1.7 by 1.7 with no outline and the same color green as the text. Drag it into position. Then we'll add the tick on top of it by going to insert icons, tick Hold down shift and drag from the corner to size it down. Then we'll drag it on top of here. Make it white and hold down shift, size it down a bit more. You can zoom in with control on the mouse wheel if you want and align it. That looks good. We'll now just add the other two, and we'll start from this one that we've already created by clicking, dragging over the whole thing, so it's all selected and then pressing Control D, drag it into position. So the smart guides appear at the top and bottom, and the gaps correct, and then Control D again. We can change this to our second color and this text to our second color. We'll right click on this and change it from icons. Click insert. Then we'll do this red, and the circle red and the icon, whatever you want that you think looks good here. I'm going to choose across. Now we can cut in the text for the other two parts. So Amber is needs monitoring and action. We can copy that. Then go to this, select it and choose paste, keep text only. That doesn't quite fit in the frame, so you can either make the frame a tiny bit wider or we could have just reduced the margins. So I'll click on here, press return, and now it all lines up perfectly. So we can now post this text in by selecting this, going to post and choosing keep text only, and then add returns in for the other bullets. These are currently all aligned to the middle, but I want them to be aligned to the top, so I'll select all three of these. Go to text options, textbox, select vertical alignment top, and then top margin adjustment till it's in the right place, which is about 1.3. I can now copy in the last part. Control C to copy that text, select the text you want to replace and choose paste text, PressRturn and now add in the details underneath. And press return to add each one as a bullet. So there's a really nice way of using the screen to its full potential to show the three parts of this rag status. These panels make everything more visual and make it more memorable. 26. Create A Basic Infographic: An infographic is a visual representation of information that can combine text, images, icons, and graphics to present data or key points in a clear and engaging way. They are great at simplifying complex information, but can also be used with simpler content such as a typical PowerPoint slide to grab attention, add variety, and make your slide more memorable. So here is a standard text base slide where the four parts of an environmental policy are outlined. We could easily just arrange four boxes across the slide, but by using shapes to make a simple infographic, we can make a slide that is more engaging and memorable. So firstly, I'm going to cut this into the notes. Control X. Control V to paste. Then we can click here to add a chart and choose a pie and a doughnut, which is the fifth option. I want the sizes of all of these to be the same, so I can just enter something like one in each of them. Then close this down, click on the title to delete it by pressing the delete key and the same with the legend. We can now click on the Pi itself. Go to this option here, good series options and change the size of the whole. I'm going to choose 40%, press return. I also want a white outline, so I can go to home, shape outline and choose white. I want it to be a bit thicker, so I can also go to Shape Outline and choose weight three point. That looks good. So now we can add the policy title in the middle by clicking on the textbox, clicking and dragging here and typing our text. I'll click on the outside. I'll select everything and make it fig tree 20. Bold and a dark green. Central line the text. Hold down control and shift and drag this from the side, so it fits on two lines and drag it down because I'm going to add a small icon above it. I'm also going to make the whole thing a little bit bigger. So I can click on this, hold down Control and Shift, and then drag out. I can hold down Shift and click and drag this down, and I'm going to add a small icon above it. So we'll go to insert icons and type plant. I'm going to select this one, click insert, change it to the same green as the text below. Hold down shift and drag it down. You can adjust it with the cursors for some fine adjustment. Now I'm going to add each of the categories. So I'm going to copy the text out there. Click anywhere to add this, paste it in. Make it the right size, center it. I'm going to put the text there and then rotate it by 45 degrees. We'll also make it white. If we go to the format shape options, we can drop down the size options and set it to rotation -45. We can use this for the others as well. So we can hold down Control and Shift click and drag to make a copy, and then go to a range, rotate and choose flip horizontal. We can add our text, which is this, clicking on the outside, and then choosing paste text only. Click on this, hold down Control and Shift and drag down. Again, we can go to a range, rotate and flip horizontal. Can adjust this to the correct position and paste the texting. We'll down control and shift again while we drag to make a copy of it. Flip it horizontally and copy the texting. I'm now going to move this all up very slightly, making sure everything selected and dragging up. I'll change the font to the title by clicking on this outside dot, big tree, bold and gray and then aligning it to the center. Now we have a nice basic infographic, which adds some more impact compared to the text. But finally, I'm going to add some numbers in small circles to help identify each of these sections and then add the supporting details. So I'll click on Oval, click anywhere. I want to make this 1.9 by 1.9. With a white outline, the same width of the outline as was in the circle, which was three point. Adding the number one by clicking on it and typing one, and then changing it to the font I want, which is fig tree and 24 points and bold. Now I can track it into position and make it the same color. Now I can hold down Control and Shift and drag to make a copy. Again, set the correct color and type in the correct number. We'll now select both of these top numbers by clicking on one, holding down shift, and clicking on the other one, then Control and Shift and dragging down to make these copies. Setting the color as we go. And now we'll add in the supporting details. So we'll click on a rounded corner rectangle. Click anywhere. I want these to be slightly less rounded, so I can click on the little yellow dot and drag to the left. I want these to have no outline. And the shape fill will be the same color as the panel that's next to, but I'm going to change the transparency to 90%. It's a very soft color. And this is so we can use dark text and so that it contrasts well with the bolder colors and the white text that's in the circle. So we'll copy this text from the notes, paste it here. Make it gray and fig tree and 12 point and align it to the left. I can now move this up so it's in the right position. And then if I want, I can add a line from this to the circle. I also want this line to be the same color, so I'll use that and set it to 90% transparency. So that's a really nice way of adding the details in if you want. I can now just quickly paste in the other panels to save time. And then we have a really nice looking basic infographic that I think looks much better than just having the simple text. And if we wanted to, we could select all this supporting detail, press Control J to group, go to animations and click Fade. And then we could reveal this information, talk about these four sections on how we protect our environment, and then click to reveal the details, which is a really nice way of making an impactful and memorable slide. 27. Visualise A Process: A step process diagram helps people see the flow of a process at a glance and makes the slide more appealing and easy to follow. So here we have some content where a process diagram would help you tell the story. So firstly, I'll cut this text. Control A to select at all, control X to cut, and put it in the notes. I'll now click on this and click Delete to remove it. Right click on the background, quickly set any background color we want. Change this text to white, clicking on the outer dot, then choosing white text. I'm going to make it Fictory bold and align it to the middle. Now we can add the graphic for the first point. I'm going to use a circle. So we'll click on the oval. Click anywhere. I want to make this 5.5 by 5.5, set the shape fill to any color we want with no outline. For the text, I'm going to be using Fictry again. At 20 point, old and white. And now we can cut in the text from the notes for this one. This is going to be step one, identify the goal. I'm going to copy the text for identify the goal. And if we paste it in by right clicking and making sure we just choose keep text only, it will keep the font that I've selected up here. I'm now going to add a smaller circle above this, so we can click on the oval again, click anywhere, choose whatever color we want. This colors fine. I want this to be 1.3 by 1.3. Set it to no outline, drag it into position. And type one. I also want this to be ctory 18 is fine and bold. So there's our starting point. I'm also going to copy in the text underneath it. So I can paste this, format it as we want. For this, I'm going to choose a smaller font size 14 point. Turn off the bullets. You can keep them if you want. I generally prefer text without bullets where possible, and I'm going to add a space in between them in a minute. We'll make this white. Then go to your paragraph settings. On Windows, you can click this small arrow here, and the box will appear. And on a Mac or Windows, you can right click and choose Paragraph. I'm going to change the after spacing to ten point, and that creates a nice space between these text points. We can now click to drag this. We can also remove the full stop if we want. And then this can be a line to the left or the center. Whatever you think looks better. I'm also going to add an arrow. We'll click on arrow right in the drawing menu. Click anywhere. Set the shape outline to be no outline, and then size this as we want. Click drag it into position. Now we have this. I can click drag and select everything. Drag this into place. And now we have this one. We want to make three more copies of this and then change the text. To do that, we can either select all of it, press Control D, drag it into place, and then press Control D again, or another way of doing it, which saves you having to align it in the same way is to hold down Control and Shift while everything selected that you want to copy, click and drag. Shift will keep it locked to its Y position. Then let go and press Control Y, which is effectively the shortcut for redo, and it will redo it in the same place with the correct spacing. Control Y again to create the final one. We don't need this end arrow. And if I select everything here, I can hold down shift and move it to the center of the screen. That looks good. I'll now quickly change the text. Each time we copy it in, making sure that we right click and then choose keep text only as the paste option. For this one, it's wrapped, so we go to the size and properties settings, textbox, and we can either set the left margin to less and the right margin to less, or you can turn off wrap text in shape like this and then press Return or shift return where you want it to wrap. Now we can paste in the text below for each of the other steps. Again, right clicking and going to keep text only and deleting the full stops if we don't want them. Control, Aid select everything. Right, click Paste, keep text only. Now we can just change these numbers. And there we have our four step process, which is a really nice visual way of telling the story of your slide. And once the basic positions and the design is done of this, it's now quite easy and simple to make variations with some small changes. So as an example, I can click on these, hold down Shift, select the others, and press Delete, and then write in the step at the top here. Align this to the center. Make it fig tree, bold, a little smaller. I'm going to make it the color of the background and then drag it into position. We can copy it to the other three by holding down Control and Shift, clicking and dragging, and then letting go of Control and Shift and pressing Control Y to redo. Change the step number. You can change the color of any of these if you want to. I could click on this arrow, hold down shift, drag it to the left, and then make this arrow the same color as the circle, which we can use the eyedropper for. You can use the cursors to finally adjust it to the left, so we'll click the left curse out once or twice. And then that looks like it's part of the circle. You can do the same with these And again, to the left cursor for some fine adjustment. So by adding some basic shapes and some layouts like this, you can convert some basic text into a nice, high impact visual process diagram, which will help tell your story. 28. Show Relative Values With Shapes: Here, we will use the relative size of simple shapes to visualize key data or statistics. In this slide, we have a simple statistic that we want to visualize for more impact. You can see that a standard PowerPoint graph is not very effective. So firstly, we'll cut this text and put it in the notes. Now we can delete this chart and center this title. We're also going to make it figtry and bold. We'll also make this white and then set the background to be a solid green. So now we're going to draw two boxes. We'll click rectangle in the drawing menu and click anywhere. We can set this to the height we want, which is about this. And for the width, I'm going to choose 7.5, and that's in centimeters. And in the total orders, we have 7.5 million, so I'm going to make it easy to make it relative and make it 7.5 centimeters. Control D will duplicate this to make a second block, and I'm going to make this 5.25, which will match the total delivered and on order. Now I can set the shape outline to no outline. For this, the shape ville will be dark green. For the one above, I'm going to choose a light green and no outline. Then drag this into position, so it snaps. Now we can hold down Shift, select the lighter green in addition to the dark green, press Control G, and drag this out. I'm also going to align this to the center. Now I can ungroup it, either Control Shift G or write click and choose ungroup. And I can add my text. But effectively, because we started by typing in these sizes in centimeters, this is now relative to this, as we've grouped it and stretched it. So if I add this text, total orders in the main section here, I don't need to write orders. I can just write total, shift return to put that on a new line. Then I'm going to make this the dark green color, fig tree and bold. And I want these figures to stand out. So I'm going to make them 44 point. And align everything to the center. That looks good. Now I can add the text in for the other panel, and we can actually take this text and type over it. So I'll hold down Control and Shift, click to drag this here, change this to white, and then I can copy my text from here, select this and right click and choose Pace text only. Then hold down Control and Shift, drag from the side, and add in the figures for this section, which is 5.25 million. We can also add 70% of the plan achieved underneath, so I'll copy that out of there. Make it fig tree, bold and white. I want to make this 166 point for a shift return here and make this slightly bigger. 28 will do. Then I can make this white and sent to the text. Then we can put this here. So now we've got a nice visual slide to show that statistic. And we can make this an even more powerful message with a little bit of animation. So if I click on this, hold down Shift, click on the light green one, Control G to group, then go to animations and choose Wipe. I would like this to happen from the left, as that makes the most sense in this instance. So from left, I can make that a bit slower duration of 1.5 seconds. Now, if I right click and send it to the back, I can select this, hold down shift, select the green, control G to group again, and then wipe again from the left, and 1.5 seconds. So I'll click. Look at the animation pane. Firstly, we have this wiping from the left 1.5 seconds, and then click, to have this. And then finally, we can fade this in at the bottom. So I'll just click on it, Breast fade. And now when we run that, we can ask this question, how are we doing this year? We can click reveal our target, which is a total of 7.5 million. We can have some interaction with the audience and ask them if they know how much was delivered and on order. Then we can click to reveal it. And then finally, we can click, to say, that's 70% of the plan achieved. This makes a powerful interactive slide and really helps to visualize your message. 29. Highlighting With Animation: We can use the transparency animation to highlight various elements of your design, to help them stand out and to help the audience focus on your message. In this example, we have four key business insights. Firstly, we could change the design of this to something similar to what we've done in a previous lesson, which is to use four numbered panels across the screen. I think this visually is a big improvement, and it can be created using rectangles and circles, as we've shown before. But we can also add animation to help your audience focus on the key insight that's being discussed. So firstly, we could add an animation on each one of these, and I'll click and drag over all of them, and we can choose fade. I also want this to happen for everyone on a click. Now when we run that, each time we click, one of these will appear. And this, I think is a big improvement on the previous version where they all come up at once. But I think we can go one better and use the transparency animation to fade back the ones we've already talked about. And to do that, we can click on the first one. And this time, we want to go to add animation because we're going to add a subsequent animation. On the Mc, you can simply click on the animation on the ribbon, and it will automatically add an animation. But on the PC, we will need to go to add animation because if you click on any one of these, it will replace them. So we'll go to add Animation, we want to choose one of these emphasis effects, and we'll select transparency. You'll see it will show you a preview of what it's going to do. The default is for it to go 50% transparent, but I think it looks better at 75. You can also choose more than that, if you wish, by double clicking on it. Then entering in a custom amount, for example, 90 and pressing return, and then okay. But for ease of use, we're going to leave this on 75. So now we've added that 75% transparency animation. We want to go to start and make sure it happens with previous. And I want it to happen when panel two is revealed. So I'm going to click on this in the animation pane, drag it up to where it says, two, and drop it underneath. So when two is revealed, one will become 75% transparent. So we'll click. We'll talk about market growth, and when we finished and move on to operational efficiency, people's attention will be drawn to panel two that looks like it's highlighted because we've low lighted panel one. I'll quickly show you how to do that again by doing it to panel two and three. So we'll click on panel two. Go to add animation, transparency, select 75%, start with previous, and then click and drag it into position. Then we'll do three, click on three, add animation, transparency, 75%, start with previous. And now they'll all work correctly. We'll talk about market growth, and when we finished, we can click operational efficiency. When we finish that, click again, and each time the previous ones will fade out. And finally, if you wish to bring these elements back and make them fully opaque, we can do that by adding a third animation. So we'll click on number one, hold down Shift, click on number two. And then while shift is still held down, click on number three, go to add animation. Choose transparency again. This time, while these three are selected, I want to right click and choose Effect Options. I'm going to go to amount, choose custom and press naught, which effectively means you're adding no transparency, so it will be fully opaque. Then we'll press Return, click Okay. Now, the slide will work as it previously did, but at the end, it will bring them all back to fully opaque. So I think using this method is a really nice way of helping your audience focus on your message and keep them aligned with the key points you're talking about. 30. Engage With Well-Chosen Images: I using well chosen high quality images is an excellent way to enhance the effectiveness and engagement of your message. Images can convey emotions, set the tone, and resonate with your audience. Here is some content that is well suited to being matched with photos. Using unique bespoke images are best for business use if possible, but I will be using the PowerPoint stock library for this example. So we should be looking to use images that directly relate to your topic or key point. You should avoid clustering slides with too many visuals and you'll need to ensure that they are high resolution and professional looking. So firstly, we'll set up the background. And I'm just going to use this dark teal color. And I'm going to set the title to white. Big tree for the font. Bold and 40 point and aligned to the center. I'm going to use four panels to put the photos on, and a quick way of doing that is to right, click these same convert Smart art. And choosing this first option here, basic blocklist. Now I have four boxes across the screen. White's clicking on one of these dots just to make sure everything's selected. You can go to Ungroup and then ungroup again. And now we have all of them as individual items. I'm going to make these white with no outline. Make the text, the dark teal color, make it figtry, 20 point, bold, and we're going to drag these right down to here. I now want the text to be aligned at the bottom, and to do that, we go to format shape, size and properties, textbox, vertical alignment, and choose bottom. I can add a small margin at the bottom of about 0.7. Now we can add one photo in for each of these. I'm also going to move this title up very slightly by holding down shift and dragging up. So now we're ready to add the photos in each of the four panels. So if we go to insert, picture, stock images, hype in our keyword, and select the image we want to use and click Insert. We can click and drag to size it from the top corner. But never click the handles on the vertical middle to size it, as you can squash the image doing that or press Control Z to undo. So I'm going to drag this into position. Pick up the corner handle, size it to the right height. I can use the cursors for some fine adjustment. Now I can right click, choose crop, bring in the black handles to where I want to crop it to, then hold down Shift and drag it to any part of the image I want to use, and press Return. I can also align it perfectly with the white panel by clicking on the image, holding down shift, clicking the white panel, then going to range line aligned center. Now I've got the perfect size for that. I can actually duplicate this one, copy it into the other four, then change the image. Then I've got the right size straightaway. So if I press Control D, drag it into position. Make sure we got the height right, then press Control D and Control D again. Now we can we, click on this one, change picture and stock images. Type in your search term. Click Okay when you've selected it, and the same for these two. Change a picture, stock images. Like in your search term. Click the image you want. Now we have a really nice visual impactful slide which can really show off these key study areas. So when there's an opportunity to use a powerful photo, it can really add a lot of emotion and impact to your slides. Images can also be powerful by using them as the background of slides. So if we go to a new slide here, we can format the background with a picture or texture fill, click Insert and choose stock images there, and pick, for example, the same image as the last one we just had. This will automatically resize it for you. And then I could, for example, add any text panel I want, such as this, which I've made using a 30% transparency fill. If it was on naught, it would have looked like this, just plain black. But by adding a little transparency, in this example, 30%, it allows some of the background to show through, just a really nice effect. If using text over the top of the image, the image must be chosen carefully, and the text must remain readable, such as this example here. 31. Make Better Tables: Tables can be a useful tool for organizing information clearly, particularly financial data, statistics, and comparisons. Default PowerPoint tables often don't do this well, but there are a number of ways you can improve how information is presented in a table. Here is an example of a table in the standard format, so we can start by removing all the formatting. We'll select the table by clicking on one of these outside circles. Then go to Table Design. Then choose pen color, we'll select white, and then go to borders all borders. By selecting the pen color first and then choosing borders, you can reset and recolor these lines. We'll go to shading and just select a gray for now and select all the text to black. I also want this to be fig tree. And while we're here, we'll center the text and make that fig tree as well. And we'll also make this bold and size 40. I'm also going to make this blue. And now we want to focus on this part of the table, the hour solution part. So one of the things I'm going to do on this is to give this a blue fill. I can now make this text white. And for these parts, these four here, you can click on the bottom one and then drag the mouse up, select all of them. I'm going to select those and change the text to bold. So already, that's a lot clearer, but there are a couple of other things we can do to improve the look of this table. I don't think we need this feature because these are obviously features. We click Delete there. And for this column here, so we can click on either the top or the bottom cell. In this case, we'll click on the top one and then drag down and set the shape fill to no fill. I also want to align this text to the right. We can do that by pressing Control R. We're choosing this option here. I'm also going to change this text to a dark blue. I'm also going to change this as well to a dark blue. And I'm going to select all of these and press Control B, so they're all bold. On the ones that compared to our solution, I'm going to make these blue. So they stand out, so they can be easily compared. To do this, you can simply double click on the cell. It will select the text and then select the color. I think that's looking a lot easier to compare. I'm also going to select these top four, click in the first box and then drag across and select shape fill and choose no fill for these. I'm also going to add a slightly bigger border just to separate these a bit more. Just going to choose a horizontal border, make it six point. To do that, we can select the whole table, so click one of these outer circles. Then go to Table Design, do it in this order, select six points here, then go to borders and choose inside horizontal border. Now each row has a nice space between it. So now, already, I think we have a much clearer table. In this example, the small changes we've made will really draw the audience's attention to our solution, the blue column on the left. You can also combine the table with other elements to make a more unique and professional version by going beyond what a standard PowerPoint table can do. So here, I'll show you how you can add ticks and crosses from the icons library instead of yes and no, to help make it even clearer and stand out more. So in click here and drag across, then press delete and now add our icons. We can go to Insert icon for the tick, you'll need to type yes for it to appear and then click Insert after clicking on it. We're going to make this a bit smaller, and it's important to hold Shift to keep its perspective. And no. Drag it into position. I want to make this one white, but I'm also going to make the other ones blue in the competitor one to four section, and that's quite easy to do. I can hold down Control and Shift and drag this to copy it. Then I can change graphics fill and choose the dark blue. So again, I hold down Control and shift and drag. Put this where I want it, and we can press Control Y to redo. If you want to align these exactly, you can bring them in, select them, and then go to line and distribute horizontally. Once we have these in, we can easily change them to crosses if we want. For example, in my table, these four are going to be crosses. So once they're all selected, I can right click, change graphic from icons. Type either cross or no and select this no, they will all change. That's a really good way of easily changing icons in PowerPoint. Now I can select all these. Control and Shift and drag, and that will make copies. And then control y will redo. And in this example, this one, this one, and this one are going to be ticks and the bright blue. So I can change the shape fill to the bright blue. Then right click on this while they're all selected, change graphic from icons. Type yes. And then either click here and click Insert or double click. Now we have a visually powerful table that will show off our solution in a very clear way and break out of the standard PowerPoint table look. 32. Enhance Bar Charts For More Clarity: Default formatting is sufficient for a working document or spreadsheet, but it can be improved for a presentation. We can make your bar charts look better and communicate your data more effectively. These typical slide and chart titles can be rewritten so they are clear and to the point. The goal is to help your audience find the information they need as quickly as possible. So we could rewrite this title to give it a clearer message. For example, our revenue continues to grow. Now we can click on the dot on the outside, make the text a little bigger, set it to figtry, bold and bright blue. I'm going to take the title from here, which has more detail, copy it and put it in underneath the main text title. So I'll paste, drag this to here, make it 16, g tree, and drag this so it doesn't wrap. I'm also going to add in 2024 to the main title because I'm going to remove this from the axis where it's repeated multiple times. Now we can remove some sections that we don't need. For example, the key or legend here, so you can click on it, make sure it's selected, and click Delete. We can also now remove the title, so we can click on the title and click Delete. It's generally better to put the titles in the main area above the graph because they're easier to format that way and can be added to the main title in the set position on the slide rather than forced into this graph area. So now we can drag out this slightly and drag out this to make it a bit bigger. If we click this plus, I'm going to choose data labels. And you can see it adds in the amounts, but we're going to format them a little more. So if we go to more options, and number. We can go to category where it says general and change it to currency. I'm also going to go to the format code and simply put naught comma K. Click Add, and that would just change it into a rounded figure 4,000, which I think is clearer in this example. I'm going to make the font Fgry bold and one bigger. I'm also going to improve this bottom axis, so I can click on that. In this panel here, format axis, I can go to number again. Date is already selected. If I click this drop down, you can see various options you can have for the dates. Under format code, I'm just going to leave the month because it already says 2024 and I don't need the day. So I'll delete DD and y y y y, and just leave MM and click Add. And for type, I'm going to select the second one down to change it from the number to the name. I'm also going to make this fig tree as well. And that looks good, but I don't think I need these grid lines either, so I can click here, click on them, make sure they're selected and press delete. And the same for this axis. As we already have these big data labels, we don't need this other side, so we can click and press Delete. That's looking good. I can also make the bars a little wider and the gaps a little less. So we can click on the bars and then set series overlap and gap width as we want. I'm going to set the gap width to 50%. I think that looks about right and keeps enough gap while making the thicker bars. You can adjust this to whatever you think looks good. And finally, I'm going to paste in a panel with a message that I want the audience to read as a takeaway after viewing the chart. And this can be easily added by going to insert shapes, and then I chose arrow Pentagon. You can then adjust the angle of the arrow pointing by dragging the little yellow dot left or right. And finally, I can add a single animation, something like animation fade on a click, just to that panel, so the chart will come up, and it's a lot clearer now because of the way we've edited it and removed the unnecessary information. It has a good message at the top, saying that our revenue continues to grow, and then we can click to add this panel that gives the details about what's happening. All of these small changes to your charts will allow you to give greater clarity to your message and communicate your data more effectively. 33. Using A Linear Timeline: A timeline can be used to represent events, tasks, or milestones sequentially along a linear path. It provides an easily digestible overview of a series of steps over time. When dealing with historical information, it is easy to provide too much information which dilutes the effectiveness of your message. So let's turn this into a timeline and reduce the amount of text. First of all, we'll set our background color by right clicking, going to format background, and then choosing the color we want. I'm going to use this blue and make the text white. We'll make sure all of this text is selected by clicking on it and then clicking on the outer dot and then choosing white. I'm going to make this fig tree, 16 points, and then add some bigger text above it for the main point of the title. So in click textbox, click anywhere. I'm going to type our business highlights, Control A, select it. White, fig tree, bold. I'm going to make this 44 point, stretch it out so it doesn't wrap, and align it to the middle of the text box and arrange line, a line center to align it to the center of the page, and hold down shift and drag it up so it's in position and then for this line underneath. I'll hover over this line at the side, hold down shift, click and drag down. So there's a clearer title. Now let's add our timeline. One way of doing this is to convert it into Smart art and then break it up. So it's in individual shapes, which can be quicker than copying and pasting the text. So if we make sure it's all selected by clicking in the box and pressing Control A, we can right click, then go to Convert SmartArt, more Smart Art graphics, and pick anything we want from this. If we go to list and choose something like this, a horizontal bullet list, we now have the text elements for the years broken up and for the details underneath. I'm not actually going to use this extra information in this one, so I can delete it. Now we can break this up into shapes. While it's selected, we can right click, go to group, ungroup, and the same again. Control Shift G will also do this. For these years at the top, I want to make them into circles. So I'll make sure they're all selected. Select shape fill, choose my color, and choose the color for the font. And I want this to be figtry we can go to shape format, edit shape, change shape, change it to oval, and then we want to make sure that the height is the same as the width. 4.36 to make them perfect circles, and then hold down shift and drag. For the formatting, I'm going to make the number really big. So I'm going to select that number type 40, and for the year 24. Here, I'm just pressing Shift and return to move it down, then selecting the two, then making it 40. And this 24. Quickly going to do this to the others. I'm going to draw a line across these, so we'll select line, hold down shift, and drag it across all of them until we hit six. I'm going to make this ten point. Select the color I want, then right click and send it to the back. I'm also going to make these circles a little bit smaller, so there's a bigger gap between them. To do that, we can click on the first one, then hold down shift while we click on the subsequent other ones, and then hold down Control and Shift and drag from the corner. I also want these to have no outline, so I'll go to shape outline and choose no outline. That's looking good. Now let's format the boxes below. We can click Hold the mouse down and drag over them to select them all. Then I'll select no fill, no outline. Big try scenreed and white. I'm also going to take off the bullets. I think that looks a lot better, but I'd also like a space between the different key points. And to do that, we can click on the paragraph settings here. Also available by this drop down the line spacing options, you'll see there's also paragraph spacing, and I'm going to set the after to be 15 point. That adds a nice big gap for the second key point for each of these years. So now we've created a timeline, which is more effective than the text because we are combining clarity with structure, and this makes it easier for audiences to understand complex information at a glance. And making these timelines from shapes means that they are easily adaptable. I could select these key points here and delete them. Click to delete this as well. I'm also going to move these down a bit. So again, we'll select them all, hold down shift and drag down too out there. And now we could add in the extra information for each year in a way like this, where the first year will be a line down to a panel with some more information in, and the second year will be a lineup. We could then select this, hold down, control and shift and drag and then control why to do it again. And the same for the one above. And now we could simply type in or paste in the text into these other four boxes. So now we've shown the major achievements in subtle panels that are connected to the timeline, and these are really easy to edit and change to anything you want. They provide a much more visually memorable slide to show this information. 34. Add Interactivity With Slide Zoom: Often graphs and statistical data can be the most important part of a presentation, but they can be time consuming and difficult for audiences to follow. So in this lesson, we'll show you how you can add interactive slides using Slide Zoom. I often see attempts like this to combine multiple charts onto a slide to provide an overview. Even though charts like this are quite well designed, by the time they are reduced down to fit, they are often difficult to read. So it can be difficult to arrange everything on the slide neatly and effectively. So we're going to start with the blank slide and save time in this example, I'm quickly going to paste in six example slides. You can use any slides you want for this, or you can use the source file for this lesson. So we'll go to our blank slide. We'll go to Insert. Under Links, we'll choose Zoom, and we want to select Slide Zoom. From here, we can select all the slides we want to use in this slide Zoom, which are these six that I've just pasted in. You can either click in this little tick box or on the main slide. Then we'll click Insert. While they're all selected, we can give them a border. I'm just going to choose a mid gray color. We can now align them by clicking and dragging. I'm just going to roughly align them where I want them. And then use the align tools to space them out. So I'll select all of these. Go to arrange line middle, then arrange the line, distribute horizontally. I can now press Control G to group and align to the center of the page. I can then click and drag these up and use the smart guides to align them. I'm going to move these all down very slightly, so I'll select all of them, hold down shift and drag down. That looks about right. You can now click on any of these to zoom in for a full screen view. Moment, by default, when you click, it will go on to the next big slide. But if we press Escape and then select each one of these, I'll just quickly ungroup this one so we can select it. We'll click on the first one, go to the Zoom section on the ribbon and choose this option under Zoom options. Return to Zoom. This little box in the corner will show you this arrow, which means that after you viewed this slide, it will come back to this menu, and the number next to it is the slide it's going to go to. So we're now going to select each one of these and click Return to Zoo. Unfortunately, you can't select multiple ones because the option won't be available. So we'll just go through do each one. Now when we run that slide, we can click on any one of these, zoom into it, and when we advance, it will zoom back. Just a really nice way of adding interactivity and building engagement with your audience, as they can choose which sections they would like to look at. There is one other small tip that I like to use when using interactive men such as this, and that is to hide these slides here 4-9. The reason for that is that if, for example, you had some slides after slide nine, so we'll press Control D to duplicate this slide, drag it right to the end, and then write anything such as P two, just so we know we're at that part. And at the moment, if you run from slide four, which is this menu, you view any one of these and go back. The next time you advance, it will go through each one in turn. Okay. So if we hide the slides, it won't do that. So we can click on slide five, hold down Shift, click on slide ten, right click and oe Hide slide. Now these are all a bit more faint. They're less opaque than they used to be, and that means they're hidden. There's also a strike through through each of these numbers. So now we can look at this slide. We can look at any one of these we want. Click to go back, look at this one, click to go back. When we finish looking at them, we can then press the right arrow or click anywhere outside these options, and it will go straight past them. 35. Using A Journey Map: Using journey map section slides can help reduce the complexity of longer presentations. They can make each stage more digestible while still connecting it to the overall narrative. By returning to the agenda between sections, you allow the audience to focus and engage better, knowing the flow and duration of each segment. So here's an example agenda that we're going to make into a journey map, and we've added timings to help keep the session on track and ensure that all the items are covered. We can now add some nice design and make the most of the screen and use some graphics to make this look better and have more impact. Firstly, we're going to choose a background color, and I'm going to make it a solid light blue. I'll click on this outer dot to make sure all of this text is selected. Then change it to fig tree. Make it bold, align it to the center, and make it white. For each of these bullets, I'm going to make one panel, and then it'll nicely go across the middle of the screen. For now, I'm just going to cut all this text, delete this box, and paste the text into the notes. So firstly, I'm going to add a white panel and click and drag anywhere. I want to make this slightly less round, so we'll click and drag the yellow dot, then shape fill it to white and shape outline no outline. I'm going to cut this text in it. And I want to press Control A and make sure the text is the right color. I'm going to choose a darker blue. I also want it to be fig tree and bold. We can press return under the main title. I'm going to make this part of the text non bold and 16 and this part of the text. The main title for each section, I'm going to make size 24. We can make this panel a little wider, something like 6.5 centimeters will do. I'm now going to add the timing, so I'm just going to paste that in for my notes. I'm going to click and drag this so it aligns with this box. Then center it. Also make it figtry again. I'm going to choose this light blue color and make it bold. I also want this to be one size smaller, and I can hold down shift and move it down a bit. Finally, for each section, I'm going to add a number. So I can click on Oval, click anywhere, type the number I want. I'm going to click on the outside of this and make it victory and bold, and up the size to 24. I can hold down shift and drag to make this a bit smaller. That's about the right size. I'm now going to give that no outline and make it the same blue as the text. And click and drag it into position. You'll see the smart guides appear when you're in the center and when it's positioned at the horizontal middle over the white panel. I can also adjust the margins to bring the text up slightly. So we can go to text options under format shape, textbox. I can set the vertical alignment to top and then click to increase the top margin. I think something like that looks good. And now I've got one of them. It's easy to create the other four. So I'll make sure this is all selected. I'm going to move it to the left just a little bit. Press Control D, drag it into position. While your mouse is held down, you'll see the smart guides appear. You can let go when it's in the position you want. Then press Control D and Control D again. If we want to make sure these are all centered, we can select all of them, press Control G to group, then go to a range, line, line center. So I now ungroup them by pressing Control Shift G, and I can now easily change the numbers just by selecting them and typing in. I can choose the minutes by doing the same thing. And I can cut and paste this text in deposition. So select the text. This is the title for number two, Control X to cut. And if we go to paste and choose paste text only, it will paste in the correct format. We can do the same for this bit. Control X to cut, select this text, go to paste and choose text only. I'll just quickly do that for the other two. I can now delete these notes. And now I have four items on the agenda. These look really good, and I think it's a much nicer way to present them than just using plain text. Now we're going to group all the elements in each of these panels. So make sure they're all selected, press Control G. This is to make them easier to animate. Same again. We're clicking, dragging over to make sure they're all selected pressing Control G to group. Now if I click on the first one, hold down shift, and then click on the subsequent ones, I can add an animation to each one. So if we go to animations, we're just going to choose Zoom and to make sure they start on a click while they're all selected. Now if we run it, we can talk about today's agenda and then talk about each part as it's revealed with the animation. So firstly, today, we're going to talk about objectives and context. Then we're going to talk about key topics, interactive session, action planning. A really nice way of presenting your information. And now I'm quickly going to paste in three generic slides just so you can see how the journey map works and how each section can be highlighted. So here's my three generic slides. Those are going to be, in this case, the objectives and context. And how I like to do this is press Control D to duplicate the slide. Go to the animation pane, make sure all the animations are deleted because we've already presented the slide and revealed them one at a time. And in this example, I'm just going to change the color of each of these panels. To something like this that isn't highlighted. And to do that, you click on the group shape, click again, select the panel, and then change the color. So now, after you've presented the four sections you're going to talk about, we can advance the slide, and then the others fade back, and we can say, we're firstly going to look at objectives and context and then go into that section. And then if I control D on this slide again, I can drag this to where the section key topics presentation would be starting. I would click on this white one and set it to the blue color, and then click on this one, click again just to select the panel, change it to white, so that one's highlighted. And after that, we can have any slide we want. So, for example, I could press Control D, drag that slide in. And now you can see how we're using the journey map. So we first present the agenda. We go into Section one, we deliver our slides and talk about them. Then you can see how we're now moving on to Section two, and you can easily make variations of these for as many sections as you need. It's a really helpful reminder as you go through your presentation, what you've covered, what you're going to look at now, and what you're going to look at after that. 36. Using Links For Interaction And Audience Participation: Adding links makes a presentation more dynamic and allows for a more personalized or adaptive experience. It enables non linear navigation, where you can jump to specific sections of your presentation based on audience questions or interests rather than following a rigid slide order. In this example, we have a menu with five different options on for different sections of a business. I've also created the five slides for those sections, and we're going to create links so that we can jump to any of these sections as we choose. So the first thing we do is add a shape, and we're going to add a link to that shape. For something like this, with a number of different elements on, I like to choose a rectangle, click and drag to cover the main area that you want to better click on. We can right click on this, go to Link, choose Insert Link. The default will be to an existing file or webpage, but we want to choose place in this document. And I'm going to make this jump to slide two, which is marketing. You'll see a preview of it in this window, and we can click Okay. Now that's created. I can make the shape fill on this, have no fill, and the shape outline, no outline. This has effectively created an invisible panel which you can click on to jump to that slide. While it's selected, if I press Control D, it will make a copy of that. I can click and drag it here. Put it roughly into position, press Control D, and again and again. And when you hover over these, a small tool tip will show saying the slide that it's going to jump to when you click it. So for this one, I want to right click and edit to the link to change it to go to slide three, which is the Sales slide and click Okay. The same for these. Select the slide we wanted to jump to, which will be slide four operations and click Okay. And then finally for these two, Edit Link, jump to the finance slide. Edit link, jump to the research slide. But I know, whenever any one of those is clicked on, it will jump straight to that slide. Now, we just want to make sure we set the back button so it goes back to the menu. And for this, we can use one button, set it to go back, and then copy and paste it onto the other slides. So we can start without it. I'm just deleting it off each of these slides. I'm going to leave it on number one marketing. We can now right click on this Link and choose slide one. Press Okay. So now, when you roll over this back button, it will say it will go to slide one. I'm going to press Control C, page down to go to the next slide, and same again. So what I'm doing is pasting in that button, which already has the link in it to slide one. So now when we run that on any slide, the back button will go back to slide one. I can jump to any option here. And for example, we could use audience interaction. Which section would you like to go and look at next? Section three operations, and then click and we'll go straight to it. And the back button will get us back to the menu. And if you had this interactive menu, and then you wanted to go onto another slide, I'll just type in an example here. Then we could advance through them by hiding them. So at the moment, if you played from slide one and you didn't choose any of the options, but just press Next, it would then go through all of these. But as they are an interactive menu, you probably wouldn't want that in this example. So we can select them all by clicking, holding Shift, and clicking on the last one, and then right clicking and choosing Hide. What this will do is it will make the interactivity still work. But if, for example, you looked at sales and finance and then wanted to go on to the rest of your presentation, then it would skip over the hidden ones. So for example, we'll play from there, we'll have a look at sales, read that information. Then we'll have a look at finance, read that information. And now from the menu, we can just go forward to the next section in our presentation.