Professional PowerPoint Presentations

1. Introduction: Okay, so you want to be a master of presentations. Great. This is the place where you can start your journey to become one. And I will be your guide, your mentor, and assistant. Believe me, if you take your time and some effort, you will become a master of presentations and you will be able to win just any audience with your stunning presentations. My name is Peter garlic, and I'm going to give you a course on professional PowerPoint presentations to provide the best listening experience. In many parts of the course, I will be replaced by a voice-over professional. The course is divided into six thematic blocks. We will start out by discussing the general principles of making effective presentations. Then we will go deeper into the details of the game. What will you learn from this course? Three things. First, how to make effective presentations. By effective, I mean presentations that have a clear message and that help you achieve your goals. Second, you will learn how to use PowerPoint more effectively, which will enable you to create presentations much faster. Third, you will learn how to make state-of-the-art presentations that are in line with present day graphic design trends. To sum up, after going through this course, you will be ready to ingest any audience who are presenting to. Who am I? What do I do? Why should you believe that they can teach you anything about presentations? I've run my own business since 2015. It is called slide formation. We're a small team of a few professionals who create professional presentations for companies. We are a highly specialized graphic design studio. We don't make posters, flyers, or any other kind of visual advertising. All we ever do, our multimedia presentations were based in Warsaw, Poland, but we operate internationally. We worked for large companies from around the world. I am also a lecturer at Warsaw collegium CV does university. And I teach students how to create great presentations. I am also a member of presentation guilt, the biggest organization uniting presentation experts. In early 2021, I published a book entitled effective presentations step-by-step. It is available on Amazon. So are you ready to make the first step on the journey? Are you ready to start impressing your boss, your colleagues at work, and your clients with your super presentations. Then see you inside the course. 2. Use visualization and short phrases: We will start our course by looking at the rules of making presentations. Rule one, use visualization phrases and short sentences. Why is this rule number one? When I ask my students who are training participants, what are the most common problems that you see in presentations? There's always the same answer. There's too much information in the slides. Slides are often overloaded with content and this puts a pressure on the recipients. Here's an example of such an overdone slide. A lot of different elements, a lot of content, a lot of diverse forms which distract attention. Here's another example. This one is even worse. It has no visuals at all, just bulleted text, and that's it. A recipient looks at a slide like this and they think, Do I really need to read all of this? Couldn't they make it shorter somehow, or at least highlight the important information? Such slides usually cause frustration in the audience. However, the worst kind of presentations or like this, it looks as if it wasn't a presentation, but an e-mail or a book. There are no visuals at all, not even the simplest formatting. Long paragraphs are absolutely unacceptable in presentations. Recipients hardly ever read the entire text and presentations. All they do is scan for information that is relevant to them. If you do not highlight the important data, it will be really hard for you to drive your message home. Here is an alibi kind of slide. I call it this way because it looks as if the author first wrote the text on the left and the decided that it could do with some visualization. So he added the photo shown on the right. The problem however, is about this long paragraph. The recipient has to spend at least half a minute to extract something valuable from this text. This is way too long. It requires too much effort and we'll put most of your audience off. What should this slide look like? It should look like this or like this. With even more visualization. Can you see how much faster the audience will be able to read the key information from this slide. You will take them only a few to a dozen seconds. This makes it so much easier. The main difference between these two slides is in the way the texts are written. Only phrases and short sentences are used here. In the previous slide, the whole paragraph was written as if it was an e-mail. Long descriptive sentences with little meaning. And it is enough to put only the facts on the slides, phrases, and short sentences. That's all we need. So it's essential to understand that writing for slides is completely different from writing emails. Instead of long texts, use visuals, phrases, and short sentences. 3. Present content on two grounds: Rule number to present content on two grounds. A common problem with presentations is that they are too complicated. Slides have too many different elements and the recipient can get completely lost in them. Take a look at this slide. Yes, it is a real slide made by the US Army in case you were wondering. It was shown in one of the meetings of the military staff during the war in Afghanistan. When General Stanley McChrystal saw the slide, he said, Gentlemen, when we understand this slide, we will finally win this war. After a few years the Americans drew back from Afghanistan. This slide is a perfect example of how not to make a presentation. It is known as the spaghetti slide, and it still causes consternation. It is so complicated that it takes a really long time for the recipient to understand all the intricacies of this slide. But slides that have too little formatting are also hard to understand. Here is a completely raw slide without any suggestion of what is essential and what isn't. There's no hierarchy of the content. Such slides also cause frustration. The secret to effective presentations is showing the slide content on two grounds. What is this all about? The theory of two grounds is taken from the world of photography. Let's take a look at this random photo which I found on the Internet. We could call it a guy with a beard and glasses on the street. What is the foreground here? I mean, what do we first pay attention to? The man in the center of the frame. Everything else in the photo, the buildings, the trees, the street, they're all in the background. The background does not catch the eye. We know it is there, but we also know that it is not that important. The foreground is what's important. The guy with a beard and glasses. And that's exactly how we should construct our slides. Instead of creating them on multiple grounds, like the spaghetti slide or on one ground for that matter, like this raw slide. We should create slides on two grounds. If we think that this or that should be noticed first, if we want to make sure that this or that gets attention, this is what we bring to the foreground. This can be done in multiple ways. Using a contrasting color. We're enlarging the key elements or keywords. We're adding suitable visualizations. Just like here. Let's compare these two slides. Which slide will be easier to absorb for the recipient. Naturally, it will be the slide where the keywords are highlighted and accompanied by icons. This is our foreground. That's our guy with a beard and glasses, so to say. All the rest is background information that the recipient may or may not read. Going with the metaphor of the photo. This is our street, our cars, and our trees. Usually recipients don't have enough time to read the entire presentation. They just scan them with their eyes, flicking slide after slide, and only stop at those points that catch their attention. So these must be the most important elements, the ones that we want them to remember. So after you've entered your texts and added the visualization, remember to format your slides so as to achieve the foreground and the background. What's the easiest way to do this? You just need to find the keywords and then bring them to the foreground in three steps. Step one, we make them bold. That is, make them thicker. Step two, we change their color. Step three, this step is optional. We enlarge them. Naturally. We can use more advanced techniques of bringing keywords to the foreground. You can insert them into a shape, for example, a rectangle or a circle. You can also put an icon next to each of the keywords. This will make them most visually interesting. Take a look at this slide and compare it to this slide. As you can see, they are the same slides with the same content. They only differ in the formatting of the text. Which one is better? The correct answer is none. Well, this slide has no bold text. This slide has all the text in bold. Here. Each of the words seem to scream. I am important, check me out. Whereas here each of the word seems to be saying, There's nothing important here really. You don't have to remember anything. Actually, it's best if you forget about this slide. A properly designed slide should look more or less like this. We use color, Bolding, and size of the selected keywords to show the recipient what they should pay attention to and what to remember. Bolding the text, size, and color. These are the three simplest ways to bring key words and phrases to the foreground. This principle is all important if we want to create powerful presentations. Here's one more important thing. In the first example, it was pretty easy for me to emphasize the keywords. Why? Because they were placed at the beginning of each of the three information set. This has a big impact on how the slides are formatted and therefore the overall effect of the slide. Take a look. Can you see how chaotic this slide would have been if the keywords were placed once in the middle, once at the end, and once at the beginning of each information set. So we can draw an important conclusion. When writing the text for the slide. Makes sure that the most important words are placed at the beginning of each information set. This way, you can easily emphasize them. For example, by Bolding them out, we're changing the font color. As a result, the keywords will also become the titles of each information set. Remember this rule. This is one of the most important things when it comes to creating effective presentations. Let's see how to apply this in practice. In this context, it is worth being aware of the talking headlines principle. It is applicable mainly to business and corporate presentations that contain a lot of information. It means that headlines cannot be content poor, but they must communicate something. They must communicate the essence of the content to be found in a given slide. Let's see a few examples. We have a slide that refers to the yogurt segment. At least the headline would suggest so. But is this a sufficient explanation? Not exactly. Even if we supplement it with additional keywords. If we want to create a meaningful headline, it is worth adding some key information there. For example, like this. When viewing the slide, the recipient will get valuable information from the very beginning, from the headline. And many recipients flick through presentations just reading the headlines. So if they do read them, they will already get quite a lot of information. Therefore, are talking headline. A headline that contains essential information is a kind of summary of the whole slide. It is the essence, the conclusion drawn from the arguments presented below. Another example, a slide with a chart and some background information. Is this an effective way of message communication? Not exactly is it. The recipients have to draw conclusions from this slide all by themselves. Let's do it for them. Let's make it easier to interpret this slide by creating a talking headline. Thanks to this simple improvement, the recipient gets a chance to understand the essence of our message. One more example. This headline won't work very well. This one will work much better. I would like to remind you that the talking headlines principle works mainly in business presentations and presentation sent via email. It will not really worked first-stage presentations shown during conferences and similar events. These must utilize it very short, laconic phrases on the slides. Here's a brief summary. This is how content should be structured on slides, at least in purely business presentations. The headline conveys key information. The content is divided into several sections, and each of them has its own headline and explanation. Jumping a bit ahead. This is how we should construct the form of professional slides. We create them using mostly simple motifs and shapes, perfect order and icons. But we will go into detail with these topics a bit later. 4. Use Guides and the ‘Align’ function: Rule number three, use guides and the aligned function. One of the most common mistakes and at the same time, one of the least realized is untidy *****. Let's compare these two slides. Slide number one. Slide number two. Which one looks better to apparently same looking slides with exactly the same content. And yet there's a slight different look again. Slide number one and slide number two. Which one looks better? Slide number two is definitely better, of course. Why is that? So when we look closely at the first slide, we'll see minor shifts. There's an tidiness and chaos. The icons are at different distances from the texts. This long text is centered so that there is no symmetry to either left or right. The graphic is too close to the edge of the slide. The title is too close to the line that forms part of the layout. Everything here is a bit off. There is chaos as if each of these elements were thrown randomly onto the slide. Meanwhile, the second slide is tidy. The text is aligned to the left, which gives the impression of order, at least from this slide. This is how we should align longer texts to the left or justify them. That is, align them to the right and left at the same time. Short texts and phrases of one or two lines may be centered. Look at the other elements on this slide. The icons are at the same distance from texts. The title is aligned with all the elements below. You could draw a straight line here. All of these objects are aligned along this line. The whole layout of the content below the slide title can be fitted into a symmetrical rectangle. It all gives the impression of tidiness and harmony. And so the impression that the entire message, not only the form, but also the content, is well-thought out and properly structured. By contrast, when the recipient looks at slide number one, idea may form in their subconscious mind. There's something iffy about this. I don't know what it is. I don't know why. But something is not quite right here. I don't trust this message. And that's the catch. And only few people are aware of it. Untidy messages are messages that breed distrust and skepticism. You want to make effective presentations. You want to be convincing to your audience. Then you need to start organizing your slides as best you can. Fortunately, you don't have to waste a lot of time doing this. Because PowerPoint has two great functions to help you align all elements almost automatically. And most similar applications offer the same. They are the guide and the Align option. We will discuss these options in more detail in the second part of the course. Now, let me just tell you about them in a nutshell. We activate guides by going to the View tab and clicking on the Guides option. When you click it, you will see straight dashed lines to the side. Typically to such lines appear one vertical, one horizontal. And they both go right through the center of the slide. These lines are visible on each slide, but only in the draft mode. They are invisible when the slideshow mode is on. What are the guides for for placing equal symmetrically distributed elements along them. For example, such circles. We can move guidance to the left, right, up and down, or add new ones with the control key on, we can move a given guide and so create a new one. We can set an infinite number of such guides on a slide. If we want to delete a guide, we slide it out of the slide without any key pressed on the keyboard. And then the guy disappears. I always start work on a presentation by setting up for guides to guides in the center. And two on the margins, one on the left and one on the right. In this way, I mark out my working space within which I will be arranging the content of my presentation. And look here. Logo in the top corner must not be placed in a random position. It must touch the margin guide. The title can't be here either or here. The first letter of the title must be aligned with the guide. And all the elements below must also be aligned with it. Take a look at this table, for example. It should sit neatly between the left and the right guides. And not like this. Guides are the key to organizing your slides. Believe me, it is impossible to create a well-structured, professional looking presentation without having guides turned on. So every time you start to work on your presentation, first go to the View tab and then activate the guides. Another option that allows you to arrange elements quickly is the aligned function. How does it work? Let's see an example. Let's say we want to arrange these five circles neatly. Select all the circles by clicking each of them while holding the Control key down. Then we enter the format tab and select a line. Sometimes you may find it difficult to find this function because its name maybe hidden, but you will definitely find it by clicking on this icon. This function is available in every version of PowerPoint. Click on the Align option, and we see this option. Now we have several options to choose from. We can align selected elements top, left, bottom, and so on. Which option should you choose? Follow the logic. Align top, and look here, all the circles have been pulled to the highest point. Now I will click align, distribute horizontally, and all the circles have been laid out evenly. I will get the same effect of tidiness if I choose to align the shapes vertically, just select all the elements. Go to the Format tab, select Align Left, and then distribute vertically. Note that with the align horizontally and aligned vertically options, the two outermost elements remain stationary. So if these elements do not have enough space, they can overlap. Therefore, you need to leave enough space at the beginning. So the whole set can simply fit in a given space. After aligning all the elements, we can select the whole layout with a cursor and place it in the center of the slide. And the center is defined by, well, the guide. Remember, professional presentations are aligned and tidy presentations. Without this, it is also impossible to create an effective presentation. In order to create a nice and aligned presentation, reach for two key PowerPoint functions, guides and align. 5. Use a limited colour palette: Rule number four, use a limited color palette, main color, a color accent, and neutral colors. A common mistake while making a presentation is using colors that are not contrasting enough. As a result, the texts are hard to see and sometimes even completely unreadable. This is especially true when our presentation is shown with a projector that has an old low-quality lamp. Such projectors flattened the colors out, and as a result, a light gray blends with a dark gray, for example. So always try to go for contrast in colors. If you choose a light color for the background, the texts on the background must be dark, and vice versa. Given a dark background, the text color must be light. Then we will avoid situations when our slides cause fatigue to the eyes of our recipients. But it's just as tiresome when our slides contain too many colors. In my presentations, I typically use a very narrow palette. I only use the main color of the presentation, a color accent, and the rest are neutral colors. That is black and various shades of gray. But what are the best colors to use? First of all, they need to match the visual identity of your company. If your company has a green logo than the dominant color in the presentation, that is, the main color, should be exactly the same shade of green as in the logo. Now, it is important that it is the same color and not a similar one that is available from the color palette. New versions of PowerPoint feature a fantastic tool that lets you extract colors of your choice. This function is called eyedropper and it works like this. Pick any shape of your choice on the slide. Select Shape, Fill, eyedropper, and then click the cursor on the part of the logo from which you want to draw a color. And so we have extracted our color to the PowerPoint color palette. The new color is listed in the recently used colors section of the color palette. The palette looks the same everywhere in Shape, Fill, Shape, outline, and texts color. So now we have defined the main color of our presentation. It is also worth choosing a color accent that is an additional color that you may find useful or not. When designing slides. Apart from these two, we want to use all neutral colors, black, white, and various shades of gray. And this is how we have created our unique color palette. The narrower the palate, the easier it will be for us to decide how to design our slides. But also the slides themselves will look cleaner, neater, and more elegant. Where can you find the accent color? For example, it could be the additional color in the logo. However, if the logo only has one color, you can find an additional color on the company's website. First, take a screenshot of the website using the keyboard shortcut Windows, Shift S on Windows, or Shift Command on Mac. Next, insert the screenshot on this slide and then use the eyedropper function again. If there's no additional color on the company's website, check out colors, dots, CEO. If you have a flair for graphic design, you can use this website to create a very professional color palette. How does the use of such a palette look in practice? Here's a slide using the main color. In this case, it is pink. There is no color accent on this slide. In addition to the main color, there are also neutral colors, light grays, and dark raise. Another example from a different presentation with a different color scheme. The main color here is navy blue. In addition, there are also neutral colors on the slide. White for the icons, and gray for the bar under this slide title. There is no color accent because it is completely unnecessary. Another example, a slide with the main color and color accent. The main color is blue and the color accent is turquoise. There are also neutral colors on the slide, like these short labels describing the graph. That's why I would recommend using a color accent sparingly. Only when we really want to highlight something on the slide, emphasize it, and bring it to the foreground. For the vast majority of slides, it is enough if you use only the main color and some neutral colors. This formula allows you to create aesthetic and effective presentations in a very easy way. Here's a practical tip on pairing neutral colors. If your slide background is white, tried to use many light colors, such as light gray. Like this one. The first gray color located in the left column of the color palette. This is my favorite color and I use it in almost every presentation. Medium. Grays don't work very well. Such dark colors are pessimistic and overwhelming. I advise against them. Heart rates are elegant, but they should be used only in small doses. To summarize, if your slide background is white, use light colors. Use vibrant colors for those parts of the content you want to bring to the fore. In the case of a dark slide background color, vice versa. We'll talk about using the background in one of the following lessons. 6. Stay up to date with trends: Rule number five. Stay up-to-date with trends, simplicity, order, visual lightness. Do remember the 990s? I remember I was born in the 1880s and grew up amidst colorful advertisements and the omnipresent Motley infant tile aesthetics. This type of aesthetics is a thing of the past, but I still see it in many presentations. Look at this slide. This slide is completely old-fashioned. Let's take a close look at it. From a Let's start from the top. The title. It has a shadow underneath. The shadow effect makes this lettering appear dirty. It doesn't look very good, does it? It's definitely better to get rid of it, both in the title and in this phrase below. Let me share a general comment. Most of the effects available in PowerPoint and the like do not help. Aesthetics. Actually, quite the opposite. I personally use only about 20% of PowerPoints functions. Most of them make our presentation look heavy and outdated. So let's get rid of the shadow under the heading and the blue phrase. But we should also get rid of the graphics in the upper-right corner. This is the so-called clip art, very outdated graphic theme. The use of similar graphics, this type of three-dimensional human figure, suggests that our presentation was made a long time ago. So it's better to give up on this type of graphic design altogether. Another thing to improve is the charts. Both are three-dimensional. However, this form is now considered obsolete. Platforms work much better because they are simpler, clearer, and visually lighter. The current canon of graphic design does not tolerate any excess effects, any reliefs or heavy, old looking 3D themes, such as in the PowerPoint chart default settings. Another thing that calls for improvement is the bullets at the bottom of the slide. Bullets should not distract attention from the most important information on the slide. There should be a small, delicate accent that helps not hinders the reading. So instead of such crude large bullets, it's definitely better to use regular dots like this. Moreover, we should make the font more consistent. Both their type and color. Is this light okay now? Well, no, it is still far from okay. There's still a lot of colors and a lot of mess. What should this slide look like? Then? It should look like this. For example. This is a two-color version, a main color and a color accent. And this version has only the main color without an accent. Both these versions are good. Both versions have a lot less color than the original slide, a lot more order, and a lot more of what is known as visual lightness. I will be referring to this idea of visual lightness again and again throughout this course. Actually, this seems to be a good moment to say what the contemporary graphic canon is all about. And what should the style of our presentations B, so that they are considered aesthetic and trendy. First of all, presentations made in the spirit of simplicity are considered stylish. This means not too many elements, short texts, no unnecessary decorations that serve no purpose and have no value on their own. Everything should be as simple as possible, because simplicity is elegant and easy to absorb by recipients. Second, the modern graphic candidate is based on order and symmetry. I've already mentioned that when discussing rule number three, order is an essential element of a professional presentation. The third on my list is visual lightness. It is a subtle feature of graphic design that is a bit difficult to define. It's basically about an impression that a given graphic does not take up too much space. That it is gentle and delicate, does not attract too much attention. And at the same time, it is designed in such a way that it makes the message very easy to read for the recipient. Three-dimensional pie charts are an example of visually heavy graphics. On the other hand, a good example of visual lightness is a doughnut chart, which is much easier to read and more delicate at the same time. Where do we look for inspiration to be up-to-date with current trends? I would recommend, if I may, are channel on YouTube. Just enter slide formation into the search bar and you will find our channel with many video inspirations. I need to warn you, however, that many of them are meant for advanced users who can already make pretty good presentations and are ready for the next level. Alternatively, you can look for inspiration on the slideshare.net website. This is a website that I like to call YouTube for presentations. Different companies and different people post their presentations there to share their ideas and offers. And thanks to this, we all have the opportunity to see how real presentations are created in various categories. However, I would like to point out that while there are many great presentations there, there are also a lot of very weak presentations. You have to be careful with this website. However, no matter what social media platform you use, sometimes it is just enough to enter modern presentation template in the search engine window. And surely a lot of interesting inspirations will pop up in the search results. All you have to do is invest a bit of your time. 7. Use an agenda like a storyline: Rule number six. Use an agenda like a storyline. Let's take the following situation. We are showing our presentation. We show one slide after another. And at some point we noticed that there's an expression of surprise on the faces of the recipient. We see that they have lost track. This often happens with long multithreaded presentations. However, there is a simple trick to avoid this. I call it an agenda, like a storyline. What is this about? Let's take a look at this example of a presentation. Here is its title slide. So we can see that the presentation will be about employee benefits. The second slide in presentations is often the agenda slide. It can take many forms. It can be very simple, and it can also be slightly more advanced in terms of graphic design. Just like here. However, the essence is the same. The agenda slide is intended to show a list of topics that will be covered during the presentation. And the agenda slide is not usually shown. Again, in my opinion, it is much better to repeat the agenda slide just before starting a new thread in the presentation. So in our presentation on employee benefits, slide number three will be the agenda slide. But here we highlight only one thread, the one that will be discussed next. On the next two or three or ten slides, we discussed this thread. When we finish, we display the agenda slide again, but now the name of this second chapter is highlighted. The easiest way to achieve this distinction is by changing the color to a more expressive one, while the other elements are deemed by giving them a low contrast color in relation to the background. In this case, the color is light gray. And so the following slides cover the second thread, which we then wrap up by showing the agenda slide again. Here the next part of our presentation is highlighted called the benefits. Thanks to such a presentation scheme, the audience always knows when we finished one thread and proceed to the next one. This is a significant facilitation and provides a great comfort for the viewers of the presentation. The agenda slide does not need to be so graphically complicated. Sometimes a plain text field with a bulleted list is enough, like here. The secret lies in the highlighted point is brushed bold, and in a different, more distinctive color. All other points, on the other hand, have a color that is similar to the background color. In this case, it is like gray. Such agenda slides can also have a slightly more advanced form like this, with shapes inserted from the Insert tab. Option shapes or like this. With icons. We will talk more about where to get icons and how to format them in one of the next lessons. 8. Use only the recommended fonts: Rule number seven. Use only the recommended fonts. We have lots of different fonts to choose from in every presentation software. The most commonly used are Calibri, arial, Tahoma, Verdana Times New Roman font can improve the aesthetics of a slide deck and another one can ruin it. As is shown by these few slides. They have the same content. Only the fonts differ. Take a look at each of these slides. Do you like any of them in particular? Or perhaps one of them you do not like. Before I tell you what font names are behind these slides, let me give you a quick lecture on font types. Fonts fall into two basic categories, serif and sans-serif. How are they different? Only by serifs. That is, these little elements kind of tail. Why are they called serifs? I honestly don't know. Maybe that's why. Anyway, the essence of this division is that Cera fonts, that is, those with tails, have become popular in print and in books. Mainly because serifs allow you to better combine letters into compact structures such as words. This makes them easier to read. By contrast, sans-serif fonts have caught on in computers and the Internet. Why? Because the first monitors, hence such a low resolution that they were not able to display small elements like serifs. That's why they were cut off. And so it was that sans-serif fonts became popular. The division into serif and sans-serif fonts is important because as recipients of messages, we perceive each of these font groups differently. Sara fonts, since they have become established in print and books, have a sort of conservative field to them. By contrast, sans-serif fonts, because they have caught on, on the Internet and in new technologies have a modern field. So if our goal is to create a modern looking presentation, we should go for sans-serif, but be aware of using Arial or Calibri. Why? Because they are common fonts, way too common. I would guess that roughly 90% of all presentations in the world employ one of these two fonts. No wonder, Colibri is a system font for Windows and the Office Suite. Each newly opened document, Word, or PowerPoint, uses Calibri by default. Have you heard of this marketing principle, standout or die? Choosing a font that is different from the most common fonts is the easiest way to stand out. So instead of the hackneyed Calibri or aerial, use, other simple aesthetic and clear fonts, such as Tahoma, Verdana, trebuchet, or Century Gothic. However, with business presentations, steer far away from hand-written fonts, such as Comic Sans. They are great for children's presentations for school, but not good at all for serious business presentations. The fonts that we've installed on our computers are just a fraction of all the fonts in existence. Professional graphic designers download designer fonts from the Internet and install them on their computers. This may be a good idea if we wish to make a truly unique presentation. However, the right selection of fonts requires a lot of experience in graphic design and an artistic intuition. We should also be careful with designer fonts for one reason. We may end up with a presentation that is completely unreadable to the addressee. Have a look at this example. Here is a slide using a non-system font that has been installed on the author's computer. This is what this same slide looks like when it lands on a computer that doesn't have this font installed. Therefore, it is best to either send the presentation in PDF format or you safe and tried system fonts. In PowerPoint, there is an advanced option of embedding fonts and files, which you can find here. File tab, Options, Save section. And you can check mark embed fonts in the File option. But to be honest, this function doesn't work well. Many fonts can't be somehow embedded in some errors occur when we do it. So I don't recommend using it. It's much better to send the presentation in PDF format or you safe and tried system fonts. Let's go back to our slides from the beginning of this lesson. What fonts are used on these slides? This is Calibri, this is areal. This is Tahoma, Verdana, trebuchet. And this one is Century Gothic. Which one would you choose for your presentation? 9. Seven principles of presentation – summary: Seven principles of presentation, summary. You have learned this seven iron rules for creating professional presentations. Let's make a brief summary. Rule number one, use visuals and short phrases. Remember, right, the text for your presentations differently than if you were writing an email. Stick to dry facts. Use short forms. Use only short paragraphs. Rule number two, present content on two grounds. It means that the most important information must stand out. The easiest way to do this is to brush a given keyword, bold, change its color, and enlarge it. Rule number three, use guides and the aligned function. Remember, you cannot really create a professional presentation if you do not use these two functions. A professional presentation is an orderly presentation. Rule number four, create a small color palette. All you need to do is choose the main color, a color accent, and a few neutral colors for your presentation. White, black, and various shades of gray. Rule number five, stay on top of trends. The current trends in presentations are based on maximum simplicity, order, and visual lightness. Rule number six, Use the agenda as a storyline in longer, multithreaded presentations. So stick in the agenda slide every time you start a new chapter of your presentation. Rule number seven, use only the recommended fonts. For example, Tahoma, Verdana, trebuchet, or Century Gothic. 10. 3 types of presentation: Key PowerPoint features and tricks, three types of presentations. Before we go over to the tricks and the various cool features of PowerPoint, I'd like to clear up 1 with you. Where do we start creating a presentation? First of all, we need to define the recipient. Who are they? What are they like? What are their expectations? The more we know about the recipient, the easier it will be for us to adjust the contents and form of our presentation to them. Secondly, let's define the purpose of our presentation. As with many projects, the theory start with a vision of the end, works here as well. So let's keep our minds on what we want to achieve with the presentation. This way, it will be easier for us to build a compelling case or remove unnecessary threads that do not move us toward our goal. Thirdly, we need to think about the logistics of the presentation and define what type of presentation we should deliver. What's going on here. When the word presentation is heard, different people may have different ideas about what a presentation is. Their presentations for large conferences, presentations for small business meetings, and finally, presentations sent by e-mail and functioning completely without a presenter. These are the three main types of presentations, all completely different. Stage presentations. That is, presentations for large events, conferences and presentations made in the convention of a show. Business presentations prepared for small meetings. Meetings have management boards and supervisory boards, project and working meetings with clients or business partners. Finally, we have slide docs, that is documents in the form of slides. These are presentation sent by e-mail and read directly by recipients from a computer or from printouts without the presence of a presenter. Each of these types needs a slightly different approach. Stage presentations require very little text on the slides, but a lot of visualization, a lot of emotional content, tales, stories and anecdotes. They are infotainment that is a combination of information and entertainment. Recipients expect knowledge, but provided in a light and entertaining form. For such presentations, it is safe or not to include charts, tables, or long bulleted texts. Business presentations require a lot of matter of fact content, not storytelling, not anecdotes. It is essential that they contain dry fact arguments, calculations, statistics, hard data. Therefore, in such presentations Naturally, there'll be a lot of charts, tables, calculations, and bullets. Slide doc presentations to a large extent resemble business presentations. That is, they also need a lot of specific content, but they differ in that they need a bit more text on the slides so that the texts may create the narrative without the presence of the presenter. So don't make the mistake of showing a slide doc when you go to a stage presentation and vice versa, do not send in a stage style presentation by email because the recipients will not understand much of it. So think about what type of presentation you need and then use whatever means necessary to meet that end. 11. Background and layout of the presentation: Background and layout of the presentation. One of the first decisions to make when designing your slide deck is what background your slides should have. I'll tell you straight away. The simpler, the better. Know wavelets, no ornaments, no elements that add nothing of value. The layout of the slides and the background should be simple, preferably uniform in color. And now the question, should the background be light or dark, white or black? There is a lot of discussion about it, but let's just keep it simple. The dark background is only suitable for stage presentations. Light backgrounds such as white are best for business presentations and slide docs. Why such a division? First, let's take a dark background and stage presentations. Why is this a good match? Because such presentations are usually displayed in dark rooms in front of a large auditorium. To avoid this situation, when the whiteness of the slides and the screen dazzles the eyes of the recipient's. A dark background is better suited. Second, the whiteness of the slides could distract from the most important element of the presentation, the presenter. It is different with business presentations and slide docs. Labor economics counts here. Sometimes we have to prepare a presentation in a very short time. The easiest and fastest way to work is on white backgrounds. Because when we want to use logos downloaded straight from the internet on our slides, many of them have a white background. If they stand out from the background of this slide, it just doesn't look good. Such a logo will look much better on a white background. The white background is therefore universal, easier to use, and more ecological. Many slide doc presentations are printed. So to reduce the use of printer ink, it is better to use white backgrounds. What elements should be on the slides? Certainly a slide title. The title should be in the upper left corner and aligned to the left. Not centered, not right aligned, but left aligned. The slide title cannot be small. It's worth making it clearer, maybe even bold. We can also give it the main color of our presentation, but it can also be a neutral color, black or dark gray. The title can be separated from the rest of the slide with a delicate accent, a horizontal line of some sort, but it is not necessary. What about the logo? Do you put it on every slide? In stage presentations? It's not worth it. It is enough if we show it only on the first and last slides. In business presentations and slide docks. The logo is usually on each slide. Where is it best? In the top-right corner, bottom-right, or maybe bottom-left. The correct answer is, the top right corner is by far the best place. Here. It will get least in the way when we enter content. At the bottom of the slide, we can put page numbering. We can do it by going to the Insert tab and then clicking the header and footer option in a newly opened window, select the slide number option. We can also select the do not show on the title slide option and then click Apply to all. And this is how we have created a simple but perfectly sufficient presentation template. This is exactly the layout I most often use in my presentations. 12. Guides: Guides. I mentioned guides in one of the previous lessons, but they are so important that I need to take a bit of your time to drive this point home. I would like you to do the following exercise. Turn on the guides to do this. Open your presentation, a blank PowerPoint document or the template you work on the most. Then go to the View tab and select two options in their ruler and guides. Typically, you'll see two guides. That is straight dashed grey lines, one horizontal and one vertical. They go right through the middle of the slide. Great. Let them stay where they are. They will be useful for showing where the center of the slide is, which may come in handy many times during the design stage. Next, let's create two additional margin guides. Hold down the Control key, then press the left mouse button on the vertical guide, and then move it to the side. If done correctly, another guide will be created by dragging it without pressing the control key, you can move it left or right. Position it to the right of the slide. If you have a logo, their position, the guide so that it is tangent with the edge of the logo. Not like that. Not like that. Like this. Then create a second Margin guide and set it to the same level as the first. If the first was at 15.6, the second must also be at this level. This is how we have created a workspace for our slides. Did you do it successfully? If not, watch this lesson again from the beginning and see exactly how I do it. Such kinds act as boundaries against which various elements arrested. For example, tables or texts. The texts should start exactly on the left guide, not here or there, but exactly here. Such slide title stripes should also be rested on the guide. Rectangle marketing efforts. The guide stop us wondering if we have placed an element in the middle or not. The guides, when positioned correctly, will show us this right away. For example, the center guide confirms that a given object is in the middle of the slide. We can create more guidance from time-to-time to be able to better position individual elements on the slide. For example, if we have charts side-by-side, and we want the x-axis of these charts to be on the same level. Then we set the guide here and move the chart so that they're x-axis is on a given guide. When a given guide is no longer needed, we swipe it outside the slide without any key turned on and the guy disappears. We can also turn on the guides by right-clicking outside the slide. And then we select grid and guides, and then add a vertical guide or add a horizontal guide. We can also delete it by right-clicking on a given guide and then select Delete. The guide, then disappears. After you finish watching the lesson. Practice inserting and moving guides in your PowerPoint. Remember, the basis for creating a professional presentation is to set up for guides to, through the center, horizontal and vertical. And two, on the margins. 13. The Align function: The aligned function. I mentioned the aligned function at the beginning of the course. However, it is worth practicing. Open any presentation on your computer and insert a shape of your choice on a blank slide. It can be a rectangle, a circle, or a square. I'm putting a circle here. Are you done? Great. Now select this shape by left clicking on it, and then press Control and the letter D, Control D. This is a shortcut if you want to duplicate an item selected. This can also be done with the Control C and Control V key combination. So I copy and paste. Of course, you can also right-click on a given shape and select Copy. Then again the right mouse button and select Insert. But it makes the process so much longer. The vest is option, is Control D. So press Control D a few times until you have five of these shapes. Spread them out from left to right. Now select them all. This can be done by clicking on each shape with the Control or Shift button on. Now the key thing, go to the Format tab and select a line. If you cannot find the name, it's because it's hidden behind an icon like this. If you still can't find it, try here. Home tab, arrange. And this is where the aligned function should be. Now we click the required option. If we want to align these circles upwards, we select Align Top. Beautiful. Each of the circles has moved higher, the level of the highest one. Then click on align and distribute horizontally. Now, each of the circles has shifted horizontally and the distances between them are exactly the same. This is what we wanted. I can now grab all this selected set and move it more or less to the center of the slide. Did you manage to get a similar effect? If not, follow me carefully, again, step-by-step. Likewise, we can arrange all elements vertically arranged your shapes from top to bottom. Then go to the Format tab, select Align and align left, then Align and Distribute Vertically. I put the circles to the guide and can now format them properly. It may happen that your shapes overlap. This is because we left too little space for the distribution of the shapes. Please note, when you distribute horizontally or distribute vertically, the extreme elements, the topmost or the bottom-most, do not move. They set the boundaries of this whole set. So if you have these elements overlapping like this, move one of the extreme elements away more, and then align. Also remember that the elements that you align cannot be too big. If they're too big, they just won't fit into the given space. Using the aligned function can be difficult at first. But believe me, as soon as you get to grips with this feature, it will greatly speed up the process of organizing your slides. After watching this lesson, do some exercises, but four rectangles on the slide and arrange them using the aligned feature. Then put five circles vertically on your slide and arrange them using the Align feature. Again. Do not move on to the next lesson until you have completed these exercises. 14. Shapes: Shapes. The most important tab in PowerPoint is the Insert tab. Whenever you want to put something on the slide, the easiest way to do it is through this tab. So click, Insert and we can now insert shapes, chart, textboxes, videos, sounds, and many other things. For now, let's focus on shapes. I use a lot of this kind of element in my presentations. They are simple, useful, and very effective. Rectangles, squares, circles, triangles, black arrows, line arrows, horizontal lines. This is where the whole arsenal of my favorite themes for presentations sits at the ready. Look at what a simple circle can do for you. I put one end. Then using the hotkey control D, I duplicate the circle previously created. Once again, control D. And one more time. Now that I have these few circles, I am ready to enter data into them. Then I align them using the Align function. First, align top, then align and distribute horizontally. Underneath, I put the appropriate subtitles. And in this simple way, I've created an interesting visualization definitely better than this raw slide with a textbox and nothing else. The difference between slides with shapes and Ross lines without any formatting at all is quite significant. A slide with ordinary circles has taken on an interesting visual form. It is more aesthetic, but also more inviting for the audience to read. Simple rectangles allow us to structure information on the slides and bring your keywords to the for. A slide with raw texts like this can be changed into a completely different, much more interesting form. We change a TextField into a timeline. Tab, insert shapes. Here. We can select the block arrow and we can set it up as a timeline going from left to right. Align, enter the texts. And now we have quite an interesting slide. Another example, what can a regular line before insert vertical lines? And we immediately improve the structure of the whole slide. No lines. Well, unfortunately, the boundaries of the individual pieces of information are not very clear. How can a triangle be useful? It can be a pointer, or it can replace an arrow. There are some interesting shapes and the shapes section, but there are also a few that are better avoided. Which ones? I mean, mostly three-dimensional shapes as these are visually heavy and outdated. Look at this for example. There is also no point using infantile motifs such as these. I would also like to advise you against the rectangle with rounded corners. For some reason or other. It's very, very popular in PowerPoint presentations, even though it looks very amateur. So when I see this shape in my presentation, what do I do with it? I select it. Then grab the little yellow circle in the corner and drag it left or right. If I drag it all the way out, then the shape becomes a regular rectangle. If I just pull it slightly outwards, the roundness will decrease and it will look much better. However, if I drag it in and reduce the height of the shape, then look what an interesting form appears. I can now double-click it and start typing. It looks pretty good, doesn't it? There we go. It definitely looks much better than the default Powerpoint shape. Shapes are also useful for framing texts. You can do it like this. Create a rectangle, position it properly on the text. Select no fill in the shape fill option and give the shape a slightly gray outline, not too thick. Now we have the border around the text, but we can make it even more interesting. Insert the text header as a separate text-box and put it on the top edge of the frame. We make the fill color of this text white, the same as the background color of the slide. Let's also make sure that the textfield is on top. And now we have a pretty interesting text visualization. Go to the Insert tab and then shapes. This is the largest repository of visualizations and it is worth checking in there often. However, I would advise against the use of so-called smart art. Smart Art or ready-made graphic layouts available under the Insert tab. They have one big advantage, a few clicks, and we have a chart, a pyramid, or a diagram inserted on the slide. The problem, however, is that they are very common to comment. So if we make an important presentation for an experienced audience who have seen a great deal of presentations. They will certainly have seen such themes many times in many other boring presentations. Do we want our presentation to be associated with those? Well, better, not. Therefore, it is safer to rely on simple shapes created from scratch, from the Insert tab shapes option. Thanks to this, we will be able to create simple and effective visualizations. 15. Keyboard shortcuts: Keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts are very handy when we want to create presentations quickly. I've already mentioned a few Control D, duplicate selected objects. I can duplicate a shape, a picture, or slide. Equally useful is the Control C, Control V, sequence. Control C means copy. Control V is paste. Note that if I copy an item on the first slide using control C and put it on another slide using control V. It will be inserted in the exact same place. So it's worth copying slide titles from previous slides and inserting them into new ones. So that in the slide show mode, they do not jump up and down. The most important hotkey, however, is the Shift button, absolutely essential when creating a presentation? Please do an exercise like this. Put a regular circle on a blank slide like this. Insert tab, shapes. Select oval, left-click and drag it diagonally. Did you come up with a circle or an asymmetrical oval? Here's how you can check it. Select the shape and go to the Format tab. Top right, you can see if the height and width are the same. If not, it will be an ugly asymmetrical instead of a circle. If you need more time, pause the video and then resume after you insert the shape. Now, insert the same circle. But once the cursor has changed to a cross, press the Shift key, you see the difference with the shift key on a symmetrical circle will always be created. This is the magic of the shift button. Now put a rectangle on the slide with and without shift. With shift, you always get a square. Without shift a rectangle. And try to enlarge the rectangle you created earlier. With shift, the rectangles proportions will be kept. No shift. The aspect ratio can change completely. Shift is the aspect ratio key. It's key in creating, reducing or enlarging shapes. One more trick with the Shift key. Insert a line or linear arrow on the slide with and without shift. Note that with shift on, this line will always be parallel to the edge of the slide and try to extend this line. Without shift, it can get crooked. But with the Shift button down, this line will extend parallel to the edge of the slide. With the Shift button down, we can also select many elements and then, for example, group them using the Control G shortcut or ungroup them using the Shift Control G shortcut. Shift also allows us to use the so-called soft enter. If I press Shift and Enter here, the next sentence will be carried over to the new line, but a new paragraph will not be created. If I just press enter, a new paragraph would be created and a new bullet. This makes all the difference. Another important helper key is the control key. As I mentioned before, we can put a new guide on the slide using the Control key. We can also select many items at the same time or copy objects. I press Control, grab the shape and drag it to the side. This is how I duplicate elements. Interesting things can be done with the Control key. Also in the slideshow mode, have a look. I press the Control key and then press the left mouse button. The cursor changes to a red highlight, resembling a laser pointer. This is useful during an online presentation when you want to select a part of the slide. But when I press Control and the letter P, then my cursor turns into a pen and I can write or draw on the slide. Check it out for yourself. But remember, it works only in the slideshow mode. In the normal working mode, using Control P will force printing options to pop up. The Alt key comes in handy when you want to turn off PowerPoints tooltips. For example, in a situation like this, I bring the line to the rectangle, but PowerPoint persistently changes the angle of the line to pull it towards the center of the rectangle. So I hit the Alt key and the unwanted PowerPoint hints are immediately turned off. Here are some other handy key combinations. Shift F3, convert selected text, too small caps or lowercase letters. Control a. Select all. It selects all items on a slide, or selects all slides. Control B makes the selected text bold. Control M creates a new slide. Control S, saves the presentation. For other keyboard shortcuts. See the table below. It makes no sense to memorize them. But if you can see a function in there that you use often, using a shortcut, we'll probably speed up your work. Don't you think? There is one more thing to remember? If you want to make presentations really fast, get yourself a mouse. Many times I've seen people struggling to make simple maneuvers in PowerPoint by clicking on the laptop touchpad. It doesn't work. Believe me. You can carry out certain sequences three to four times faster with a mouse. 16. Crop: Crop. A useful PowerPoint feature when working with photos and icons is crop. Suppose we have this picture in the slide and we want to trim it right-side. Select the photo, go to the format or image format tab, and then select Crop. Little black lines will appear in the photo. If we grab one of them and drag it inside, the appropriate part of the photo will be cropped. Just click the mouse somewhere outside the photo. If we want to crop another photo, we can do it like this. Select the Format tab, then crop, and then move the appropriate bars. We can also grab the center of the photo and move it so that it fits into the new edges. In the case of photos of people, it is sometimes worth cropping them to a circle. Here's how you can do it. First, we select a picture and turn it into a square. Here's how you do it. Go to the Format tab, expand the crop feature, and then select aspect ratio One-to-one. Thanks to this, PowerPoint has turned the photo into a symmetrical square for us. Only now can we move on to step number two, replaces square photo with a circle. Select the photo, go to the Format tab and expand the crop option, then crop the shape, and then select oval. And that's how we get a nice picture crop to a circle. What if we skip the first step where we converted a rectangle photo to a square photo. This would result in an asymmetrical oval. And if we then wanted to make it symmetrical, make it a circle. Well, our model would put on 30 kilos of weight in a few seconds. Photos can be cropped to various proportions as shown here. We can choose, for example, the aspect ratio of 169. This will give a photo the same aspect ratio as our slide. Naturally, that's only if we work in the 16 to nine format. To check this, we have to go to the Design tab. And in the slide size option, check if we really have an aspect ratio of 169. The crop feature, however, is particularly useful when you want to get rid of a fragment of a photo for some reason, or focus the audience's attention on some central point. 17. Slide Master: Slide Master Node, an important reservation at the beginning. This lesson is for those who are already familiar with PowerPoint. If you do not have much experience or if you don't feel confident enough using PowerPoint, watch, observe, but it would be better not to try it for now. What is a Slide Master? Slide Master is a sort of presentation backend. Go to the View tab and click Slide Master. Here we have two types of slides. This big slide is a master. The smaller ones are layouts. There can be many masters and layouts in one file. When you put something on a master slide, all slides based on that master will contain those elements. However, when you make changes to the slide layouts related to the master, these changes will only be visible on each particular slide. The essence of the Slide Master is that if we insert an element here, for example, a logo, it will only be shifted in the Slide Master. When we exit the master back in the normal draft mode, this logo will be on editable. We will not be able to move it or resize it. The same will happen if we insert any shape or text in the Slide Master. So if a normal draft mode, you see an element shape or text that you would like to move or change and you cannot do it, then most likely you will be able to do it in the Slide Master mode. So you just need to go to the View tab and then click on the Slide Master option. A warning here. If you are working on a corporate template, do not change the master slide elements yourself. Your changes can create an avalanche of shifts, clutter, and chaos that can be difficult for you to get back under control. A master contains all the stylistic settings of the slides, the appropriate set of colors, fonts, and all other parameters. We can change these settings here by clicking on the Colors option and then customize the colors in the window that appears. We can completely redesign the colors of the presentation. For example, like this. As a result, each newly created shape will have a new color. It is in the Slide Master mode that we can change the whole color style of our presentation. Please take a look at the top row of the color palette. All of these tiles in the top row are defined in the Slide Master. You can introduce completely new colors there. But let me emphasize this once again. When working on accompanies template, we do not change such things. In Slide Master, we can also define the fonts that will be used in the presentation. We define them by clicking on the fonts feature and then adjust fonts. And then we select a suitable font for the headings and body text. You can also specify suitable styles, but I would not recommend changing that. Better stick to the simplest form possible. Whatever change you make in the Slide Master. Remember to exit the Master view by clicking the red X that says Close Master view. This is crucial because if you don't and start typing the content of your slides here in the master. Well, you can complicate your work a lot. You can create multiple slide layouts in the Slide Master using a different position of the logo, with a different symbol, or with any other object. For example, you can have such a frame. And then you can use this newly created layout in slide draft mode. In draft mode, you can look at the slides created in the slide master here. Go to the Home tab layout option. You can choose from many existing layouts plus the ones we've just created. A Slide Master is the backbone of our presentation. You'd better not check in there too often so as not to accidentally move some elements about. However, there are times when certain steps in the Slide Master may be necessary. 18. Change of the presentation layout: Change of the presentation layout. The main advantage of using the Slide Master is the ability to change the layout of the entire presentation. Let's assume that we need to change the layout of our presentation to match the company's presentation template. How do we do it? I will show you how to do that in two ways. Method one, to get started, open both files. The presentation you created with the wrong layout and the company's presentation template. Here's the easiest way to proceed. Copy all of this lines from your presentation. Use the Control, a shortcut, deselect all the slides in the panel on the left and copy them using control C. Next, go to the target template and paste the copied slides using control V. Here's the most important thing. While you have the newly pasted slide selected. Go to the Home tab, expand the layout option, and select the layout with the right graphics. The new layout will appear on each slide. Many of the slides will be completely disorganized now and you'll need to put in a lot of effort to realign them. Know that changing the layout of a presentation will almost always cause a lot of troublesome and tedious manual work you'll need to do to realign everything. But it's an excellent start to transforming your presentation method to open the company's template and go to the View tab Slide Master option. Next, select the master slide, the large slide on the left, and copy it using Control C. Then open your presentation. The one with an incorrect layout in the View tab, go to the Slide Master option. Paste the copied master slide here. Now you can close the Master view. Then in the Home tab, expand the layout options, and choose the layout you want to appear on the selected slides. Of course, select the newly introduced one. You should now see at least two different master layout. The old one that already existed in your presentation, and the new one you just pasted. Now you can save the file under a new name. Now, you still have some work to do to align all the elements on the slides manually. As I already mentioned, changing the layout of a presentation can be very tedious. 19. Formatting shapes and texts: Formatting shapes and texts. In one of the previous lessons, I mentioned bringing keywords to the foreground. I showed you that the easiest way to do this is to format the words like this. I select a given phrase, make it bold, change the color, and maybe enlarge it as well. Thanks to this, I have a slide that is much better formatted than before. Recipient looks at this slide and immediately sees the most important information. And that's what it is all about. If we format one key phrase on the slide this way, we can format other key phrases in the presentation in a similar way. We'll do it very quickly using the Format Painter function. You surely knew this already. But did you know that if you click the Brush icon twice, you will be able to format many elements one by one. No need to use another formatting paint. Have a look again. I select the keyword which already has the correct formatting. Then double-click the Format Painter. Then use my cursor to paint the parts of the texts that I want to be formatted in the same way. And I can do it not only on this slide, but on all slides of the document. It's a huge time-saver. I use it very often and in the following manner. I format properly the first slide of my presentation using bold, changing color and enlarging keywords. Then I double-click the Format Painter, and I adjust formatting on the rest of the slides with less than a minute. Pause this video and try it yourself in your PowerPoint to see how this powerful tool works. You can also format slides using shapes. No idea how to format such as slide in an interesting way. Slide with bullets. Go to the Insert tab, then shapes and insert a square, for example, Control D. And we duplicate this shape. Put a number from one to five in each of the squares. First, align left, then distribute vertically. And here's a pretty interesting slide. Definitely much better than the earlier version with text alone. When inserting text into shapes with their squares, circles, or rectangles. It's best to do it like this. We click twice on the shape and we can write immediately. There is no need to put a separate text-box inside the shape. Because then we will have more work to rearrange and organize individual elements. Sometimes however, our texts may not fit in the shape. Just like here. What can we do? Let's reduce the margins. The margins can be found by right-clicking on the given object. Then selecting the Format Shape option in the panel on the right. Select the rectangle icon with arrows, then the text field option. And here we have access to the margin settings of the selected shape so we can reduce them to 0. Thanks to this, our texts will fit on one line of the shape. In the shape settings. We can also choose whether a given text is to be aligned top, middle, or bottom. The same maneuver can also be done in the home tab by clicking on the icon align text. You should also control the formatting of the texts here. As for the line spacing options, I would not recommend any settings other than 1. If we want to increase the distance between paragraphs than we do not choose 1.5 or 2 spacing, but we click the Line Spacing Options. And here in the window displayed, we choose a larger value of spacing before or after. It does not matter. And thanks to this, we will increase the space between individual paragraphs. If we had selected the two points 0 option here, the distance is not only between paragraphs, but also between each line would increase. And we don't want that. 20. Other useful PowerPoint functions: Other useful PowerPoint functions. In this lesson, I'd like to show you a few other features that you may find useful. Suppose you are making a presentation, but then at the last minute, you decide to change the font throughout the document. If you don't want to change it manually on each slide, you can expand the replace option on the home tab and then select Replace fonts in a window that appears, select the font that you no longer want in your presentation in the upper drop-down menu. And the font that you want to replace it with in the lower one. And so with a few clicks, we've changed the font throughout the document. In PowerPoint for Mac, the placement of many functions may be different than in the PC version. For example, the functions to change fonts and the entire document in the Mac version is in the Edit tab on the top bar, then find and then replace fonts. Another helpful feature is reordering the layers. Suppose we insert such a shape on a slide and we want to put an icon on top of it. Unfortunately, the icon is invisible because it is under the shape. But I can right-click on the visible shape and select Send to Back. Thanks to this, I will have the correct order of the layers. Here's another way. I can select an item and then on the home tab, expand the arrange option and then select Send to Back. In the arrange option, I also have access to some other interesting features, aligned, rotate and group. The group function is only available when there are at least two options selected. Interestingly, not every object can be grouped, for example, tables or frames of the so-called placeholders from the Slide Master. However, the group feature is very useful if you have a lot of items on the slide and want to combine them into compact structures so that they are easier to move around. Right-click on the frame of one of the selected elements. Select group, and then group again. We can also group using the Control G keyboard shortcut. We can ungroup items using the Control Shift G shortcut. If we have a lot of elements on the slide and we have difficulty selecting the appropriate object with a cursor. It will help if we expand the select option in the Home tab and choose selection pane. On the right, a panel will appear listing all the items on the slide. Just select the required element here in the panel. And we can immediately change its color, enlarge it, or delete it. A more advanced function that allows you to manipulate shapes is the merge feature. Look here. I have two shapes slightly overlapping each other. I select both elements, go to the Format tab, and then expand the Merge Shapes option. Here I can choose one from several options that will allow me to change the shape of the selected objects. This is an advanced feature used very rarely. But if you are interested in this topic, I recommend you watch selected tutorial videos on our YouTube channel. For example, how to draw a pencil in PowerPoint slow version tutorial. There you will see the use of the Merge Shapes option on a specific example. And if you haven't subscribed to our channel yet, be sure to get on it. 21. Animations and transitions: Animations and transitions. If you would like to make your presentation more attractive by using animation. Let me tell you right now, this is not the right way. Animations have their advantages, but they also have numerous disadvantages. If they are used only to create a sense of action. They distract the audience from the key message. As a result, the recipients will remember much less of this presentation. Then if we showed a simple static presentation, the only justification for introducing animation to a business presentation to break down the information presented on the slides into smaller pieces in order not to show the entire content at once, but to show it bit by bit. Like this. Such use of animation makes perfect sense. It makes sense because when I introduced the first piece of information, the audience focuses only on this part. When I introduce the next one, the recipients look and read exactly what I have just put on the slide, and so on and so forth. On the other hand, if I showed a complex slide all at once, then by the time I finished talking about the first piece of information, they will have already read two more portions of the content. And so we have a desynchronization. The presenter talks about one thing and the audience reads a completely different thing. Introducing animation allows you to synchronize what the presenter talks about with what the recipients focus on. What animation should we use? I recommend you use the green fade animations and occasionally the wipe. Go to the Animations tab and select the green animation called fade. Thanks to this, the selected portion of information will appear in a subtle and delicate way. This is my favorite animation and I use it the most. You have a whole lot of different animations in the animation panel. But most of them are too dynamic and therefore likely to distract attention from the content of your slides. Yes, they are interesting animations for school or children's presentation, but certainly not for a serious business presentation. In stage presentations, there can be many more animations. And their role may not only be to introduce separate pieces of information one after another, but also to make the presentation more dynamic and attractive. But that's only for stage presentations. There are three types of animations in the animation panel. Green for introducing a given element on the slide. Yellow for emphasis, for example, by magnification. And red for taking a given element away from the slide. In order to be able to easily edit the order of animations on a slide or their duration. Turn on the animation pane. And in the panel on the right, we can preview all the animations used on a given slide. We can shift them up or down, and so change their sequence. We can also expand the options for each animation and make different settings. There are a lot of possible settings. But for simple presentations, the default settings work best. The options available in the Transitions tab play a similar role as animations. However, we can not so much animate individual elements on the slides here, but changed the way one slide changes into another. There's a whole lot of fancy ways to combine slides. But let me share one thing with you. I hardly ever use this tab. In the vast majority of situations. I do not connect slides in any way. And I keep the none option selected. Well, maybe with one exception, which I will talk about in the next lesson. And here I would like to show you a practical application of animation. Have a look. I wanted to create a timeline slide. I put it in a few circles. I put the appropriate date into each of them. I align them for order. And then I connect the individual circles with straight lines. I put appropriate texts on the date. Now it's time to animate the whole thing. To do this, I will use two types of animations. Fade and wipe. I select the first line and go to the Animations tab, choose the white option and enable the effect option from the left. Then I select the circle and the text below it, and select fade. In the animation pane, select which animations must be displayed, not onclick, but right after the previous one. We perform similar maneuvers with the remaining elements on the slide. And this is how an animated slide with a timeline can lock. 22. Morph: Morph. There is one more interesting feature in the Transitions tab that I would like to discuss in more detail. The feature is called morph. It is available only in the latest versions of PowerPoint. In the Office 365 subscription version. If you have an older version of the software, you will certainly not see this option at all. What is this feature about? It animates the slides and the different elements on the slides like this. I put an element on the first slide, for example, a square. Then I duplicate this slide, and here I enlarge this square and change its color. Then with the second slide selected, I go to the Transitions tab and select Morph. And let's see what happens in the slideshow mode. Here's slide one. Now I come to the second slide. Powerpoint animated the smooth transition from point a on slide one to point B on slide two. This is a very interesting effect because it does not require compiling different sets of animations. Powerpoint creates all this animation for us. This works even when we put an element on the previous slide. But move it outside the slide. Then we copy it and put it on the next slide. In the slideshow mode, we will be able to see how a given shape is dynamically inserted. Another example, see how a powerful chart can be created using the morph effect. The secret behind these slides is that the charts aren't actually the charts, but a combination of shapes. The morph option doesn't cooperate with charts yet. So to get such an effect, you have to create each element as a rectangle and a textbox. Create appropriate proportions, add proper labels, and then select all the slides and just click Morph in the transition tab. And then the magic happens. Using the more feature requires a lot of skill and experience. But once you get into it, your presentations can be almost like cartoons. Just like this presentation, which you can watch on our YouTube channel, slide formation, video title, premium PowerPoint template with more of effect. It is impressive, although it must be admitted that it took a lot of work to get it done. Is this feature worth using in your presentations? This is a debatable point. It is definitely an interesting hack that will help you make an impression on the recipients. But remember not to overdo it. The excess of animation, the excess of dynamics in the presentation distracts the audience's attention from the key content. After all, what do we want them to remember? The key points of our presentation, or the fact that everything was in motion. One final note, in online presentations, shown for example, via Zoom or Microsoft Teams, it is better to make presentations without such dynamic animations. Why? Mainly due to connectivity issues, are Internet is still not fast enough to display such dynamic presentations correctly. They look rather jagged. To conclude, my recommendation would be as follows. The more feature will only work for stage presentations that take place face-to-face. 23. Zoom and links: Zoom and links. And interesting animation option is the zoom option. What is it about? Opened a new slide in your presentation. Then go to the Insert tab, expand the zoom option, and then select the slide zoom option. In the window that appears. Select multiple slides and click Insert. Several titles will appear on your new slide with a preview of the slide selected. Select all of them, and then go to the Zoom tab and put the checkmarks sign next to the return to zoom option. If you don't see the Zoom tab in your PowerPoint, then go to the Format tab. The return to zoom option may be hidden there. Now let's enter this slide-show mode. Move your cursor onto one of these tiles and click on it. What's happening? We land on the slide chosen, click anywhere, and we go back to the navigation slide. And so we can move from one slide to another. This is a very useful function because it makes it easy to navigate a presentation when we want to move back or jump forward without the need to move linearly slide by slide. It is also useful when we have to create the so-called one-pager. That is one slide with a lot of content. We can do it by presenting several graphs, each on a separate slide, and then drag them into one summary slide with this Zoom option. Thanks to this, when we discuss the presentation, we can talk about the interdependencies between these charts, but we can also click on any of them and discuss a given chart in more detail. Another interesting feature is inserting links to a presentation. Select any element on the slide. For example, a shape, a photo, or an icon. And then go to the Insert tab, expand the link option and select Insert Link in the address bar at the bottom, you can insert a link to any website. Then if we click on a given element in the slideshow mode, it will immediately take us to this site. We can also select the shape and link it to any slide of our presentation. For example, we can link it to the title slide of our presentation. When in slide-show mode, we click on a given arrow, we will be immediately taken to this slide we want. Is this option frequently used? I must admit that it isn't. You may find it useful now and again, but it will not have a major influence on whether your presentation will be good or great. This is determined by other things which I will be talking about in the coming lessons. 24. Pictures: Visualizations in presentations, pictures. Surely you've heard the opinion that presentations should not only reach the mind, but also touched the hearts of the audience. They should deploy arguments that are not only rational, but also emotional. With rational arguments, it's a simple case. Rational arguments are calculations, numbers, charts, tables, research findings, et cetera. But to bring emotions into a presentation. Oh, that's a completely different story. This can be done with the help of photos, stories, all kinds of extraordinary things done or shown by the presenter, or sharing various bold and surprising statements, quotes, etc. All these tricks will bring up emotions. But the easiest way to do it is by sticking in a photo. Yeah. Photos will give your presentations, are more emotional feel, especially if they are photos of people. They're positive attitudes and smiles immediately translate into a positive attitude of the recipients of your presentation. Unusual, unique pictures work even better. However, steer away from photos that are outdated, poor quality, or watermarked. Where can you look for photos? I would recommend to you a few free photo libraries. Pexels.com, for example, is it free stock library with lots of good quality photos? Pixabay.com is another free and highly popular stock library. And it's legal. Unsplash.com and other free stock library with lots of fantastic pictures, especially in the lifestyle category. Importantly, none of these three stock libraries requires providing the source from which the photos were downloaded. However, if we do not find a suitable photo in any of these free stock libraries, we can resort to a paid stock. I recommend Shutterstock.com and iStockPhoto.com. The cost of one photo ranges from a few Euros to around €10. When a photo is downloaded, it can be put into the presentation either by dragging it directly from the downloads folder onto the slide, or by copying a given file and pasting it on the slide. Preferably with the use of the keyboard shortcut Control C, control V. Or by going to the Insert tab, selecting images, this device, and then selecting the photo from the Open Folder. We can also download photos directly from inside PowerPoint itself. If we have the latest subscription to The Office Suite, then in the Insert tab in the pictures option, we have the option of downloading a picture from the image bank. Remember that when you want to make a photo larger or smaller on the slide, do not grab a given photo by the side or bottom, but by a corner. Grabbing the side, you change the aspect ratio of the picture. Only by grabbing a photo by the corner, do we retain its original aspect ratio when reducing or increasing the size of the photo. Sometimes you may have troubles with too big a file of your presentation due to a large amount of pictures in it or their weight. What you can do then is to reduce their weight by going through this sequence. Select a picture, go to the picture format, then click compressed pictures. Then you can select one of the appropriate options. For example, a 150 PPI. It should be okay to display the presentation on a projector, although it may cause some blurbs on pictures. If you decide to print your slides. Anyway, you have to be cautious. But what I do in such situations is the following. I enlarge the picture, making sure it is big enough to cover the whole slide. Then I save it on the desktop as a JPEG file. And then I replace it by clicking with the right button and selecting Change Picture option. Just like that. And this way, I am sure that this picture will be high-quality enough to be sharp, and at the same time, it will not be that heavy. Does it make sense to place pictures on each and every slide? Not necessarily. Photos should be put on the title slide. And on those slides where we want to emphasize or illustrates something more expressively with a given photo. Stage presentations definitely need a greater number of photos than the other types of presentations. In these presentations, photos can even serve as the background of each slide. How to make a nice background from a photo that's coming right up in the next lesson. 25. Transparency and photos: Transparency and photos. Suppose we want to create a slide with a photo as the background. We take the photo and extend it over the entire slide. We will then trim it to fit the size of the slide. And now it's time for some text. Let's say that it is the following phrase. However, there's a problem with its visibility. We can try changing the color or add a shadow, but we will achieve a much better and visually more interesting effect like this. Create a large rectangle that will take up the whole space of the slide. We've covered the text and the photo. But now we right-click the rectangle and select Format Shape. Then in the formatting panel on the right, we will look for an option called transparency. It is to be found in the field section. Now it is enough to move the slider to the right and set this value to several or several dozen percent. Let's move the text box to the front. We can do it by clicking on individual layers with the right mouse button, Send to Back. And here the same right-click send to back. And here is the final effect. A pretty slide with a photo and a text. Thanks to the transparency effect, you can also add transparent fill to any text box or any shape you have on your slide. Just like this. You should remember that this type of slide works best only when there is very little text on the slide. Just one sentence or one phrase. In the case of longer texts and many elements on the slide, it makes no sense to use photos as a background because the texts on such a multi-colored background will simply be difficult to read and it will make it difficult for the recipients to focus on the content. Before you move on to the next lesson, do the following exercise. Download any picture from Pexels.com or unsplash.com and insert it on a slide. Then put a colored rectangle on it, make it transparent and write some text on top. You should get something like this. 26. Icons: Icons. Icons are one of the most effective ways to make our presentations look professional. Icons, the flat single color pictograms work very well in presentations, especially now with the increasingly popular trend for infographics. An infographic is nothing more than a way of presenting content with a small amount of text, icons and graphic diagrams. Where to get the icons. If you have the latest Office Suite, just go to the Insert tab and click icons. Icon library with his search bar will be displayed. After entering the desired keyword, various icons will appear. Click Insert, and we have a nice icon on the slide. Best of all, we can change its color to any color from our color palette. Thanks to this, we can adjust the colors of the icons to the colors of our presentation. I usually give the icons the main color of my presentation, or make the following maneuver. I insert a circle in the primary color of my presentation. And then I put my icon on the circle. What if you don't have the latest PowerPoint and you don't know where it get icons from. The flat icon.com website is here to help. It works in the freemium system, which means that some of the sites resources are free and some are reserved for subscription holders only. However, even in the free version, you will find a lot of diverse and interesting proposals. So we enter any word and select an icon. We can now download it into formats PNG or SVG. The PNG format, short for Portable Network Graphics, is a commonly used image file format. It's advantage is that it allows you to use photos and graphics with a transparent background, making them easy to insert over other colored slide elements such as the background. However, the PNG format also has one annoying drawback. Once inserted on the slide, the color of the graphic cannot be changed. The situation is different with the SVG format, short for Scalable Vector Graphics. It allows you not only to use graphics with transparent backgrounds and enlarge them without compromising on quality, but also to change their color. All you need to do is insert a given icon on the slide, selected, and then select a different fill color in the palette. This way, in a few clicks, we can adjust the icon to the color of our presentation. The use of icons in SVG format makes work so much easier. Unfortunately, older versions of presentation programs cannot use this format. If you don't have the latest version of PowerPoint, you can't do much but rely on the less effective PNG format when using icons. Now, the SVG format is available only to flat icon users who have a premium account. If we want to use these icons for free, we have to download them in PNG format. But it's not a problem. In that case, download the icons in black and then you can put them on some light background. For example, on a light gray. And it already looks quite interesting. Would you prefer it on a dark background? So let's make the icon white. Select the icon, right-click, and then select Format Picture. And the panel on the right. Go to the image formatting section and then image correction. Find the slider labeled brightness, and then move it all the way to the right to level 100%. The icon turns white. The copyrights remain an important issue. By downloading an icon from flat icon.com for free. We agreed to provide the source of the icon and the name of its author. How can we do it in the easiest way? It will be enough if we put the information about the source in relatively small print somewhere at the bottom of the slide. Now, we are using these icons in total compliance with the law. However, this obligation does not apply when you use icons from another icon base, UX wing.com. It has a much poorer collection of icons, but you can download each of them in PNG or SVG format without having to specify the source. One more issue, you may be tempted to download a color icon. Don't do it. Color icons come in various colors and there's no way you can create a consistent color scheme with them. It is better to download black icons instead and then change their color in PowerPoint if required. Here's what icon slides may look like. 27. Advanced ways to format icons: Advanced ways to format icons. You already know where to get icons from. So I'll now show you an interesting way to use them. Suppose our task is to visualize the following content. 40% of managers love to create presentations. I will find a human figure icon in PowerPoint, put it on the slide, and duplicate it until I have ten of such figures. One figure represents 10% a line. Then I select four figures and change their color to the main color of my presentation. This, of course, is only possible when we use an icon in the SVG format. If we have an icon in PNG format, we can leave it black. Then create a white rectangle and put it on the six figures on the right. Now we set the transparency to a level of several to several dozen present. And we end up with such an interesting effect. If we have a different number to visualize, for example, forty-seven percent, then we move our rectangle to the right so that this value is adequately visualized. What does it look like in slide-show mode? Certainly much more interesting than a regular chart. Knowing how to apply the different icon formatting options, you are able to create really professional slides like this one, for example. How to do it step-by-step. You will find a video that illustrates it on our YouTube channel. And under this video, slide formation Channel, video name, global warnings, world population PowerPoint slide, slow tutorial video. Before you continue, do the following exercise. Recreate this slide yourself. You can use the same or other similar themes as in the example shown. Remember to perfectly align the elements using guides and the aligned option. If you don't know how to do something, check out the video on our YouTube channel where we show step-by-step how this slide was made. 28. Improving a slide – exercise: Improving a slide and exercise. Here's an exercise for you. Download a slide from the resources section under this video. Improve it to make it as nice and neat as possible. I will show you how I would do it in the next lesson. 29. Improving a slide – solution to the exercise: Improving the slide, the solution to the exercise. How can you improve this slide? There are many ways to do it. You can use icons, you can use pictures. You can use a few shapes from the Insert tab. Or you can format this text in many different ways. Here's what I'll do. I put an editable version of the improved slide in the resources below the lesson. Download this file and take a close look at the improvements. There are a few different versions of this slide with different fonts. 30. Tables: Presenting numerical data tables. We can put a table into a presentation in two ways. Either copy it from a spreadsheet, for example, excel, or inserted directly from inside PowerPoint using the Insert tab. In this lesson, we will look at the second way. I will tell you how to insert tables and charts from excel in one of the following lessons. When you insert a table, this is what it usually looks like. We enter some content and it looks like this. Is this a good table? Well, not really. It helps a lot if we do some proper formatting as well. Note that the color of the table is not accidental. The top bar of the table inserted in the PowerPoint has a color named as accent one in the color palette. This is the main color of our presentation, and the top bar can remain in this color. However, I am not sure about the alternate row coloring, often called color banding, which is automatically generated in this table. This makes sense in larger tables of ten rows or more. This ensures our eyes can follow individual values from left to right easily instead of jumping up or down. But with a small table like this, it's not really necessary. So in the Table Design tab, I uncheck the banded rows option. Then I use this option to align all texts in the table in vertical position. I choose middle. This is important because with texts taken up or down, There's two big an asymmetrical space. That doesn't look good. Now, I change the color of the parameter column. Why? Because logically, this is a different type of information from what is in the area of data. So if this is the case, we should format it differently. So I changed the color of the column fill from the left to light gray, bold the texts and leave them aligned to the left. I select the area of data in the Shape Fill menu. I select no fill and align these texts with the right margin. Why the right? If there are figures in the table and we want to compare them with each other within a given column. It will be much easier for us to do so if they are aligned right or left and not centered. Take a look please. We immediately see that we are dealing with small values here and here with large ones. In this table. However, small and big numbers can easily get confused because the numbers are centered. So wireline right then and not left. Because this is a standard of mathematical notation. When we do long addition, for example, we align the numbers to the right. And this is also what we do when formatting a table. What else can we do to make a table clear and aesthetic? We can format the borders of the table properly. Select the whole table. Go to the Table Design tab. Here we can change the color of the pen to a subtle gray. Reduce the width of the border here from 1 to a 0.5, and then expand the borders option and select all borders. Naturally, we can select only horizontal borders or any other for that matter. But in the simplest version, I choose the option called all borders. This makes each cell of the table clearly visible. We can also make the table visually lighter when we add only horizontal lines within the table. How to do it? Just like this. Select the whole table and let's remove the borders for now. And then in the Table Design tab, click inside horizontal border and bottom border. And that's the effect. Which option of these two tables do you prefer? It's all up to you, but I prefer the one with only horizontal lines inside. It's just visually lighter. Additionally, we can change the size of the table itself or its individual cells in the Layout tab. Of course, this tab is visible when the table on the slide is selected. We can also make some more maneuvers like changing the margin size, etc. What can well-formatted tables look like? Here are a few examples. 31. Charts: Charts. How do we format charts properly? First of all, we must aim to make them as easy to read as possible. So don't put legends next two charts if you can integrate them directly into the charts. Like in this example, the recipients will read the information on this chart much faster than on this one. A column chart. In many cases, legends are simply unnecessary. It will also be easier to read a chart like this one, then this one, a pie chart. With these charts, the data labels are placed as part of the chart itself. I just right-click the chart and selected add data labels. And I added the descriptions of these labels as plain text boxes in order to make the formatting of the whole chart easier. So it is pleasing to the eye. You can insert labeled descriptions using the chart editing options. But unfortunately, it doesn't look good really. With more complex charts, the legends must appear on the slide. But where do you place the legend on this slide is important. See, I click the plus sign next to the chart selected. Expand the legend options. Here I can choose where the legend will be located. If at the bottom, it will not be compatible with the chart. If on the side, it will be much easier to read the entire chart because the titles will be placed on the same levels as the corresponding colors in the bars. Can we improve a chart like this? Let's see. Let's take this unformatted bar chart. First of all, I remove unnecessary elements. I add data labels. I remove the vertical axis and grid lines with the delete key on the keyboard. Why? Because these elements do not contribute anything to the chart. There only information noise, precise data are shown by data labels which are already in the chart. Then I positioned the chart between the left and the right guide. I change the sequence of the bars to give some logic to it. I highlight the hero of the chart and format the label and description under the column accordingly. And now I have a well-formatted chart. Okay? Now, take a look at this pie chart. What do you think? Which category is bigger? The one that represents product B or C? It's hard to say, isn't it? For many data visualization experts, this proves that pie charts are no longer valid and we should give up on them. Look at this chart, exactly the same data, but presented in a bar chart, it becomes immediately clear which value is the greatest. Pie charts, one form or another, are therefore imprecise. They're great advantage is that they show components that add up to 100%. But unfortunately, they do not give clear information about how the individual components differ from each other. However, I do use pie charts in my presentations, but only when the individual components are few and do not have similar values. For example, in such a case. Having said that, I much prefer doughnut charts, pie charts, because visually they are much lighter. It's better not to use charts with three-dimensional effects at all. Just replace them with ordinary flat bars. As an alternative to column charts, we can use line charts. How do I format them? This formula works best. 32. Chart – exercise: Chart exercise. Here is a short exercise in front of you. Go to the resources for this lesson, download the chart file, and correct it following the rules discussed in the previous lesson. 33. Chart – solution to the exercise: Chart solution to the exercise. Were you able to correct the chart from the previous lesson? Here's my proposal of a solution. That is, how I would improve such a chart. Let's start by adding data labels. Then delete the vertical axis, the grid lines, which are no longer necessary, and other useless elements. I said it neatly. Guide to guide. I match the colors of the chart to my presentation. Next, I fix the formatting of the texts inside the chart. I enlarge the numbers and make them in the same color as the columns. I can slightly change the spacing between the bars, formatting of the texts. And voila, the chart is correct and ready. 34. Inserting tables and charts from Excel: Inserting tables and charts from Excel to PowerPoint. There are several ways to insert a table or a chart from Excel into your presentation. Here's method number one. I copy a table or chart, Control C. I go on the slide and press control V. I copy and paste. That is, the table is fully editable, but unfortunately, all the formatting we had an Excel is now gone. Method number two, I copy the table from Excel Control C and paste it onto the slide by right-clicking and selecting the icon labeled paste as picture. The table looks the same as in Excel, but unfortunately, I cannot edit it. Method number three. Much better. I copy a table or chart from Excel. So Control C. I right-click on the slide and choose the paste option. Keep source formatting. Here we go. Now my table is fully editable and looks like it did in Excel at the same time. Method number four. It's good though not without a few downsides. It's about linking the two documents, the PowerPoint and Excel files. Like this. I copy the table or chart, go to PowerPoint. And in the Home tab, I opened the paste option. I choose paste special. Then in the opened window, click Paste link, and then, okay, the table looks the same as in Excel. If I want to edit something in it, I just click on it and it immediately takes me to Excel. If I change any data here, this data will be automatically updated in the PowerPoint document. Therefore, this method is useful for people who update data a lot in Excel and do not want to download every new version of a table or chart. This greatly speeds up their work. However, there are a few catches. Catch one. The weight of your presentation can go up significantly. If it was one megabyte, it can now weigh as much as 15 megabytes, making it impossible to send via e-mail. Catch to. It is easy to unlink such documents. For example, by sending someone just the PowerPoint presentation without the Excel file, then the recipient of such a presentation will see the table correctly, but will not be able to edit it. And this can complicate the entire process of creating a presentation. Which of these methods suits you best? I most often use the third method. That is inserting tables or charts by pasting, keeping the source formatting. However, everyone must develop their own model of working with tables and charts to suit their individual needs. Remember that the rules for pasting tables are the same as for pasting charts. 35. Alternative ways of presenting data: Alternative ways of presenting data. Figures do not necessarily have to be presented in the form of charts and tables. I showed you one of the more interesting ways to do it in the lesson where I discussed advanced icon formatting possibilities. Now let me share with you some other inspirations. Please look at this slide. A slide with a table. There is so much data in it that you don't even know where to look. It would be useful to find a way to bring the important parts of the slide to the fore. For example, a circle like this. However, instead of a symmetrical circle made with the use of the Shift key, I often see ovoid shapes. It doesn't look very good, does it? It is much better to do such highlighting by changing the fill color of a given cell or by inserting a more symmetrical shape like this one, for example. The problem with asymmetrical shapes is that they bring too much disorder and the feeling of untidy *****, it is much better to use symmetrical shapes. You remember how to paste a symmetrical circle into the slide? Yes. With the Shift button pressed. Okay, Let's go back to our slide. The entire slide, we'll look even better if we extract the key data from the table and turn them into the heroes of the slide. It is enough to put the appropriate numbers in regular circles and label them. Another example, a slide full of data. Turn it into pie charts. However, we change these charts, donut charts, add icons, and we have a pretty cool slide. There you go. Another example, a slide with three charts. We add information about how much the relevant indicators have increased or decreased. We can give up charts and focus the audience's attention only on rises and falls, just U-shapes. And that will do, we can change their color as well as reduce or enlarge the appropriate shapes depending on how big the rises or falls are. One more example, a slide with text-only. I change its structure so that the information runs not in the usual top to bottom manner, but from left to right. Thanks to this, the impression of a running timeline is better conveyed. To emphasize the passage of time, I add two triangles like this. I might as well use a regular arrow here, but it would be too cliche. What else do I do? I format the text, have a look. This is a slide without any visualization, without any picture or icon. But thanks to the formatting of the text, I mean, larger font size, bolding, change of color. The whole thing has acquired a much more interesting look. Please also note that the numbers in the previous slide seem, well. Pretty humble. This is just $4 million. While here we are talking about $4 million. Here. This is a really big number. The formatting makes all the difference. This is of great importance for the general perception of messages. 36. Storytelling: Content, storytelling. You've probably heard about storytelling. Storytelling is the art of writing stories, anecdotes, or case studies in a captivating way to engage the readers. What's more? Storytelling is one of the most effective persuasion tools. Stories motivate, inspire, persuade, and therefore cell. Let's imagine that the CEO of a company is speaking to the employees. Here are two different speeches. Speech one, I think that we can confidently say that we're envisioning a great future. We've had some significant successes and we can be proud of who we are and our achievements. I hope that you're as proud as I am. Speech to. A couple of weeks ago, I met an older man in the elevator who said to me, Oh, I know you, I didn't know this guy. I thought he must have mistaken me for someone else. He was very old and look sick, but he knew who I was and what I did. So I asked him how he knew all that. And he said to me, You know, my son is told me a lot about you. He said he has never enjoyed working for a company as much as he enjoys working for you. The first speech doesn't tell a story. There's no story, no anecdote, no hero. It's a general, uninteresting speech that no one will remember. It's full of big words like pride, success, future. But they feel empty and abstract. They don't inspire authentic emotions. However, the second speech is an example of good storytelling. You were told about a real conversation between two people. You could even picture it in your head. Even though there was no mention of pride in the second speech, you could feel it more intensely than in the first example. This is the magic of storytelling. It evokes emotions through stories that feature real events and people. Emotions make our stories memorable. And there's a big chance that if our recipients field specific emotions thanks to our stories, they will also be more likely to accept our point of view, agreed to our offer or by whatever we sell. This is the power of storytelling. Let me say it one more time. Storytelling is the art of telling authentic stories. Keyword real, such as anecdotes, personal experiences, or case studies. So how can you use storytelling in your presentations? There are two simple ways to do it. Method. One, telling a few stories or anecdotes in your presentation, mixed with concrete business messages. In this method, stories are separate threads woven into the presentation. There shouldn't be too long, so the main message doesn't get lost entirely. The stories also shouldn't be too unrelated to the topic of the presentation. Instead, they should act as examples and emotional arguments that support our message. And believe me, emotional arguments are the most persuasive method to using storytelling as the foundation of the entire presentation. In other words, using storytelling to create the whole structure of the presentation. Here, things get more complex. And if you decide to dive deeper into the theory of storytelling, it can seem quite overwhelming. To get a better idea of storytelling, let us take a look at the so-called hero journey. That's one of many narrative archetypes or story templates in storytelling. It's useful when creating movies, scenarios, or writing novels. But how can you use the hero's journey template in a presentation? To be honest, I have no idea. This is why I came up with a simplified storytelling template ideal for business presentations. Let's answer the question. What are the elements of a good story? And thus a presentation? First of all, it's the hero. In your presentation, the hero can be your company, department. Were you? The second element of every good story is the enemy. In other words, a problem, challenge, or some sort of evil the hero must face. The third element is the goal the hero wants to achieve. The fourth element is some sort of external help that enables the hero to defeat the enemy and achieve their goal. These four elements are necessary to create an engaging story and they are used in almost any story. For example, Cinderella. In this story, Cinderella is the hero, of course. Her stepmom is the enemy. And her goal is to get away from her step mom's house. The fairy godmother offers external help by enabling Cinderella to shine at prince charming ball. This is why the story can end with a happy ending where Cinderella and the prints fall in love. This narrative archetype can also be used in business presentations. For example, let's imagine that the topic of the presentation is the new safety and security protocol that requires a two-step authentication process in the client system. The client is the hero in this story. While cyber criminals. Who may hack the client's accounts are the enemy. After introducing the enemy, you can present specific data that show how big of a danger the client is dealing with. Remember that the more dangerous the enemy, the more dramatic, interesting and engaging the story. And as a result, the recipients of the presentation will feel much more motivated to seek the solution that can help them fight the enemy. This solution or external help in this story is that very topic of the presentation. The two-step authentication process. Armed with this weapon, the client will be able to defeat the enemy. Cyber criminals are powerless in the face of this security measure. The goal, the client satisfaction and feeling of safety leading to even more clients is achieved. In the presentation, you can even present some relevant data, such as survey results that show that clients would be willing to pay more for this solution, or that the number of clients would increase significantly. At the end of the presentation, you should give your recipients hope. You need to make them feel that if you go through this long and difficult path together, you will eventually defeat the enemy with the help of the presented solution and therefore achieve the established goal. This is a really simple way of creating a presentation using the principles of storytelling. Can you guess which storytelling element is usually missing in most business presentations? The enemy? Most presentations I see, especially startup presentations, lack this key element. The presentation usually starts by introducing a new product or service and then mentions a long list of benefits. That's not enough. The recipients will start asking, why do I even need this? I've lived without it until now and I've been doing quite well. What's in it for me? This is why, before you even start talking about the product or service you want to present, you need to talk about the problem that the recipients are likely facing without this product or service. We need to point out the enemy What's wrong with the current situation you want to improve with your product or service. Look at how Steve Jobs used this story template in his famous presentation introducing the iPhone concept. What's wrong with their user interface as well? The problem with them is really sort of in the bottom 40 there. It's, it's this stuff right here. They all have these keyboards that are there, whether you need them or not to be there. And they all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic and are the same for every application. Well, every application wants a slightly different user interface, a slightly optimized set of buttons just for it. And what happens if you think of a great idea six months from now, you can't run around and add a button to these things. They're already shipped. So what do you do? It doesn't work because the buttons and controls can't change. They can't change for each application, and they can't change down the road. If you think of another great idea you want to add to this product. Well, this is a classic. Notice how Steve Jobs didn't start his presentation by talking about his product 20 years. Instead, he began by pointing out the problems we were all facing while using smartphones. And only then after the audience had agreed with him and they were ready to hear about the solution to those problems, aka the iPhone. How are we going to take this to a mobile device? But what we're gonna do is get rid of all these buttons and just make a giant screen. A giant screen. Now, remember to show the enemy, that is the problem first and then present the hero or solution. It's a simple story template that will make it easy to introduce storytelling elements into your presentation. 37. Structure of the presentation: The structure of the presentation. A good presentation should have an introduction, body and conclusion. And it's best if the conclusion is closely related to the introduction. Okay, But seriously, what's the structure of a good presentation? You can structure it in a couple of ways. Here are my best tips. Structure one, problem solution. This structure is based on the classic storytelling template featuring the hero and the enemy. So in this structure, you first introduce the problem and the challenge your company or client is facing. Next, you present the solution and then you explain the benefits of that solution. Structure to chronological structure. This structure consists of presenting the presentation threads in chronological order, from the oldest to the newest. It's ideal for presentations that talk about the company's history or the phases of a specific project. Structure. Three suggested solution. In this structure, you first introduce the problem that needs solving. Then you show your recipient's a couple of possible solutions while commenting on each one and providing pros and cons. The final solution that we present should be the recommended option. This means that this solution should have more pros than cons or have no cons whatsoever. You can end this presentation with a short conclusion structure. For a top-down approach. This structure is way more effective than its opposite. So starting with the details and then moving on to the big picture. The top-down approach first describes the general situation. For example, the existing market situation. This includes showing lots of statistics which will later allow you to draw a specific conclusions. You can choose specific data to be the hook of the presentation and then continue your presentation by following the problem solution structure. Introduced the problem, propose a solution while backing it up with arguments and talk about its benefits. Structure five, frame story. The frame story structure is a great way to create an engaging presentation. It consists of telling a story within a story. To come up with a frame story. First, find a metaphor related to the presentation topic. Then use this metaphor as a thread woven between the slides or placed directly on each slide. For example, let's say that you are supposed to create a presentation to discuss searching for savings in the company. The blood from the, where's Wally or Where's Waldo books series is the metaphor you could use. In this case, you can use images from the book On slide separators within the presentation and therefore slowly introduce your recipients to the main topic. Structure six, business presentation. This is simply a presentation that tells your company's story. Here's the structure I recommend you use. First, start with the title slide. Then create a general slide introducing the company and what it does. Next include a slide that talks about the company's products or services. The following slides should explain the company's products or services in detail. The next slide should introduce the technology that the company uses, followed by a slide with a list of achievements and certificates, a slide with testimonials, and a list of key clients, and finally, a slide with the contact data. These are just a couple of suggestions amongst an entire array of possibilities. Whatever structure you choose to follow for your presentation. Give yourself time. Think about it ideally while being far away from PowerPoint. The more important the presentation, the more time you should give yourself to think about the structure, thread order, and content you want to include. Abraham Lincoln said once, Give me six hours to jump down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax. This is also true for presentations. At first, a sheet of paper and a pencil will be a better tool than a computer. If you start creating content for the slides too quickly without deeper analysis, you may end up creating a chaotic presentation that lacks thought. Then you will feel bad because of how much time you wasted on making it. And you won't feel motivated to change it or start again from scratch. So before you start working on your presentation in PowerPoint, give yourself some time to think about the structure and the content. If any content piece or information makes you feel downfall of whether to include it or not. Have no mercy and get rid of it. The shorter the presentation, the better the simpler it is, the better. 38. Slide content structure: The slide text structure. Do you remember this slide from one of our first lessons? I'd like to show it to you again and use it to show you how to structure the text on the slides. In this example, the content on the slide is very well-written. However, if the keywords were placed in the middle or at the end of the sentences and not at the beginning, like they are placed here, then it would be much more difficult to read the information. So here's a very important thing. When you write the text for the slides. Try to write them so that the keywords are placed at the beginning of each text set. Doing it this way, we'll give each set a title. This is the title of this specific set, and this is the body. This is the best structure to follow to create clean, easy to read slides. So to write the text on the slides well, follow this sequence. Step one, calculate how many sets your slide will contain. For to divide this slide into two parts, left and right. For three, create three columns. For follow the quad set framework. For five, create five columns or two rows with 23 sets each. Ideally, each set should have more or less the same size. However, if one of the sets has more texts than the others, try to move the sets around and distribute them more or less evenly. Step two, write each set. So it's beginning is also its title. The title should have a few words maximum and be the most important information in the set. Avoid long sentences. Use short phrases and bullet points instead. Make sure that the text is as simple as possible without unnecessary words. Remember that a lot of information can be included in your speech rather than on the slide. Step three, format the titles of each set. The easiest way to do this is to build them out, change the color, or make them bigger. Alternatively, you can put them inside different shapes. Step for edit the text. Get rid of all unnecessary words and expressions and rewrite the text in the most structured way. Take a look at this example. Here we have a slide with texts that includes some numerical data. It looks okay. However, it can still be made simpler. Let's structure it in the following way. Let's move the numbers to the beginning of each phrase. Or we could also add category names to create titles for each set. Whichever structure you choose. These slides are much easier to read for the recipient than the initial version. This way, they will be able to identify the most important information on the slide right away. Remember, the texts in the presentation shouldn't be complicated at all. It shouldn't remind the recipients of a text from a novel or even an e-mail. Instead, the presentation language should be simple, concise, and full of well-structured information pieces. The more organized the presentation, the easier it is to read. Of course, remember that the amount of content on the slides depends heavily on the type of presentation. For example, a stage presentation should have very little text. On the other hand, a business presentation or a slide deck presentation can have more text. However, no matter the type of presentation you're creating, you need to evaluate every time whether the specific content portion should rather be included on one slide or separated into a couple of slides. Personally, if the content is long, I prefer to divide it into a couple of slides. Because of that, my presentations usually contain a large number of slides. But I also know that some people prefer fewer slides in their presentations. As a result, their slides have more texts. Which way is better? It depends on your individual preferences and the preferences of our recipients. The more familiar you are with their preferences, the better you can adjust your presentation to match them. Here's an example of a presentation by Microsoft. Look at how simple the slide is. No unnecessary elements. And take a look at how well-written the text is. Each of the three sets has its corresponding title colored, bolded or bigger than the rest. But that's not all. Each text set is structured in the most organized way. Each line starts with a number. Same here. However, in the third set, each phrase begins with the name of the sector where the company operates. There are no complex sentences. Instead, the sentence structure is simple and as schematic as possible. And that's exactly what we're talking about. Other renowned companies presentations also confirm this rule. The more schematic the text, the more easily and willingly the recipients will read it. 39. Sources from which to draw inspiration: Inspirations, sources from which to draw inspiration. Where can we find inspiration for creating presentations? I have already mentioned several sources. I recommend slideshare.net in the first place. It's a collection of presentations from around the world. We can be inspired by their graphic design and the ways of arranging content. Youtube isn't another great source of inspiration. I would recommend our proprietary slide formation channel or any other channel from the following one skill PowerPoint tutorials, channel, level up, PowerPoint, PowerPoint spice, and presentation process. I also recommend looking for inspiration on Pinterest. Just enter presentation design in the search bar. And a lot of interesting stuff will pop up. Another great source is Graphic River dotnet, repository of many professional design materials with presentation templates. You don't have to buy. You can just scroll through it and draw inspiration from it. I also encourage you to follow my profiles on social media, on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. 40. Modifying slides step by step: Modifying slides step-by-step. Finally, I'd like to invite you to join in the fun of modifying slides step-by-step. Look at this slide. What would you change in? Certainly the readability of the texts could be better. Replacing it with white makes it even harder to read. I add a shadow. Now it's better. But you can also do it differently. I create a slightly transparent rectangle, break the text into two portions, and then separate them with a small vertical separator. It's a simple straight line inserted with the Shift key. And now we have quite a pretty slide. Another example, text slide. A bit boring, isn't it? I changed the font to a more interesting one. I insert three circles because I make these circles transparent. They give an interesting effect of intersections. I add two lines to the sides of the label and then add icons. It looks pretty good already. I change the color scheme to a brighter one. And it's great. A smart art slide. It looks very cliche. You have surely seen such themes in many presentations. You can be creative with it and try to improve it by changing some elements or adding icons. But in my opinion, it's best to just start from scratch. And I will use the simplest themes for this shapes from the Insert tab. So I put textboxes in such block arrows next to them. If I do not have enough time to look for icons, I put this numbering I correct and enlarge. And it looks good at least. However, the important thing which often escapes the eye at first sight is the perfect order on the slide. Note that these shapes are on one axis. The distances between them are the same. There is alignment and symmetry, and that's what it's all about. There you go. Now we have a slide with a photo. Does not look good because it is surrounded by a vast white and empty space. Photos rarely look good if we put them on an almost empty slide, it will look much better if we zoom in on this photo so that it fills the entire space of the slide. This is when a problem with the legibility of the texts usually arises. But there is a way out. We insert a shape and make it transparent. It does not have to be a rectangle. It can be a nice regular circle. We can change the formatting, enlarge the shape and move it. It looks really good now, another example, a slide with text. We're talking about subsequent stages of work here. So let's enlarge the texts a bit and then arrange them from left to right to better reflect the idea of a timeline. To emphasize this, we can add this kind of an arrow, but it will work better if we insert the texts into such black arrows. We add these three lines to form a loop and then change the color of the block arrows. Why? Because they attracted too much attention and that was unnecessary because there was no essential information in them. It will be much better if we add icons and if they have a navy blue color. In this way, the recipient will be able to quickly see what is going on at a given stage thanks to the icons. One more example, Long Text slide. What needs to be improved first? Well, first the bullets to be sure they shouldn't be so heavy and clunky. Simple dots will work much better. Then I align the text to the left margin guide and bring the key information to the foreground. I changed the font to a more interesting one. And then instead of the commonplace bullets, I insert ordinary rectangles. The content visualized in this way it looks much better. What else can I do? I can add this kind of a belt or even a few of them. Thus, I marked out three sections on my slide. This is a good way to structure the content of your slides. Let's break them down into smaller chunks and let each of them have its own section heading, introducing the recipient to more detailed information. Is that all? Well, not really. It is always worth breaking down such long paragraphs into bits that are more user-friendly. For example, with bullets. Now this looks to me like a pretty good slide. 41. Inspiration 1: Inspiration for a professional slide, circular visual. Now I will show you how you can easily create such a visual in PowerPoint. Believing it's easier than you think. First, you have to go to the Insert tab, click Shape and insert a hollow circle. That's it. Well pasting, click the Shift button to make your shape symmetrical. You can change the whole just by grabbing this yellow point. But you don't have to change it if you don't want to. So let's just leave the default shape. Now, insert a rectangle and place it exactly in the middle of this circle. The next step is very important. So pay attention. First select the circle and then select the rectangle. Next, go to the Format tab, expand the Merge Shapes option and choose, subtract. This way. You'll have an arch just like this. Now, duplicate it, rotate it, and place it right here. Continue this process a couple of times. Now let's group all of these items and duplicate the group. Now let's change the position of this arch. We can change the colors and paste the text. Now, let's add some icons. And there we have it. 42. Inspiration 2: Inspiration for our professional slide, navigation slides. Now I will show you how you can easily create such a series of slides. I found a picture like this that I will use in my slides. Make sure your picture is of good quality and there are no blurs when you increase its size to fit the entire slide. Now we need to paste a rectangle. Then we need to add another shape. Just like this one. You'll find it in the shapes option in the Insert tab. If we grab this little yellow circle, we can rearrange this shape to make it look just like we want. Let's duplicate this shape and then resize all of them to make them fit into the slide. Finally, let's align them some more. And there it is. Very nice. Now the text, we could type the text into these shapes. But if we want the animations and transitions to work correctly, we must paste the text into separate boxes. Next, we have to align them properly. Now let's duplicate one of the shapes and change the color of all the other shapes too gray. Next, let's bring the texts to the front and place this new shape here. We can use the align options. Now let's duplicate this slide and change the position of this green shape. I'll just place it under step two. And I'll do the same thing with step three and step four. Now we need to insert some text. To find the text, I'll just go to my blog at pure target array.com. And I'll use a text fragment from one of my blog articles. It's very important to format the text properly so that it's easy to read. But that's not rocket science. Doing this is quite easy for everyone. Now let's make the magic happen. I'll make a cool animation with the Morph transition. Have a look. To do this. I select all these slides. Then I go to the Transitions tab and choose the morph option. This way, I created this kind of animation. Looks great right? Now. I'll make an additional slide. This will be the intro slide. It'll be very simple. No picture, just some text and two rectangles. Simplicity is the key, and it looks just perfect. 43. Inspiration 3: Inspiration for professional slide, bulleted circle. This is a smart art. It doesn't look good. There's little chance anyone will pay attention to such a visualization. So let's make it a lot more visually appealing. Gets simple. Yes, simplicity is the key. So first, let's get rid of this unnecessary arrow. What about this visual? Do you like it? I don't. So I'll convert this smart art into a simpler element. We can change it here and convert it to text or shapes. I will change it to plain text. That's it. This is a good place to start formatting this slide. Now I'll insert a big circle inside the slide. Remember to press down the Shift button so that it's fully symmetrical. Then I'll send it back and copy and paste another circle. But this time I want it to be only an outline. Just like that. I'll make it a bit bigger and place it outside the green one. And here's the magic I want to make. First, I'll insert a rectangle to hide a part of my yellow circle. It's a piece of cake. You just change its color to white and bring the green circle and the text to the front. And that's the effect. Look here. We can re-size the white rectangle to reduce or increase the size of the visible part of the yellow circle. That's the magic simple, right? We can achieve this result in a couple of different ways. For example, using an arch shape. But I think this way is the easiest one. So I'll stick to this. What's next? I'll insert a couple of small circles or dots with a thick white outline. And I'll place them on the yellow circle. One more thing, a few horizontal lines connected to these small circles. We can adjust the colors. We can use a couple of different colors on a slide. But I like to stick to a narrow color palette to have more control over what elements my audience focuses on. So this is my color choice. This is good, I like it. Now. I'll group these elements and align them so that they are evenly distributed on the yellow circle. Now, I'll shorten these lines to the guide visible in the middle of the slide. And now let's arrange the text. This is a good slide, simple, nice, and clear, but we can do something more. We add icons. Let's find them inside the PowerPoint icon library. We could place them like this, but it doesn't look great. So instead, I'll put these icons in separate circles. Yes, we've got lots of circles on the slide, but that's okay. And voila, this is my final result. Was it difficult? I hope not. I believe anyone can design a slide like this. It's pretty simple, but you have to put in some time and effort. 44. Inspiration 4: Inspiration for professional slide dashboards. Today, I'll show you how you can easily create an impressive slide with a dashboard full of data. Tables. Boring calculation shown as plain text. No, that's too boring. You won't grab anyone's attention with this. Let's try to do something much more interesting. It's still simple. So simple that anyone who deals with PowerPoint regularly will be able to do it. Simplicity. That's the key. So first, I'll put a pie chart on the slide. Not very big, not too small. Just like this. I will type in the same digit to make all the items of the same size. How many items should I have here? I'll go for six. Now, I'll rotate this chart a bit. You can find the rotation option in the Format Data Series Options. Here, you can increase the angle of the first slice to 30 degrees. This way, if we change the bottom items to white, it'll be a nice visual just like we want. But this is not the final result yet. So first, let's change the type of the chart to a doughnut chart. We can also reduce its hole size. That looks much better. It's just visually lighter. I like it this way. Next, we can change the colors to match some indicators. Read for low performance, yellow for medium, and green for high. Now, the pointers, the simplest possible pointer is a very narrow triangle. We can leave it like that. But I will add a small circle beneath it. It will look a bit nicer. Now the text, I formatted it properly and set the pointer to reflect the correct number on the scale. But I forgot to mark the scale. So let's type in the lowest and the highest possible value here. And this is the indicator for product a. I also have two other products, so I'll do the same for two other columns. Let's align the text. And now Control G to group all the selected items and duplicate the whole set. Now let's align all the elements nicely. And there we have it. The top row of our dashboard slide is ready. Now I'll insert a shape like this and change it to a capsule form by grabbing this little yellow circle inside. I'll also change its color and insert a line. This will be our risk indicator. Next, I'll insert another shape just like the previous one, except now it's vertical. This looks great. Let's duplicate this set and change the colors of the pointers. Now it's time for the third part of the slide. I don't have much space here, so I'll use the same horizontal shape. This will be the awareness indicator. I'll type in the number and search for an icon. Each icon like this will represent 10% of the population. Let's duplicate our icon using Control D. Now, I want to visualize 78%. How can I do it using these icons? It's very simple. Paste this shape, for example, a rectangle and covers some part of this group of icons with it. Then change its color to match the background color and make it a bit transparent. You can find the transparency option in the panel on the right, which will appear by right-clicking inside the shape. Very simple and quite impressive, right. 45. Inspiration 5: Inspiration for professional slide, visually appealing diagram. One of the best sources of inspiration is Graphic River dotnet. It's a huge repository of many different graphic materials and templates. However, to me, the most interesting section is the presentation section. Here we go. Here we can browse through hundreds of beautiful templates and draw inspiration from them. We can even buy one for a couple of dollars, but I won't do that. Please note that this is not a paid mentioned. I don't make any money by recommending this site. But if you'd like one of these templates and want to buy it, go ahead. But what I want to show you right now is that you can not only by the template, but also find some inspiration for your slides. So let's find a nice design that we could recreate. My goal is to prove to you that you can prepare such a nice-looking slide. It's not that difficult. So let's have a look at this one. It looks very good and seems relatively easy to recreate. You don't think so. Oh, let me prove how easy it is. Here we go. Let's take a screenshot and go to PowerPoint. Let's paste it here. This is our model, and let's recreate it on a blank slide. What do we start with? A headline, of course. And then let's paste the shape. This is a rectangle with rounded corners. It's a funny looking shape. Actually, I don't like it. But once we grab the yellow circle and pull it towards the edge, we get a much nicer shape like this. Now let's place it to the right and rotate it. Please note that you have to press the Shift button and hold it to turn the shape by 15 degrees. Doing this will help you make your visual fully symmetrical. Then let's duplicate this shape using the Control D keyboard shortcut. Now let's rotate by holding down the Shift button. And let's do the same with the two other shapes. Great. Now let's select the shape and bring it forward like this. As you can see, our visual doesn't look exactly like the one we found on graphic river. But that's not what we're aiming for. I don't want to over-complicate it. My goal is to show you how you can make a similar slide in your business presentation without spending long hours designing it. So let's keep it simple. Okay, my next step is to change the outline of our shape to white and make it thicker. Then I'll put four circles inside each corner of my shape. You can use the zooming option with the Control key press down and your mouse wheel, just like this. This way, you can put the selected shape precisely where you want it to be. We could put icons inside these circles. But since I want to make it as simple as possible, I'll just put in some numbers. This will be perfect though. Let's move the shape a bit to the left to place it in the middle of the slide. And now it's time to type in the text. And now we have it. It looks really nice. It's not exactly the same as the slide we found on graphic river, but it's good enough for your pitch sales presentation or a slide deck you'll present in front of your boss. It's a slide you can really impress your audience with. And that's the idea. 46. Homework: Homework. We are now at the finish line almost because they're very important thing remains, practice, practice, practice. So I have a homework assignment for you. Download the resources under this lesson. There you will find the practice slides. Improve them as you think is best. When you have them ready, share them as screenshots on the closed professional presentations, Facebook group. I or some other members of the group will give you suggestions on how to improve your slides. You will find a link to the group into resources below the video. This is a special group reserved for my courses and trainings participants. If you have any problems with any function of PowerPoint or if you are short of ideas for presentations, you can always ask our group members. See on Facebook. 47. Conclusion: Thank you for going through the entire course with me. I hope it was valuable to you. In order to acquire the principles I talked about, you will need to start practicing. Just watching a course is not enough. Therefore, do the homework. But also, were you intrigued by any of the slides I showed? Recreate it from scratch. Do you often create slides? Use the themes I showed. Open one of your old presentations and start to improve it. For the sake of practice, you will see that your new presentation will be much cleaner, more structured, and much more professional. Remember to download the training script. It is under the video below. There you will find a key principles that I talked about during the course and a lot of inspiration. Remember also that you can find support in our Facebook group, professional presentations. You will find a link to this group in the training script. If you've completed this course, it is time to attend a workshop in person. During a live workshop, I will be able to look at your slides, suggest what else you should change in them. You will also be able to ask me questions and discuss topics that were not addressed. During the course. You don't have information about the workshop. Send me an inquiry via e-mail. Thank you. I wish you every success possible. And let's keep in touch.