Book Image

Microsoft PowerPoint Best Practices, Tips, and Techniques

By : Chantal Bossé
Book Image

Microsoft PowerPoint Best Practices, Tips, and Techniques

By: Chantal Bossé

Overview of this book

Giving great business presentations that stand out can mean the difference between getting and losing out on an important promotion, a critical client deal, or a grant. To start creating PowerPoint presentations that showcase your ideas in the best light possible, you’ll need more than attractive templates; you'll need to leverage PowerPoint's full range of tools and features. This is where this PowerPoint book comes in, leading you through the steps that will help you plan, create, and deliver more impactful and professional-looking presentations. The book is designed in a way to take you through planning your content efficiently and confidently preparing PowerPoint masters. After you’ve gotten to grips with the basics, you’ll find out how to create visually appealing content using the application’s lesser known, more advanced features, including useful third-party add-ins. The concluding chapters will equip you with PowerPoint’s advanced delivery tools, which will enable you to deliver memorable presentations. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to confidently choose processes to create and deliver impactful presentations more efficiently.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Understanding layouts and placeholders

Through the years, I have seen many people start a new presentation and tell me they did not like the text boxes on the first slide, so they just deleted them to start from scratch. Unfortunately for them, they did not know that doing so would make them work much harder than necessary to create their slides. This also makes it even harder if they decide to change the overall look of their presentation. This huge mistake usually happens because users don’t know about two fundamental features in PowerPoint: layouts and placeholders. So, let’s show you what they are and how they will help you create your content faster.

Layouts

When you start a new presentation with PowerPoint’s blank default template, your new file already includes a title slide. But there are more layouts available in the Home tab (1). To access these, in the Slides group (2), click on the Slide Layout (3) drop-down list (Figure 3.1):

Figure 3.1 – Finding the Slide Layout button from the Home tab in PowerPoint ...