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)

Choosing fonts and colors

Since the introduction of Office 2007 by Microsoft, users started to see the presence of themes in their applications. Just to keep the description short, we can say that themes help to define the overall look of a document in terms of colors, fonts, effects applied to shapes, and so on. As you might have noticed, I put emphasis on the word document. That’s because a theme can be applied throughout your Office applications, making your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents look more consistent. Microsoft supplies some free themes that can be found in the Themes list in the Slide Master view. If you want to learn more about themes, you should check out Echo Swinford and Julie Terberg’s book Building PowerPoint Templates v2, listed in Further reading.

Using one of Microsoft’s themes to create your presentations can help speed up the design process, if one suits your needs. But I would still advise you to make some changes so that your...