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)

Converting bullet points into SmartArt

I am among the users that feel that the SmartArt feature would benefit from an upgrade. After all, it was introduced when Microsoft replaced the menus with the Ribbon in Office 2007 and has not been worked on much since then. But I also feel anyone creating presentations should not have to work hard to produce their content, which is why using SmartArt can be a good starting point to reduce the number of bullet points you use.

Of course, if you are using the subscription model of PowerPoint with M365, you can leverage the Designer feature, as discussed in Chapter 5, Using Artificial Intelligence to Improve Your Visuals. But even so, there are times when design ideas might not fit with what you have in mind for your visuals. That is when using the Convert to SmartArt Graphic function might be helpful:

  • When you are on a slide with bullet points, first select the content placeholder. Then, in the Home tab, in the Paragraph group, look...