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)

Creating new shapes with the merging tools

If you have read through the book chronologically, you might now be at a point where you have many creative ideas to make your presentations more visually appealing. At the same time, you might also be feeling stuck with the same old standard shapes list within PowerPoint, thinking you will have to reach out to a graphic designer to create what you have in mind.

Wait until you have read this section before reaching out for help! The Merge Shapes tool might be just what you need. I will show you how to use the tool with three specific examples that might be helpful for any business presentation.

But first, let’s explore where you will find the Merge Shapes tool and which options are available to create new shapes. As the name implies, you need to select at least two shapes on your slide to activate the tool (Figure 6.22):

Figure 6.22 – Activating and finding the Merge Shapes tool

Figure 6.22 – Activating and finding the Merge Shapes tool

Select the...