Creating Presentation In PowerPoint


In other Microsoft Office programs such as Word and Excel, it seems as though templates play a less vital role than they do in PowerPoint. In spite of their importance and power and ease of use, you’ll often create a letter or another Word document without using a template. Worksheet formats can be so varied that even extensive worksheets are begun without initially using a template due to their unique nature. A presentation, however, often follows a similar pattern among its slides. To maintain consistency and professionalism, your presentation slides will often follow a similar format or look throughout your presentation. Therefore, keeping things uniform with a template or layout seems to be the best way to create a new presentation.

When you first start PowerPoint, it displays a blank presentation with a single slide showing. The layout is simple, with a title across the top and a subtitle below.

If you want to begin with the slide PowerPoint gives you when you start the program, you will click to add a title and subtitle, and continue creating the presentation. After you fill in the text and possibly add a background image, you could apply a theme to the presentation and continue on to the next slide by clicking the New Slide button.

If you click the icon above the New Slide button, PowerPoint selects a slide layout and generates a new slide.

To add a title to the second slide, you’ll click on Click to Add Title and type a title. Click on Click to Add Text to add one or more bullet points to the slide. If you want to add something other than text in the title or body areas, click one of the six buttons in the center of the slide.

Depending on what you click, you can add one or more of the following:

• Table—A worksheet-like table with rows and columns containing data.

• Chart—A graph showing data relationships.

• Clip Art—An image from the Microsoft online Clip Art gallery.

• Picture—An image from a graphics file.

• SmartArt Graphic—A diagram image from Microsoft’s SmartArt Gallery such as an organization layout chart or a flowchart.

Instead of clicking the New Slide button’s icon, if you click the New Slide button’s text with the down arrow to the left of it, PowerPoint displays the Office Theme drop-down list. The name Theme is misleading. What you see in the list are layouts from which you can select. When you select a layout, PowerPoint creates a new slide and you continue creating your presentation.

For a fancier presentation, you’ll probably begin with a template. When you click the Office button and select New, PowerPoint displays the New Presentation window. If you want to begin with a completely blank presentation, you can click the Blank Presentation button, but to begin with a template, you should select a template.

The categories to the left of the New Presentation window provide a list of topics on which you can base your own presentation. For example, if you were creating a training presentation, you could click to display the available templates from the Presentations category, select Training, and then click to select one of the sample presentations that appear. One will be a training presentation for the old Outlook 2003. You can change the content to match your presentation. As is true with most of the template presentations, the Outlook 2003 presentation is professional looking, and you should be able to convert it to the subject you’re teaching so that your topic portrays the same consistent and professional look.

After you select a template, PowerPoint loads it and creates the presentation. Although a template is often referred to as a model without data, many PowerPoint templates come with full presentations inside them. You’ll have a wealth of slide formats you can use and modify for your own presentation. When PowerPoint first presents you with your new template-inspired presentation, a help window appears telling you about the presentation template and offering some advice on ways to change the template’s presentation to suit your own needs.