Understanding PowerPoint Presentations

After you learn ”or refresh your memory of ”how to navigate PowerPoint, you can create a basic presentation. This chapter gets you up and running on presentation basics so that you can quickly move forward to more advanced and sophisticated PowerPoint techniques.

Before you start, though, it helps to understand design templates and slide layouts, which are presentation building blocks.

Understanding Design Templates

A design template includes preformatted fonts, colors, and styles that blend together to create a consistent look and feel for your presentation. You apply design templates using the Slide Design task pane. It's usually a good idea to apply a single design template to a presentation for consistency, but you can apply multiple design templates to a single presentation if you want. Figure 2.1 illustrates a sample design template.

Figure 2.1. A casual design is good for an informal crowd , but isn't something you would use for a corporate audience.

To learn more about the impact of choosing a design template, see "Working with Design Templates" in Chapter 25, "The Media ”Designing Visual Support," p. 535 .

The AutoContent Wizard selects a design template that is suited to the type of presentation you want to make. If you don't use the AutoContent Wizard and instead select your own design template, be sure that the template you select suits your audience and fits your presentation's message.

Depending on which method you use to create a new presentation, your presentation might already contain a design template. If you want to view the templates ahead of time, apply one directly to a presentation, or change to a different template, click the Design button on the Formatting toolbar to open the Slide Design task pane.

Understanding Slide Layouts

In addition to a design template, the other important design feature you need to consider is a slide layout. A slide layout helps you add specific types of content to your slides, such as text, tables, charts , and pictures.

Even though PowerPoint provides a lot of layout combinations, these layouts contain only seven different elements. They are

• Text ” A placeholder on a slide into which you can add text, such as a title or bulleted list.

• Tables ” A table that you can format, customize, and fill with data.

• Charts ” A chart you can fill with information and format into various types, such as a bar, column, and pie. Charts are good at showing relative sizes or amounts, such as cost allocations and percentages of sales figures. Figure 2.2 illustrates a chart.

  Figure 2.2. Charts can add visual punch to a presentation.

  

• Diagrams ” One of several diagram types you can use to organize and display information. From the Diagram Gallery, you can create organization charts and cycle, radial, pyramid, Venn, and target diagrams. Figure 2.3 shows an organization chart.

  Figure 2.3. Use an organization chart to help present your organization to new team members .

  

• Clip Art ” A clip art image from Office's vast collection of ready-made graphic images, from your own computer or network, or from the Internet. Figure 2.4 shows a slide that contains clip art.

  Figure 2.4. Clip art helps you illustrate your presentation's basic concepts.

  

• Media Clips ” A sound clip or movie file you can use to add musical effects to your presentation or play a video within it.

• Pictures ” Graphic files such as GIFs and JPEGs. A picture is similar to clip art, except that you use the Insert Picture dialog box to find graphic images instead of inserting one from the clip gallery.

You add each of these elements to a PowerPoint slide using the Slide Layout task pane. On this task pane, PowerPoint offers 27 different types of slide layouts divided into four categories:

• Text Layout ” A text layout slide contains only text. The slide might contain one or two columns of text, with or without a title.

• Content Layout ” Content layout slides can contain up to four pieces of content in several arrangements. Content is a graph, a photo, an organization chart, or some other visual element.

• Text and Content Layout ” The seven text and content layouts place text and content on a slide in various arrangements.

• Other Layout ” The other layouts don't fit the other categories. For example, you can create a slide with a single table, diagram, or organization chart. You can also create combinations with text, media clips, clip art, and charts.

NOTE

If none of these predefined layouts is what you want, you can modify a blank slide or customize one of the existing layouts by adding, moving, or deleting objects.

Depending on which method you use to create a new presentation, it might already contain slide layouts. If you want to look at these layouts before you create a presentation, apply them directly to a slide, or change a layout, choose Format, Slide Layout to open the Slide Layout task pane.

Many of PowerPoint's slide layouts include an option for inserting content. For example, if you choose any of the layouts under Content Layout or Text and Content Layout in the Slide Layout task pane, a content palette will appear as a placeholder. This content palette includes six buttons :

	Insert Table
	Insert Chart
	Insert Clip Art
	Insert Picture
	Insert Diagram or Organization Chart
	Insert Media Clip

You'll note that, with the exception of pictures, PowerPoint also includes separate layouts specifically for adding the other content types. For example, you can also insert a table using the Table slide layout or a chart using the Chart, Text & Chart, or Chart & Text slide layouts. These layouts give you extra choices of content location, formatting, and content combinations. Experiment with the available slide layouts to figure out which ones work best for your presentations.