Tutorial 2: Intro to PowerPoint

PowerPoint as a Tool
Today I'm going to give a brief overview/intro to PowerPoint. PowerPoint is an invaluable and very useful tool to both students and professionals alike. It provides you with the ability to present visuals for just about anything, from a presentation about a trip you recently took to a business proposal, all in one easy-to-use program. When you first open PowerPoint, you need to choose a theme for your presentation. While it's not necessary to choose one as your first step (you can apply themes later), choosing a theme can be helpful in organizing your thoughts and figuring out the best way to convey your message. Here's a screen capture of a few themes you might find when you open PowerPoint:

If you look to the left side of the window, you can choose various ways to filter themes or even download new themes to choose from. In looking at the right side of the window, you can refine some options for the theme you select. First of all, upon selection, you are given a preview of what some slide-layouts would look like with your selected theme applied. This side of the window also gives you the option to change the colors used in your slide theme, as well as change the primary font, and the slide aspect ratio (options include Standard 4:3, Widescreen 16:9 and Widescreen 16:10) depending on what type of screen/projector you have to present with.

Making a Slideshow

Now that we've selected a theme, it's time to begin building our presentation. After selecting "Choose" at the lower right of the theme selection window, PowerPoint will open with the theme you have selected already applied and a title slide ready for you to begin editing. Here is an example of a title slide:

Now that we've made our title slide, we can begin inserting new slides. If you look above on the left-hand side of the screen capture, you'll see that I've already added a few slides. Here's how you do this..

1. You can simply click on the "New Slide" button (you'll see this toward the top-left part of the screen capture.
   Note: When you click on the "New Slide" button, it will insert a basic content slide with a title bar at the top...there are other slide-layout options though!!
2. Instead of using the basic content slide provided by clicking the "New Slide" button, you can click on the arrow located on the right of the "New Slide" button and choose the appropriate slide-layout for your needs from the subsequent drop-down menu. (See screen capture)

Let's say we selected the "Title and Content" slide-layout from the drop-down menu to insert into our slideshow. We'll now type in our title and write a little description about PowerPoint..

Now that we've explored the basic content slide, let's take a look at how we can incorporate media into our slides.. So we'll insert a new slide by clicking the arrow next to the "New Slide" button and for this example, we'll select the "Comparison" slide-layout. Here is what the blank layout looks like:

Notice in the two large rectangular boxes, below "Click to add text" there are 6 small squares with little designs in each of them. These allow you to insert media onto the slide. I'll start from the top-left square and move right and explain what each allows you to insert. By clicking on the boxes, you can insert tables, charts, SmartArt, pictures, ClipArt, and videos. Here's an example of this slide-layout with pictures on it from a trip I took to Europe:

 As you can see, PowerPoint is a great, easy-to-use tool for presenting material and media, with options for just about any presentation need you could have, both personally and professionally. 

Ease of Use

Now that we have seen what PowerPoint looks like and can do, we'll go over a few aspects that make PowerPoint very easy to use. Since PowerPoint is a Microsoft product, and comes in the Microsoft Office Suite, it functions very similarly to Microsoft Word..one of the most widely used word processing programs today. With that said, you can edit and format text in PowerPoint essentially the same way you would if you were working in Word! Additionally, when you insert pictures into slides, like I did above, you can perform basic photo editing and formatting, such as cropping, rotating, and resizing, right there on the slide too, nearly eliminating the hassle of using another photo editing program.

Animation and Transition

PowerPoint doesn't stop there either. It allows you to customize transitions between slides and animations to give your slide show a personal touch as you present the material. Below is a quick video I made, using Camtasia Studio for Mac, on how to use basic animations and transitions in your PowerPoint slideshow.

Upon reviewing the video quality on here, it's not very good.. Here is a link to video where you can view it in higher quality.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10144412/animationtransition.mp4


Thanks for looking at my tutorial blog and be sure to check back for my next post!