Presenting a few helpful PowerPoint tips
PowerPoint is 26 years old this year and some people at Ext. Marketing Inc. (we won’t name names) have been building presentations for almost as long, back when slides were printed onto expensive transparent sheets and we called them overheads and carried them around in boxes.
While presentation technology has changed for the better, some of the slide-building fundamentals we learned in the early days still hold true.
1. Build Master slides first
Before creating a presentation, click View > Slide Master and create custom Master slides with the approved corporate logo, colours and fonts (your marketing department probably has branded Master slide decks ready for use).
If you’ve never used Master slides before, take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the concept. It’s fairly simple, and will save you tons of time: no more painstaking, slide-by-slide design updates.
2. Use the Outline window to add text
Toggle between Slide and Outline view at the left-hand of the PowerPoint Home screen, and add your slide text in the Outline window rather than typing directly in the individual slides.
Add your slide text in the Outline window rather than typing directly in the individual slides.
This small step will save you time in the long run: the tidy Outline hierarchy makes it easy for you to organize your thoughts, make major text edits, and import or export large blocks of text with one click.
3. Use the Slide Sorter to move things around
You can simply click and drag to reorder your slides without losing track of anything or accidentally deleting a slide. Slide Sorter is also the best way to gain an overall high-level view of your presentation message and how it flows.
Simple but effective. Just like PowerPoint.