How to Master Microsoft Office PowerPoint

Posted on March 29, 2016 by resourcefulman

PowerPoint allows you to quickly merge presentations, but slideshows can be dull and boring if you only know the basics. It’s time to learn how to customize templates, add animations and slide transitions, take notes on slides, and more.

Get up and running fast with PowerPoint

PowerPoint is pretty easy to use, and if you’ve used other Microsoft Office applications before, the menus and toolbars will be familiar to you. You have basic menus for opening and creating files, and just like in Microsoft Word , there is a “ribbon” at the top of the application window, containing all the necessary formatting options and contextual commands. You will also see options for creating shapes, inserting images, designing slide layouts, and choosing interesting slide transitions.

For this article series, we’ll assume you’ve used PowerPoint before, but if you’re looking to brush up on your knowledge, Microsoft’s Quickstart Guide for PowerPoint will get you started.

How to perform the most common and important tasks in Microsoft PowerPoint

No matter what kind of presentation you’re putting together, you need to know how to work with templates, customize your slide master, prepare your slide notes, and maybe even add one or two animations. Here are some basic principles you should know.

How to customize templates

Templates are like blueprints for your slideshow. They also make it easy to create a slideshow layout once and use it over and over again. For example, let’s say you were teaching a class about tigers. You can download a ready-made template and create a separate slideshow for each lecture, but always have the same layout, cool fonts and background images.

You can use the ready-made templates that come with PowerPoint 2016, download templates from authoritative sources on the web ( like Microsoft itself), or even create your own. Of course, you can also customize any template you have downloaded or installed. After opening a new or ready-made template, go to the View tab in the menu bar (located above the ribbon), then select Slide Master from the ribbon panel. On the left side, you will see the slide master at the top and all the different slide layouts in the template below it. Any changes you make to the slide master at the top will affect each of the different slide layouts, but you can also customize the elements for each slide.

If we go back to our tiger lecture example (shh, that’s perfectly fine), you can pick a pre-made template and modify it to be more, well, tiger-like. You can change the background of each slide to an awesome photo of a tiger, for example:

Choose a slide master
Right-click the background (or press Shift + F10 to open the context menu) and select Format Background.
In the Format Background window on the right, click the Fill tab.
Select the “Picture or Texture Fill” radio button.
Under Insert Image From, select File, Clipboard, or Online.
Choose your awesome tiger photo and hit “Paste”.

In the Format Background window, you can also choose solid colors, gradient colors, and patterns to fill the background of your slides if you don’t want to use a photo. Or, if you have a bunch of cool tiger photos that you want to use, you can set the background for each individual slide using the same process above. The same goes for formatting any shapes (random colored squares, circles and rectangles you may have in your template). Right-click the shape, select Format Shape, and adjust everything as you would in the Format Background window.

If you want to change the font used in the template slides, hover over the text box, right-click and select a font style and size from the drop-down menu. You can set separate fonts and colors for headings and multiple levels of text. Again, you can do this on a slide by slide basis, or you can style the entire template in the Slide Master.

Of course, every object on every slide can also be moved or deleted. If you want to customize an object, left-click it to select it. Once selected, you can click and drag the item, resize the item, or press the delete key to make it disappear. Once you have a template you like, you can save it for future use:

Go to File> Save As
Select OneDrive, This PC, or Add Location
Select PowerPoint Template (* .potx) from the drop-down menu.
Name your template
Click “Save”.

Now, the next time you want to give a lecture about the tiger, you can start with the same template and just enter all the new information. You can also share your template with other tiger enthusiasts so they can create their own slideshows as well.

Last but not least, let’s say you need to give a tiger presentation to some important business people and you’ve been told that they hate cool photo backgrounds and nifty fonts. Well, you can apply any template and associated color and style themes to any slideshow you have already created. Just go to the Design tab, choose a new pre-made template, or browse for a template file you already have. All of your information will remain the same, but formatted according to the new template. There may be some flabbiness in some slides, but this is something you won’t notice when you take a closer look at them.

How to align images and other objects

When you add images, charts, graphs, shapes, or other objects to a slide, they float right in the center. You can select objects to resize, or drag them individually, but you can also align them with each other or with other objects on the slide to make them look nice and orderly. Here’s how to do it in a few clicks:

Hold down the Shift key and select each object you want to align.
While they are selected, click the Format tab on the menu bar.
On the ribbon, select Align.
From the drop-down menu, choose Align Selected Objects (it may already have a checkmark).
Select the Align drop-down menu again and choose an alignment type.

There are several options to choose from: Align Left – Aligns the left side of each object with the farthest left selected object. Align Right does the same with the farthest right object as the anchor point. Align Center centers all selected objects to the horizontal center point of the selected objects. If objects are on the same horizontal line, they will be on top of each other (the same goes for left and right alignment). Aligning to the top, middle, and bottom edges does similar things, but works for vertical rather than horizontal. This means that if the objects are on the same vertical line and are aligned to the top, bottom, or middle, they will also be stacked on top of each other. You can also Align To Slide from the drop-down menu and align objects to the sides and center of the slide, rather than aligning them in relation to each other.

The Align drop-down menu also has another useful feature: you can distribute objects evenly so that their distance is equidistant from each other. Select the objects, go to the Align menu and choose Distribute Horizontally or Distribute Vertically. If you select the Align Selected Objects check box, the two outer objects will remain, and the middle object will fit perfectly between them. If you have Align To Slide selected, objects will fit perfectly throughout the slide.

How to add slide animations and transitions

Once you have all your objects where you want, you can have some fun and add animation to them. You can display text one line at a time with a dissolve effect, or display images off-screen. PowerPoint makes it easy to add animation:

Click the Animation tab.
Select the slide you want to animate
Select the object you want to animate
Select the effect on the ribbon

Remember that animations play in the order in which you add them. If you want the object or text to appear first on the slide, add this animation first and then move on to the next one. You can always change the order of the animation on the ribbon or in the animation area, but it’s easier to just animate everything in the order you want.

If you want gorgeous slide transitions, it’s even easier. Click the Transitions tab, select the slide you want to add a transition to, then select a transition from the ribbon panel. Whichever effect you choose for this slide will transition to this slide from the previous slide, not from there to the next slide.

How to create slide notes and use Presenter View

If you want to jot down notes for each of your slides and see them when you present them without the audience seeing them either, PowerPoint has a built-in feature. From normal view, select the slide you want to add notes to. on and click the text box at the bottom of the screen (it should say “Click to add notes” if there is no text already). Enter your notes and you’re done.

If you want to use these notes during your presentation, you have two options: you can print them, or you can use Presenter View during your presentation. To print your slide notes, go to File, choose Print, then choose Note Pages from the Print Layout menu. To use Presenter View:

Go to the slideshow tab
Select from the beginning or from the current slide
Press Alt + F5 or use your mouse to click the button with three dots in the lower left corner of the screen.
Select Show Presenter View.

Presenter view shows the current slide, how many slides are left, how long you were on the current slide, the next slide in your presentation, and notes for each slide. If you are projecting your slideshow onto a separate monitor, projector, or interactively, only you will see the presenter view.

Best New Features in PowerPoint 2016

PowerPoint has gotten a little sleeker and more user-friendly in later versions, but it’s still the same slideshow machine that people have been using for years. However, PowerPoint 2016 has several useful new features:

You can search the ribbon: on the Windows version, you will see a “Say what you want to do” box above the ribbon bar (small light bulb symbol). You can enter any question here and PowerPoint will find what you need. For example, you might ask him how to insert an image, how to add animation, or how to create and add diagrams. For some reason, this is not included in the Mac version.
Collaborate on presentations in real time: PowerPoint 2016 now allows people to work on the same slideshow at the same time . You can see when someone else is working with you and also see exactly what they are working on on each slide.
Drawing on touchscreen devices. If you’re working with PowerPoint 2016 on a tablet or other touchscreen device, you can use the Draw tab to create handwritten annotations. You can also draw shapes and write equations.

Other than that, the changes in PowerPoint are pretty minor: a new high-contrast black theme, several new slide transitions, and several new chart types. Hey, if it doesn’t break …

Work faster in PowerPoint with these keyboard shortcuts

You can find a complete list of PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts on the Microsoft support site, but here are the main ones you should know about:

Alt + H, F, then S: Change the font size for the selected text.
Ctrl + X, Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V: Cut, copy, or paste the selected text, object, or slide.
Shift + F10: Display the context menu for the selected item.
Alt + N, P: insert a picture.
Alt + H, S, then H: Paste shape.
Alt + G, H: Select a theme.
Alt + H, L: Select a slide layout.
Alt + W, Q: change the scale of the slide.
Alt + H: Go to the Home tab.
Ctrl + Z: undo the last action.
Ctrl + S: Save Presentation.
Alt + S, B: Start slideshow.
Esc: end slideshow.

Check them out and you can instantly prepare your presentation.