Course Microsoft PowerPoint 2016 for beginners

Course Microsoft PowerPoint 2016 for beginners

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What is PowerPoint?

PowerPoint is a graphical presentation program used to organize and present information. PowerPoint presentations consist of a number of individual pages or "slides.” Slides may contain text, graphics, sound, movies, and other objects that can be freely arranged. Presentations can be printed, displayed live on a computer, or navigated through at the command of the presenter. For larger audiences, the presentation is often projected onto a large screen. Handouts,speaker notes, or outlines can also be produced from the slides.

PowerPoint 2016 Editing Window (Normal View)

The Normal View in PowerPoint features several commonly used Tabs, Panes, and Tools.   We’ll use Normal View as we create and design our presentation.

The Ribbon

The Ribbon replaces the menu bar seen in previous versions of PowerPoint. The Ribbon groups items that are most likely to be used together. There are several frequently used tabs, such as File, Home, Insert, Design and View. Clicking on each tab activates a group of relative commands, menus, and buttons. There are also contextual tabs that only show up only when needed, such as Text Box Tools, Picture Tools, Drawing Tools and Chart Tools. To activate those tools, click on the associated object.

Opening PowerPoint

To open a PowerPoint 2016 presentation, click on the File tab in the upper left corner.

 The most common choices for opening a presentation are:

 New ‐ allows you to open a Blank presentation or you may choose from a selection of Templates and Themes.

 Open ‐ lets you navigate to an existing file to view and/or modify a presentation that has already been created.

 Recent – displays a list of your most recently created presentations and their file locations.

Creating New Presentations

The New selection gives you several options:

 Blank presentation creates a new presentation using default settings for text and color. Theses slides will not include content or design elements.

 Templates and Themes are used to create a new presentation based on pre‐designed slide styles. These options also do not include content.

 New from existing will use the formatting of a previously created presentation.

For this exercise, we’ll start with a Blank presentation. Select New, choose Blank presentation and click on the Create icon.

PowerPoint Slides

When you choose to create a blank presentation, PowerPoint will open a presentation with a Title Slide. Once the Title Slide is open, you’ll see a slide with two placeholder text boxes for a title and a subtitle. Click inside the placeholder box and type to add the title. If you want a subtitle, click and type inside the smaller placeholder. If you don’t want a subtitle, you can just ignore its placeholder box.

To add a New Slide, make sure you’re on the Home tab.

The New Slide button will add slides to your presentation. The New Slide button has two parts:

Clicking on the top part will automatically insert a new slide. If you have just reated a Title slide, the new default layout will be a Title and Contentslide (for details, see the section on slide layouts).

Clicking on the bottom will give you a choice of layouts. You can choose which layout you want for your nextslide. Select a slide layout by clicking on itsimage in the Office Theme gallery.

Slide Layouts

There are several standard slide layouts to choose from when adding new slides. A unique layout can be chosen by clicking on the bottom half of the New Slide button in the Home tab. When the layout gallery opens, click on the style you want and a new slide with that layout will appear in your presentation. Each layout caption describes the layout type. Content can be text, tables, charts, graphics, pictures, clip art, or video. If you decide later that the layout you chose doesn’t work well for a particular slide, select the slide by clicking on it in the Thumbnail pane. Next, click on the Layout button in the Slides group of the Home tab. Click on a new layout and it will change the layout of the slide.

Applying a Theme

Once a new presentation has been created, a design or color scheme can be added. Remember to use color carefully to enhance your presentation, not detract from it. You will want to maintain good contrast between the background color and the text color. Consider using a light colored background and dark text (or vice versa), but avoid busy backgrounds and primary colors. Use sans serif fonts like Arial, Calibri, and Helvetica for titles and size them between 44 – 60 points. Sub‐headings should be between 32 – 40 points, and body text between 18 – 32 points. Try not to use more than two fonts. PowerPoint has many pre‐set designs and themes that include complimentary colors and fonts. To add a theme to a presentation, go to the Design tab in the ribbon. There are several themes immediately available. To use one of the built‐in themes, just click on its thumbnail.

On the right side of the Theme thumbnails, there’s a scroll bar and an Arrow Down button, which will offer more designs, as seen below. If you’re online, you can get more themes from Microsoft Office Online. (Your office program must be a genuine Office product to get online templates).

If you don’t want to use a theme, you can add Background Styles.  From this selection, you can add some preset background styles that change according to the colors you’ve chosen.

Using the Format Background feature, you can choose fill colors, gradients, transparencies, textures, or pictures for your background.

When you have the desired background fill effect, select Close to apply it to the selected slide or choose Apply to All to add the background to all of the slides in the presentation.

Designs can be added to all of the slides or to selected slides. To select multiple slides, click on a slide in the Thumbnail pane of the navigation bar and then hold down the control key and click on any other slides you want to apply the design to.

Text Formatting Bulleted

Lists In PowerPoint, you can easily modify a slide’s default bulleted list. Click inside the text box, and the Format tab will automatically be highlighted. Click on the drop down triangle next to the Bullets button in the Paragraph group.

From the Bullets and Numbering menu you can make various changes to your list:

 The bullet size relative to the text

 The color of the bullet

 The shape of the bullet using either a picture or a character

You may also want to adjust line spacing between paragraphs or lists. You can do this through the Paragraph group of tools by clicking the Line Spacing button and selecting Line Spacing Options.

Indents and Spacing controls will open in a separate dialog box.

Adding Content

Text is the default content of the slide below. The format for the default text is a bulleted list. To add text, click and begin typing. To add other content, click on the icon within the content group on the new slide. Each icon will open the appropriate dialog box or task pane in the Drawing Tool s contextual tab.

The icons represent the six standard graphical elements that you might want to insert.

Clicking on an icon will open the associated dialog box. Note that these icons, as well as several other insertion options, are also displayed in the Insert tab on the Ribbon.

Tables

Set the number of columns and rows as needed in the Insert Table dialog box and click OK. Methods for editing and the design and layout of your table are located on the Table Tools contextual tab.

Charts

Select the type of chart you want and click OK. Once inserted into the slide, you can click on the chart to activate the Chart Tools contextual tab, where you’ll find tools for editing chart data and changing layouts and styles.

SmartArt Graphics

SmartArt graphics are shapes that are designed to represent the relationship between things or people. You might use SmartArt for an organizational chart or a timeline. SmartArt styles and layouts can be formatted in the SmartArt Tools contextual tab.

Pictures

Rather than using too much text on your slides, consider using pictures along with text as a more interesting way to communicate your ideas. You can put lots of text into the Notes Section and refer to that as you’re speaking.

When browsing for images, keep in mind that pictures imported from web sites can be low resolution, and are typically used for on‐screen presentations and web pages. If you’re going to print handouts, be sure to use images that are at least 180 dpi (dots per inch).

Online Pictures Online pictures have replaced the old Clip Art. When you click on the Online Pictures button you get a search box. You can type in a word and press enter to search for a specific image or you can click on the Bing Image Search icon to browse categories.