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Applications July 2000 • Vol.6 Issue 7 Page(s) 14-19 in print issue |
Create A Presentation A Step-By-Step Guide To Designing Your Own Masterpiece | ||
 If there's one skill that every aspiring business professional should develop it is the ability to create tasteful and effective presentations with a program such as Microsoft PowerPoint. Gone are the days of standing before conferences and committees with easels or white boards. Even the trusty overhead projectors and transparencies are on their way out. Presentations are now the status quo, and if you want to capture the attention of both clients and colleagues, you'd better learn how to use them.  Before You Begin. We'll show you how to create a presentation using Microsoft PowerPoint, but keep in mind almost all presentation programs on the market have similar features and functionality. If you can do it in PowerPoint, chances are, with a little searching through a program's Help files, you can do it in a similar presentation program. Before even opening PowerPoint, you should have in front of you an outline of what you intend to say. This outline of talking points is what you will use as the content for the PowerPoint slides. Then, as you give your presentation, you can, with the click of the mouse or the press of a button, bring the appropriate point up on the screen when you introduce it. No wrestling with flipcharts, no inkless markers or inadequate erasers, and no struggling to conceal the next point on your transparency. Depending upon the content of your presentation, you may want to consider using graphics to grab and hold the audience's interest. These graphics may be as simple as one of the little clip-art images included with Microsoft Office, or they may be pictures of your product, activity, or business. You'll want to think about what images could be used to supplement your presentation and where you will find them. Keep in mind that while graphics may be helpful in illustrating concepts, be careful not to overuse them. Also remember that when a small picture projects on a large screen, it is greatly magnified. Viewers will notice poor image quality, so if you know that a picture is low-resolution, think twice about including it in your presentation. Another type of graphic that works well on PowerPoint slides is the chart, graph, or table. Since presentations quite often involve the explanation of statistics, costs, percentages, and trends, the use of colorful bar graphs, pie charts, and tables can really bring an otherwise boring synopsis to life. Take time to think about where you could incorporate these graphical assistants into your presentation. Open PowerPoint. Once you're clear on your content and graphics, you are ready to open PowerPoint and begin creating. Click Start, Programs, Microsoft PowerPoint. If you're not too sure about your presentation-building skills, you may want to enlist the help of the AutoContent Wizard, which offers both creative advice and help with the content outline. Or, if you have your content figured out but aren't sure about the design, try a Design Template as a means of getting your creative juices flowing. Let's opt for the Blank Presentation route so we can have the maximum amount of creative freedom in designing our slides. Using Blank Presentation, you'll be on your own with both content and colors, but that lets you create a presentation from the ground up. Select Blank Presentation, then click OK. Now let's get started. Create The Presentation. In this example, we're going to create a presentation with the goal of persuading vendors to advertise their products on a particular Web site. This fictional Web site—the D-90 Resource—provides a wealth of information for Land Rover owners and four-wheeling enthusiasts, and it would be an ideal place for manufacturers and dealers to publicize their products and services for these vehicles. You can use the text and examples given in the sidebar "The Finished Project" to practice, or you can create your own presentation on whatever you wish. Slide Master. To start, you can save some time if you use PowerPoint's Slide Master feature. It controls font characteristics, such as style, size, and color, as well as background colors, shadowing, bullets, and accent and fill colors. The Slide Master also contains text placeholders for the main text and footers. Develop the slide master with all the characteristics and colors you want to appear on every slide. And, if there's a graphic you want to repeat on each slide, make sure to also add it to the Slide Master. Click Cancel in the New Slide dialog box, if it appears. Go to the View menu, choose Master, and then select Slide Master to display the blank Slide Master. The first thing is to establish the color scheme by either right-clicking the slide's background (not in a text box) and choosing Slide Color Scheme or choosing Slide Color Scheme from the Format menu. Within the Color Scheme dialog box, you can select a Color Scheme on the Standard tab. But if you don't like any of the color schemes on the Standard tab, you can create your own look on the Custom tab. Select the color square to the left of each element whose colors you want to change and then click Change Color. This opens a new dialog box, where you can either choose from a wide array of standard colors or create your own colors on the Custom tab. Go ahead and pick a color scheme or set of custom colors you like. When you're finished, click Apply To All. Creating your own color scheme is fun, but don't abuse the privilege. If you've chosen a different shade for each scheme feature, you've probably gone too far. Remember that while your presentation needs colors and contrast, a virtual rainbow of shades can be annoying. Use colors that compliment the nature of your presentation and use them consistently throughout. Also, think about the contrast between your text and background color; your goal is readability. When in doubt, choose either black text on a light background or white text on a dark background. (Keep in mind some people even find it hard to read white text on dark backgrounds.) Combinations such as red text on a blue background may leave your audience squinting at the screen. Back on the Slide Master, click the text boxes to choose your fonts. It's easy to use the Font and Font Size drop-down menus on the Formatting toolbar or click Format, Font to pick the sizes and styles you want. You also can use the buttons for Bold, Italic, Underline, or Shadow to add any of those characteristics or the buttons for Align Left, Right, and Center to properly align the text. ( NOTE: If your toolbars don't appear on-screen, select View, Toolbars and make sure there's a check next to the toolbar you want.) Let's choose Times New Roman as the font for the body text and Arial (with the bold effect) for the title. Now highlight the standard title text and choose one of the shadow settings from the Shadow button (the one with a shadow) on the Drawing toolbar to give the title text a different look. Choose 60-point text for the title size and 36-point for the main level of body text. Highlight the text in the body text box and, in PowerPoint 2000, choose Bullets And Numbering from the Format menu (in PowerPoint 97, choose Format, Bullet) to assign colors and styles to the bullets we will use on the slides. Assign a color and style, then click OK. The last feature you'll want to add to the Slide Master is the logo graphic, which we'll want to appear in the upper left of each slide in the presentation. In our example, we opened the Insert menu and chose Picture and then From File to retrieve the graphic from where we'd saved it on our computer. After selecting the graphic, we clicked Insert to place it on the slide. If you don't have a graphic saved to disk, select Insert, Picture, Clip Art. Select a picture you want, then click it and select the Insert Clip button. Close the Insert ClipArt dialog box. Now place your cursor over it and click and drag it into position. We actually had to nudge the title text box down slightly to make room for our logo. Close the Slide Master. Title Slide. To add the first slide, click where it indicates. Select Title Slide and click OK. Click in the title box (it says Click To Add Title) and type in your presentation title. Do the same in the subtitle box. (It says Click To Add Subtitle.) After typing the text for the title and subtitle, let's say you realized that it needed to be a little larger than the point sizes you've assigned on the Slide Master. To enlarge the text, select and highlight the text and use the Font Size drop-down menu on the Formatting toolbar to beef it up. If you aren't satisfied with the positioning of the title and subtitle, move them one at a time by clicking the text and then either click and drag the borders of the text box or use the arrow keys. Now let's say we want to add a photo to our slide. You can add a photo in the same manner in which you added the graphic earlier. Chances are, when you add the graphic and click Insert, it will appear in the center of the slide, covering much of your text, which, of course, is unacceptable. To fix this, select the picture, go to the Draw menu on the Drawing toolbar, choose Order, and then Send To Back. This returns the text to its rightful position on top of the photo. From there, you can enlarge the picture by clicking and dragging the handles on the selected picture and then nudging both picture and text boxes into perfect alignment. Before you proceed, save your presentation by clicking File, Save As. Give it a name in the File Name box, then click Save. It's a good idea to save your presentation frequently; we'll remind you to do so after you create each new slide. Slide Two. The second slide is a good place to state the objective of our presentation. Our objective was to the point, and we wanted the layout of the slide to be equally straightforward. Each time you want to add a slide to your presentation, simply choose New Slide from the Insert menu and then select the slide layout that best fits your needs. For our example, let's choose the first slide option because all we need is a title text box for the word Objective and a subtitle box to contain the objective. Type in the desired text just like before. Again, you might need to slightly adjust the positioning of the boxes and enlarge the font sizes. Save your presentation by clicking File, Save. Slide Three. Since this presentation is sales oriented in nature, we need to include a brief list of our audience's objectives and then go on to show how these objectives would be met. Because we want to include some graphic effects in this slide, choose a new slide based on the Title Only AutoLayout. The first step is to enter the title text and then add the three objectives. Because these objectives are Low Cost Advertising, High Visibility To Land Rover Owners, and High Traffic Venue, let's add a graphic to emphasize the obvious low/high theme. PowerPoint's Drawing toolbar includes an AutoShapes menu that's full of ready-made shapes, which you can position, color, and size to taste. Simply click the shape you like and then click the slide. When the shape appears, it has little handles, which you can click and drag to resize. The up and down block arrows seemed an obvious choice for our purposes. To create our example, place and equally size the down arrow and one up arrow and then select the up arrow and use the copy command (CTRL-C) and the paste command (CTRL-V) to create the second up arrow. To add the text, use the Text Box button on the Drawing toolbar to create three separate text boxes. After clicking the Text Box button, move the mouse back over the slide and position the pointer, which has changed shape, roughly where you want the box. Now click and drag it to the proper size. Upon releasing the mouse, the text box appears, housing a cursor for us to begin typing. Create the first text box and adjust the type size, and then it's only a matter of copying and pasting the box twice and typing the second and third objectives. Now group each text box to each arrow to make them easier to move, should you need to reposition them. (Group items by selecting the first item [text box], holding down the SHIFT key, and selecting the second item [arrow]. With both items selected, go to the Draw menu on the Drawing toolbar and choose Group.) Now let's add a bold red line beneath the title for a little emphasis. From the Drawing toolbar, select the Line button. The pointer becomes a cross when you move it over the slide, and you can click and drag to extend a line across the slide. With the line selected, use the Line Style and Line Color buttons on the Drawing toolbar to assign the width and shade. Now consider how you'll actually present this slide. In our example, we'll want to mention the first objective and discuss it briefly before moving on to the second objective, and so on. Thus, we won't want the distraction of having all three objectives visible when the slide appears. You can find the solution by selecting Custom Animation from the Slide Show menu. In PowerPoint 2000, in the Custom Animation dialog box, look at the list of slide items and place checks beside the ones you want to animate. (In our case, the three arrow/text groupings—Group 2, Group 3, and Group 4.) Under the Order & Timing tab, verify that the groups are listed in the order in which you want them to appear. Under Start Animation, specify for the animations to start on a mouse click. (In PowerPoint 97, click the items in the Timing tab, then click Animate.) Now go to the Effects tab and tell PowerPoint that you want each item to dissolve onto the slide—no sound effects. With that done, you are ready to watch your handiwork on the miniscreen by clicking the Preview button. If you're satisfied with the results, click OK. Don't forget to save your presentation. Slide Four. For the fourth slide, choose the Bulleted List layout (the one with a title box and bulleted list beneath). Click the title text box to enter the title and then click the body text box to enter each of the four points. The bullets are automatically supplied each time you press ENTER to go down to the next line. Now let's add the red line we used in the previous slide. Open slide three by clicking View, Slide Sorter and double-clicking the slide. Select the red line, copy it (CTRL-C), return to slide four, and paste it (CTRL-V). Then use the rulers along the borders of the slide to make sure that the line is in exactly the same place on slide four as it is on slide three. (If the rulers aren't visible, click View, Ruler.) You might need to rearrange the title and main text boxes. Animating the bulleted points so they appear one at a time is even simpler than animating the objects in slide three. All you have to do is select the main text box, go to the Slide Show menu, choose Preset Animation, and then pick the effect you want—in this case, Appear. Now save your presentation by clicking File, Save. Slide Five. For the fifth slide, let's make a bulleted list, too, but we don't want it to look identical to slide four, so let's choose the Text & Clip Art layout (the one with a title text box followed by a bulleted list on the left and a picture on the right). Type in the title text and nudge the box down a tiny bit and then enter the bulleted list text. Enter the text just as you did in slide four. This time the text will appear only on the left half of the slide. (You may need to resize the text.) Now animate the list the same way we did earlier. The picture box on the right instructs you to double-click it to insert clip art. If you don't want a clip-art image, open the Insert menu and choose Picture, From File as we did before. When the selected photo appears on the slide, it most likely will need resizing, but thanks to the handles, stretching and repositioning is simple. Save your presentation. Slide Six. In slide six we'll incorporate a bar chart to show the number of Web site hits per day in the span of an average week. For the slide layout, choose the Chart option with a title text box followed by a chart. After typing the title text, double-click (as PowerPoint tells us) to add the chart. Clicking displays a demo chart with an accompanying datasheet block of cells into which you should enter your own data. As you type the numbers and text into the datasheet, PowerPoint's demo chart transforms itself into your chart, one feature at a time. PowerPoint automatically changes the numbers on the Y-axis of the chart to correspond with the numbers you enter for the chart's bars, and before you know it, the chart is complete. To delete extra rows or columns, simply highlight them and press DELETE. We'll stick with the columnar bar chart style, which is the default style, because it happens to work well for the content. But, when it comes to charts in PowerPoint, anything is possible. When you have the chart selected and the datasheet open, you will notice that PowerPoint adds two new menus to the top of the screen: Data and Chart. Under the Chart menu, choose Chart Type to open the Chart Type dialog box. Here, you can browse several different standard styles, such as Line, Pie, or Cylinder charts. Each type offers subtype options. Choose a type and then click the Press And Hold To View Sample button to see how your data appears in that type of chart. If you don't find what you like, try the Custom Types tab to experiment with an even wider array of styles. Click OK to implement a style. Close the Datasheet. Don't forget to save. Slide Seven. Slide seven is going to be another chart, so simply copy and paste slide six instead of choosing a new slide and layout. (Choose Slide Sorter from the View menu. In that view, right-click a slide and choose Copy and then right-click where you want to paste the slide and choose Paste.) Click View, Normal in PowerPoint 2000 or View, Slide in PowerPoint 97. After retyping the title text, double-click the default bar chart to begin editing it. Let's make a pie chart for this one; choose Chart Type from the Chart menu and proceed to select the best style. Then click OK. The next step is to enter the new numbers and labels into the datasheet, shaping the pie with each new entry. When you're finished, you'll notice that the values for each pie piece did not appear anywhere on the chart or legend. Since the values—together with the shapes—were important, return to the Chart menu, this time choosing Chart Options. In this dialog box, under the Data Labels tab, specify that you want to Show Value. Click OK. Close the Datasheet dialog box and click the slide background. Now let's animate the chart so that each piece of the pie appears one at a time. To do this, select the chart, open the Slide Show menu, and choose Custom Animation. In the PowerPoint 2000 Custom Animation dialog box, tell PowerPoint that you want only to animate Chart 2. (In PowerPoint 97, click the Timing tab, click Chart 2, then click Animate.) Select the Chart Effects tab and select the option to introduce chart elements By Category and have each piece dissolve onto the screen. After using the Preview button to proof your selections, click OK. Be sure to save the presentation. Slide Eight. We'll make slide eight a table instead of a chart, so pick the Table layout, the one that has a title with space for a table beneath. After adding the title and positioning it appropriately, double-click the box below to add the table. In the small Insert Table dialog box, specify the number of columns and rows. In PowerPoint 97, you'll need to make the chart box large enough to hold all the rows. When the blank table appears on the slide, the cursor automatically blinks in the upper left. After entering the text, if you decide that it looks a little bland, select the entire table by positioning the cursor at one corner and dragging across the table, highlighting each cell. In PowerPoint 2000, right-click the table and choose Borders And Fill to open the Format Table dialog box. In PowerPoint 97, click Format, Borders And Shading. In this box, you can format the style, thickness, and color of the borders; the color of the cells' fill; and the margins and alignment of the individual text boxes. First change the table's borders; alter their color from black to the same red we used elsewhere and thicken the borders to 3-point width. Apply the selection by clicking each of the borders of the table diagram in the dialog box. Now open the Fill tab to choose a fill color for the table to give it a little contrast from the rest of the slide. Choose a gray shade and then, in PowerPoint 2000, you can select Semitransparent to mute the color even further. Click OK. We can tell we're on the right track by looking at the slide, but the three column headers across the top row need emphasis. PowerPoint 2000 allows for some additional fine-tuning. This time, select only those three cells and then right-click and choose Borders And Fill. Simply removing the borders by clicking the appropriate boxes in the area on the right side should be enough to make them pop off the slide. Select the cells again and use the Bold button on the Formatting toolbar to make the header text bold. You may need to move the title box and chart or adjust the point size to get the chart and title to fit on the slide. Save the presentation once again. Slides Nine & 10. These final two slides are going to be the most difficult to create. We'll use these slides to leave viewers with both a way to contact us and with a collage of engaging photos on the screen while we make our closing remarks at the end of the presentation. We'll also automate these slides so that we won't have to click to make each picture appear. Begin slide nine with a Blank layout, opting to create your own text box. Choose the Text Box button from the Drawing toolbar. Click and drag the box to position near the middle of the slide and stretch it to the proper size. Then enter the text, change the font and font size, and center the text within the box. Now let's say we want a way to access the Web site at the end of the presentation, should audience members be interested in seeing it. Select the Web site name you just typed, right-click the highlighted text, and choose Hyperlink in PowerPoint 2000. In the Insert Hyperlink dialog box, type the Web site's URL (universal resource locator; Web address) and click OK. In PowerPoint 97, click Slide Show, Action Settings. Click Hyperlink To and choose URL. Type in the URL and click OK. Click OK again. The picture collage we'll now create is a bit more complex than we originally anticipated, but the end result is well worth the effort. Begin by inserting eight different pictures, either from clip art or those you've saved elsewhere on your computer. Next, select each picture, one at a time, and use the little handles to reposition and resize them. You will notice that some pictures are overlapped by other pictures or by text. To achieve this effect, simply select a photo, open the Draw menu (on the Drawing toolbar), choose Order, and then select Send To Back or Bring To Front, depending upon what you want to do. While the collage effect is nice, the slide show will be more interesting and give people a better opportunity to see each individual photo if you animate it, making the photos appear one at a time instead of all at once. To do this, choose Custom Animation from the Slide Show menu. In the dialog box, you can see a miniature of the slide, and in PowerPoint 2000 as you select Picture Frame 1, Picture Frame 2, and so on for animation, the individual pictures are highlighted on the miniature. (In PowerPoint 97, click the Timing tab and Object 2, Object 3, and so on.) That way, you know exactly which graphic goes with each number. Note it on a piece of paper. Our goal is for the pictures to appear, starting with the top center photo and progressing around the circle clockwise. On the Order & Timing tab in PowerPoint 2000, you'll see each picture you've selected for animation. The problem is that they most likely aren't listed in the order in which you want them to appear. So, comparing the list with the picture numbers you've jotted down, use the arrow buttons to rearrange the listed items into the proper order. In PowerPoint 97's Timing tab, click the Objects and click Animate. Put the objects in the correct order using the arrows next to the Animation Order box. The next step is to select each Picture Frame listing and tell PowerPoint when to start the animation. Typically, an animation starts on a mouse click, but you don't want to have to click eight times on this slide, so tell it to animate each picture automatically after three seconds. Now open the Effects tab. Again, select each picture listed in the Check To Animate Slide Objects area in PowerPoint 2000 or the Animation Order box in PowerPoint 97 and specify an entry effect for it. Choose Appear for all of them and then check your work with the Preview button. Click OK. Now choose Slide Transition from the Slide Show menu to automate the transition between slide nine and slide 10 so that you don't have to click to advance the slide. Within the Slide Transition dialog box, tell PowerPoint to advance the slide automatically after three seconds. Slide 10 will go much faster because you already know what you're doing. Copy slide nine as we did earlier, delete the old pictures, and insert new photos. After arranging them to your liking, proceed to animate them just as we did in slide nine. Save your presentation one last time by clicking File, Save. Now preview your finished presentation by clicking Slide Show, View Show. Our advice: Have some fun with PowerPoint next time you are called upon to give a presentation. Using our examples above, you can see how you can create and develop your own award-winning presentation. Learn how to use PowerPoint's many tools and let it work to make you look good. by Hannah Henry
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