Introduction to Microsoft PowerPoint

Sample Lesson - Introduction

Lesson 1.03: Does This List Make Me Look Boring?

"Look everyone! A helpful list of who begat who in the Bible. We're going to be here all night long."
(Source)

We use lists to keep track of things we'd otherwise forget. They don't need to be exciting or pretty. In fact, they're usually scribbled on crumpled, coffee-stained napkins in our pockets.

At least they make our pants smell nice.

The point is, lists help us remember because we can look at them any time we want. People aren't going to carry your presentation around with them, so how will they remember what you say? How many bulleted lists do you remember from presentations?

Most of us don't remember text very well. Images, though, those are sticky. That's why one picture can say so many words. Up to a thousand, by some estimates.

Unless you spill coffee on it. Then you're better off with a list.

Sample Lesson - Reading

Reading 1.1.03: Lists Are Like Lullabies

PowerPoint presentations with nothing but bullet points are great at curing insomnia, but not so great at engaging an audience. The problem is that people have a really hard time doing more than one thing at a time. Want people to read all the notes on your slide? They won't be listening to you. Want them to listen to you? They won't be reading a thing.

For the record, trying to make bulleted lists exciting by flying the bullets in with loud whooshing or dinging sounds—while keeping people from falling asleep—only makes things worse. You may keep people awake, but they'll wish they were asleep. Give them handouts to go along with the presentations, and you might get some spitballs in your hair.

Bullets are good for your own notes, but audiences remember visuals best.

So…where do your get these visuals? If you're a world-class artist, you can probably come up with some stellar images, but what if you can't even draw stick people? You can always use clip art if you're ready to be silently judged.

Take heart, Shmooper: you can still add some visual punch to your message even if you aren't an artist. PowerPoint allows you to insert all kinds of media to enhance your presentation. Let's take a look at the Insert ribbon for some examples.

Insertables

When you click the Insert tab, the ribbon should change to look something like this:

You can insert and customize all sorts of things, like:

• tables.
• pictures.
• shapes.
• charts.
• audio/visual stuff.

No matter what you're including, you should always have a reason for it. You don't want your audience to miss the main point because they're trying to figure out what a hula-hooping panda has to do with the ecosystems of sub-Saharan Africa.

Everything you insert has a Design or Format tab with customized options for changing things up. It's handy, but try not to go overboard.

Case and point: hula-hooping pandas. Could you make them? Yes. Does it work for anything. No.

Well, maybe a slideshow about a Madagascar sequel. But even then…

Tables

If you've made tables in Microsoft Word before, you're going to do the exact same thing in PowerPoint. To get started, click Table and use the handy-dandy blue squares in the drop-down menu to pick how many rows and columns your table should have.

Once it's created, you can use the Table Design tab to customize your table. If you need to add rows or columns, the Draw Table feature allows you to—wait for it—draw lines between rows, columns, or a combination of the two. Bonus: it keeps the lines straight for you. In the style pane, you'll see color and shading options to help make your table easy to read at a glance.

For PowerPoints especially—when you can't go back to the table any time you want—you want your tables to be read at a glance.

There's also a Layout tab for tables. That's where you'll find the tools to do things like:

• change cell heights and widths. 
• align text. 
• change the text direction to vertical. 
• split and merge cells. 
• insert rows or columns.

Keep in mind you don't want to overwhelm your audience, so simple tables with few words work best. It's about visual impact, not information overload.

That's a general rule in presentation, though.

Picture

When you click the Picture button, you'll get a drop-down menu asking whether you want to pick your photo using the Photo Browser option or if you'd rather go through the file system. Photo Browser looks nicer, but going through the files is going to look exactly like what you open when you save a file for the first time.

Here's your disclaimer: If you decide to surf for pictures in the vast sea of information that is the Internet, make sure you check copyright permissions. Ideally you'll want something that isn't on permissions lock-down. Want to know more? Check out this article.

After you insert a picture, the Picture Format ribbon lets you modify it in so many ways, you'll wish you never started tinkering with it. Get a little too hot and heavy with the glitter glue? Just use the Reset Picture button to get back to the original.

As far as changing pictures goes, cropping's a pretty standard thing, but what if you want to crop something in the shape of a lightening bolt? To give your slide a Harry Potter-like scar, use the Crop to Shape option from the Crop button drop-down menu. 

There are also tons of effects you can add in by using the Quick Styles and Picture Effects drop-downs.

Nothing quite replaces Photoshop's ability to manipulate images, but PowerPoint isn't bad in a fix. You should play around with it when you get a chance.

Have we mentioned recently  that you should keep it simple? Because you should. Cropping the photo in the shape of a lightning bolt—adding glowing neon edges—might make the photo look cool, but skip it, unless you're talking about Uncle Iroh's bending abilities. Even then, though…an image would probably work just fine.

That's just our opinion.

Screenshot

Beside the Picture button, you'll see a Screenshot button, which works…sort of. You can take a screenshot of another open window. Things get a little trickier if you only want part of a window, so you're probably better off taking a screenshot on your own and uploading it as a picture.

Or you could crop using PowerPoint's crop feature. It's your call.

Shape

There are shapes, like squares, rectangles, triangles, and circles, and then there are shapes, like hexagons, arrows, lightening bolts, squares with the corners chopped off, and random scribbles of an undefined nature.

We'll let that sink in for a minute.

You have access to all of these—if you ever actually find a legitimate use for them, that is. You can even put words in your shapes: just click on a shape and start typing. If your shape is too plain, you can consult the magic Shape Effects feature for all kinds of spectacular special effects.

Broken record moment? Don't get carried away. You want your pictures to support your message, not the other way around.

SmartArt

SmartArt's kind-of like clip art, except…for grown-ups. This is where you can breathe some life into your text using pre-made diagrams and flowcharts. If you're going to use this guy, take some time to find the one that best represents your point. If you're giving a presentation on the life cycle of man-eating plants, you'll probably want some SmartArt that looks more like this:

than this:

Lots of options here, and you can lose yourself wading through them all. Look for something that matches the message and remember: The simplest option is usually the most effective.

Unless the simplest solution is to let your man-eating plant eat your crush's bae. Then you might want to go to the second simplest solution.

You can create a SmartArt object and then add the text to it, in the list dialogue box it opens:

That list is going to change the text in the different shapes. If you want to add a text-filled element, you can press Enter or that green plus sign. To remove an element, press the red dash.

Pretty smart, if we do say so ourselves.

Chart

Here's where the line between PowerPoint and Excel gets a little murky. Using data, you can make:

• pie charts. 
• line graphs. 
• bar graphs. 
• those graphs where dots are scattered everywhere. 
• 3-D surface graphs. 
• radar graphs.

We don't even know what some of these are, but they're all here if you need them. Just click on one, and Excel will open up.

Wait, what?

Charts are visual representations of numbers, which means Office is going to export all the number-related work to Excel. In its fervor to be helpful—or maybe because it's jealous of the attention PowerPoint gets—the Excel window may completely cover your PowerPoint window. Don't panic. You can just resize and/or move the Excel window so you can see PowerPoint while you work. If you already have a bunch of data in an Excel spreadsheet, you can use the Select Data feature to pull that data into PowerPoint.

There shouldn't be many situations where you're working with totally new data while making your PowerPoint, though. Chances are, you're presenting a chart because you already found something from data in Excel (or another spreadsheet app). Office just makes it easier to move that already made data into your PowerPoint.

But that also means you have to use Office for everything in order for it to make your life easier.

Video

If you have a video somewhere on your computer, you can use the Video option to import it into your slideshow. You have lots of customization and formatting options here, from cropping the video to even changing the color scheme. Check out the Video Styles and Video Effects features for some interesting customization options. You probably won't use 99.99 percent of these features, but it's good to know you have options.

Really, though? If you need to do some heavy-duty editing, you're better off with software specifically designed to edit videos. PowerPoint might help with a few small things, but it's meant for presentations, so the edits you can do are going to be pretty shallow.

One thing definitely worth knowing is Poster Frame. It lets you select a picture to throw on top of your video, basically hiding that video until it actually plays.

Speaking of playing the video, how do you get one to play while you're presenting?

Good question.

The default is automatic, which means the video starts as soon as the slide loads. If you want to add some suspense—or just explain a couple of things before it starts—click the Start button in the Format Video tab and hit, "When Clicked," which means the video won't start until you click it. You can even turn a video into a GIF by hitting the Loop Until Stopped checkbox.

Just make sure you have a good reason for making your audience watch a video. Otherwise you might lose the attention of your viewers, which is…less than optimal.

You will definitely want to test your video before you start your presentation. A/V stuff always includes a lot of complexity from the computer and the equipment, so make sure everything works before you:

• accidentally deafen your audience with speakers that are  too loud.
• turn a video upside-down, accidentally making your simple PowerPoint an avante-garde presentation.
• make a fool of yourself standing awkwardly at the front while you wait for someone from IT to work out what's going on.

Audio

Before you add audio, really ask yourself, "Self, is there any way to avoid this?" If so, don't do it. Ever. If not…we guess you can use it.

There are probably times when adding audio makes sense, but not very many. If your plan is to narrate your presentation and post it to YouTube, then you're in luck: there's a button for that. It's in the audio drop-down menu and it's called Record Audio. Bet you didn't see that one coming.

(Make sure you have a nice microphone, though. Otherwise you might not be thrilled with the results.)

To add some audio, click the Insert Audio option and either choose from what you've got saved on your computer or record your own. Just like videos, audio's going to automatically play as soon as the slide loads. If you'd rather control when the audio starts, you can change it to begin when you click the speaker icon.

What speaker icon? The one that shows up when you insert audio onto a slide.

Sorry to sound like a broken record, but unless you're making a presentation about the evolution of music in film from the silent era to Cheaper by the Dozen, it's probably better if you lay off the Simple Plan. Music works, if there's a reason for it, but sound effects don't usually help in the whole "being taken seriously" department.

Sample Lesson - Activity

Activity 1.03a: Tabling Data

Make fun of tables all you want, but they do beat plain text. Sometimes.

Other times tables can make things more confusing. If you have bunch of numbers, throwing them all at your audience isn't that helpful. Instead, you're going to want to find the most important numbers and present those.

When using a table, make sure those important numbers stand out. Highlight them, make them a different color, make them bigger, or even skip the table and put an important number on its own slide. Tables full of data are hard to read quickly, so a graph or chart usually works better to tell the story behind the numbers.

Sometimes, you really do just need a table, but keep it simple enough that the numbers are understandable. You've been warned.

Let's make one. Well, actually, we already made one. You're going to re-create it in a blank PowerPoint presentation.

Here's the table:

Recreate it in PowerPoint. You'll need to Insert the 5 × 5 table first, and then modify it in the Table Design tab.

You might notice some merged cells in the table. You can make them in PowerPoint using the—wait for it—Merge Cells button. You should also add a little style by picking out a design option.

Once you've made the table, take some time to think about what the numbers mean. Don't try to wrack your brain making meaningless connections. Instead, make a new slide titled "School Population" that explains what's important about the numbers if we're talking about:

• the drop-out rate between sophomore and junior year.
• over-crowding in the senior hallway.
• how much funding should go to each grade.

For example, if Shmoop wanted to talk about what's important in the class differences between 2014 and 2015, our bullet point might say:

• In 2014, the junior and senior grades were combined, with 97 students, while in 2015, they were separated, with 60 and 50 students, respectively. This probably means that one of the grades was too small to have its own classes.

Once you've balderdashed your way to statistical meaning for three different types of data analysis, submit the PowerPoint below.

Sample Lesson - Activity

Activity 1.03b: Antiquing Pictures

A picture might be worth a thousand words, but how it looks can decide what those words say. Or if anyone will take those words seriously.

Let's see what we can do to make a picture pop. First, find a good picture (using your own photo or something from your best friend, Google) and insert it twice on a blank Two Content (a.k.a. a two-column) slide. So… you should have an image on the left and an image on the right. It's going to be like the before and after image on those scammy diet ads, so leave one copy alone and make the following changes to the right side. The left's going to stay the same, like most people who buy diet fads.

Take the image and

• head to Color → Recolor → Sepia.
• apply some Quick Styles, of the Oval, Black variety.
• slap on Picture Effects → 3-D Rotation → Perspective Heroic Extreme Left.
• make it glow. Literally. Go to Picture Effects → Glow → 18 pt glow (any color you like, but make it glow).

We chose this image to do all those things to. It's okay to marvel at its beauty. Your picture's going to look somewhat different, but it should also look similar, because…special effects.

Once your picture looks nice and Photoshopped, submit it below.

Sample Lesson - Activity

Activity 1.03c: Outsmarting Art

We've had it with all the bragging. Let's see just how smart SmartArt actually is. We're going to give you some boring—but important—text and, using SmartArt, you're going to make it look good enough that people might actually read it.

Step One

Here's the text:

The U.S. government comprises three branches: Legislative, Judicial, and Executive. Each branch has unique powers and responsibilities that serve to form a system of checks and balances to ensure no one person or small group of people has too much power. It's not perfect, but it allows for criticism and improvement.

The Legislative Branch has two houses. The Senate has 100 members, two from each state. The House of Representatives has 435 representatives with the number of representatives from each state based on the population.

The Judicial Branch makes sure the laws the Legislative Branch makes agree with the Constitution. The Supreme Court has nine justices.

The Executive Branch is the President and his Cabinet, which is a collection of many secretaries who help advise the President.

(Source)

First, rework it into a list. It's okay if you don't catch every little detail; if you were presenting this, you wouldn't want to catch everything anyway. You only want to catch the important pieces so that you can expand on them when you're actually standing in front of a crowd. .

Fewer words means a bigger impact.

That means you'll want to isolate the most important details, like:

• what the different branches of government are.
• how many representatives each branch has.
• how they check and balance each other.

You'll probably want a nested list, because it's complicated stuff.

Step Two

Open up a new PowerPoint presentation and give it the title "Outsmarting Art." Then add a new slide and add your list of points to it. Once you have the list in PowerPoint, click on the text box with the list and click the Convert to SmartArt button. You'll see all sorts of options. Choose one that best represents the point you want to make and then customize it to fit your points. For example, if we were converting text about the water cycle into SmartArt, we might do a cycle graphic like this:

We picked a cycle for the water cycle because that's how it moves: in a cycle. If you're talking about the U.S. government, though, you might want to start in the List, Hierarchy, or Relationship categories first. Remember, most of what you would actually say should be in your notes, not on the slide itself.

When you have everything just the way you want it, grab a screenshot and upload it so your teacher can make sure you've actually been doing more than texting ugly cat pictures to your friends.

(If you are sending ugly cat pictures, though, could we get on that group chat? Sounds like fun.)