Launching PowerPoint and Choosing a Theme

Quick reference

• 00:04 You’re sitting in your office having a chat to the manager when suddenly she has a brainwave, “I think this project’s going really well. Why don’t
• 00:10 we present about it to the CEO this afternoon at the executive meeting.” Where do they get these clever ideas from? And so you’re sitting
• 00:17 there with your copy of PowerPoint, and you've got 2 hours to build a presentation and have it on her desk for review. What do you do? Well
• 00:24 this video is about staring in PowerPoint from scratch and building and saving a presentation very quickly, but this set of video is about
• 00:32 presenting and designing effectively so that your work has clarity and achieves results. So let’s continue with this video. When you first open
• 00:41 PowerPoint, you’re likely to see a slide and the ribbon or a thumbnail of a slide. If we click file and new, there’s a range of presentations
• 00:49 already preloaded here. There’s sample templates and themes already installed on our computer, or we can click a particular folder or
• 00:58 an icon and browse further. Now I’ve just pasted some text in that I copied to the clipboard earlier with the keyboard shortcut CTRL V and let’s
• 01:07 search for a business strategy presentation. And so we can click on a thumbnail and we can see a preview of the first slide and a bit of information
• 01:15 about the template. This one seems ok, click download. And there PowerPoint has downloaded that template ready for me to work
• 01:22 on straight away. I notice in the status bar that this slide is one of seven slides, and each slide has some recommended content that we can
• 01:31 use. So we can go away and build upon that and get the presentation done. Next thing that we have to do is actually save that and so we go
• 01:40 file, now when I click save, PowerPoint already pops up the Save As dialog box, because this is a new presentation that hasn’t already been
• 01:48 saved. If we just close the presentation down we could lose all of that information. Now there’s an area here where I can browse further through the
• 01:57 computer and so on, but I go to this folder, it’s the correct one, GoSkills, and there’s already a presentation in there. If I click on that and save it
• 02:06 will override that presentation and I would lose it and I don’t want to do that. So I paste in the text that I used before. I want to save as a
• 02:15 PowerPoint pptx presentation although there’s a range of others that I could save as. I could save as a show and various other formats. Some of
• 02:23 these I admit I’ve never used. So I name the file in my case, I paste in the text that I got before on the clipboard. Click save, and PowerPoint
• 02:33 goes away and does that and now my file is called Business Strategy.pptx which is now located within Windows Explorer. Now here is
• 02:43 the most important part. We need to work on this presentation from a proper storyboard, we need to add or delete slides or move them
• 02:50 around, build charts or tables, or whatever we need to do to get the story across. And after you’ve looked at enough presentations you will
• 02:58 get to recognize various templates, SmartArt graphics and effects, so please be different and stand out from the crowd. Be unique. Don’t be a
• 03:07 clone of everyone else. And as you go through the various modules you’ll learn to be fast and clear and have the confidence to try different
• 03:14 things so that you can be different. Now presuming that you’ve done all of this, you’ve built your presentation, let’s look at getting this
• 03:21 out to people. I go to the file tab again and we can print the document. We can print the presentation in a range of formats and that’s
• 03:30 covered in another video, or we click the save and send tab and look at the range of options: we can send it by email to various people as an
• 03:39 attachment, or as a PDF, I can publish the slides, or I can again save the presentation in a range of other formats. It’s amazing how quite
• 03:46 often you can do exactly the same thing in PowerPoint, in so many different areas. So I click on the save and send tab and we can
• 03:55 create a video, we can package for CD and even more. I’m going to create a PDF so I click the create PDF XPS document button. The publish
• 04:04 as PDF or XPS dialog box pops up. Make sure the file name is indeed named Business Strategy.pdf. I want to open the file after
• 04:10 publishing to look at it, and a standard size. So I click on publish and PowerPoint goes away in the background and publishes that. How long
• 04:20 that takes depends on the size and the complexity of your presentation as well as the resources of your computer. Remember this
• 04:27 presentation is actually not built yet, which is what you would normally do, so yours is likely to be a larger file size. Now that’s only 112kb
• 04:35 which is very small and it’s a great to share information with other people. So just remember that if you’re in a hurry there’s a bunch of
• 04:42 resources in the background of PowerPoint. Have a look at some of the templates and themes that are available, and use them as the
• 04:48 basis of creating and designing your presentation and you’ll get your work done so much faster. But be different. That is only the
• 04:55 start. Use the resources as a place to start your presentation, but certainly not the end of your work.

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