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
• 00:11 we present about it to the CEO this afternoon at the executive meeting.” Where do they get these clever ideas from? And so there you are
• 00:19 sitting with a 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
• 00:27 fortunately, this video is about not only where to start, but this series of videos will help you understand very clearly how to build
• 00:36 presentations, make them effective, and achieve your outcomes. So in PowerPoint, when you first open it, you may see slides and ribbon or
• 00:46 indeed a thumbnail of a slide. If we click file, new, you may even see this which is called backstage and there’s a range of presentations
• 00:53 already preloaded here. You can click on a thumbnail, scroll across and see images of the slides, change particular variants, or you can
• 01:03 even search for a particular presentation such as Business Strategy in the search bar. Now I’m going to select this one and have a look at it,
• 01:11 scroll across, it seems ok, click create. And there PowerPoint had downloaded that template ready for me to work on. I notice in the status
• 01:21 bar that this slide is one of seven slides, and each slide contains recommended content that we could use. And so we could go away and
• 01:29 build that presentation and get the work done. Next thing that we have to do is actually save that and so we go file, and when I click save in
• 01:37 this version, PowerPoint automatically jumps across to the Save As tab, because this is a new presentation and hasn’t been saved. And if
• 01:45 you just close this down at this point you’ll just lose everything. So I’m offered locations such as SkyDrive, which is Microsoft’s online storage
• 01:53 system. I got to the computer and browse. I’m going to go to the GoSkill's library and the folder within that library. Now there’s already a
• 02:04 presentation in there. If I click on that and save it will likely override it and I don’t want to do that, so I paste the text in that I used before off the
• 02:13 clipboard. I want to save as a PowerPoint pptx presentation, although there’s a range of other things I could save as, such as a show and
• 02:23 some of these other formats, some of which I admit I’ve never used. So I click save, PowerPoint goes away and does that and now
• 02:29 my file is call Business Strategy.pptx and we can see that it’s also located within that folder in Windows Explorer. Now, here’s the most
• 02:39 important part. We need to work on this presentation from a proper storyboard, we need to add or delete slides, move them around, build
• 02:48 charts, or tables or whatever is needed to get the story across. After you’ve looked at enough presentations, you get to recognize various
• 02:56 templates, you see the same SmartArt graphics and effects so please be different, stand out from the crowd! Be unique; don’t be a clone of
• 03:05 everyone else. And as you go through the various modules and videos, you will continue to learn how to build quickly, how to be clear and
• 03:12 have confidence so that you can try different things. And so, presuming that you have done all of that, let’s now look at getting this
• 03:19 presentation out to people. If I go to the File tab again, we can print, we can share it, so I can send it by email to various people as an
• 03:28 attachment or as a PDF. I can publish the slides or I can export it, I can package for CD, create a video, or a PDF. So let’s create a PDF so I click
• 03:40 the button. The publish as PDF dialog box pops up; it’s already called it Business Stragey.pdf. I want to open the file after publishing to look at it
• 03:51 and as a standard size. So I click on publish and PowerPoint goes away in the background and publishes that. Now how long that takes
• 04:00 depends on the size and the complexity of your presentation, as well as the resources of your computer. Now notice that at this stage it’s only
• 04:07 a very small size and that’s great in terms of sharing information for people but this particular file doesn’t have the content that you would
• 04:16 really need and so your presentation should be bigger than this. So just remember that if you’re in a hurry there are a bunch of resources in the
• 04:24 background of PowerPoint as a place to start. Have a look at some of those templates and themes that are available and use them as the
• 04:31 basis of starting to design your presentation and you’ll get your work done faster. But be different and use the resources as the place to start your
• 04:40 presentation, and not the end of your work.

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