Presenting with PowerPoint

Today’s Goal: Better understanding of how to create effective PowerPoint presentations.

Planned Outcomes:At the conclusion of our conversation, you will have AT LEAST five new ideas about:

  • Creating a logical structure
  • PowerPoint logistics
  • Choosing and managing templates
  • Choosing and managing fonts
  • Finding and managing images
  • Downloading, inserting and editing video

Logical Sequence

  • Title – Get their attention
  • Topic – What’s it about? WIIFM? Motivate them to listen.
  • Outcomes – What will they be able to do?
  • Sub-topics – Overview of presentation
  • Individual sub-topic slides
  • Q + A
  • Summary and Review – Did they learn?
  • Closing – Motivation them to act.

PowerPoint Logistics

  • Projector brightness (3,000 lumens) ($448)
  • Cable types (HDMI or VGA with audio)
  • Cable length and male/female adapters (
  • Have and use a remote (range and batteries) ($8ebay)
  • Projector/screen/computer locations
  • Screen size (at least 8’) and dimensions (4x3 or 9x16)
  • Use Key Words – 6 x 9 Rule
  • Don’t count on wireless
  • Carry your presentation both on your computer and on a flash drive, just in case.
  • Understand your mouse – RIGHT CLICK provides menus/drop downs – be sure you know what is active or things will go in the wrong place or you will get the wrong drop-downs. Sometimes you have to double-click.
  • Consider handouts – copyright, volume, flow of program
  • Helpful keystrokes

Action / Shortcut
Start a presentation from the first slide / F5
Run the next animation or advance to the next slide / Enter or Spacebar
Return to the previous slide / Backspace
End a slide show / Esc or - (hyphen)
Jump to the first (or last) slide / Home (or End)
Jump to a particular slide / Type the slide number and press Enter
Go to a black (or white) screen or resume the slide show from a black (or white) screen / B (or W)

Choosing and Managing Templates

  • Set screen dimension DESIGN – PAGE SETUP. Probably 4x3.
  • Choose templates DESIGN – choose or scroll to bottom Go to Microsoft Online to download
  • Use Master Slides – VIEW – MASTER SLIDES Use the Slide Master (be sure to start with the top which is really the master) and choose your fonts and font colors.

Create one slide design that is just a single body text block. Some templates cannot be altered, but some are built using PowerPoint and you can change colors, add images or symbols. Adjust shading and other criteria. Maintain font size for all bullets.

  • Removing template from individual slides – RIGHT CLICK – FORMAT BACKGROUND.

Choosing and Managing Fonts

  • Font size 28-32 (32 best) for body text – 44 for heading. Some fonts that are the same size are bigger than others. (Nimrod, Times, Arial, Bodini, DokChampa,Vrindaare all 12 point) Don’t make fonts smaller because it won’t fit. FONT – CHARACTER SPACING – CONDENSED can help you fudge a little.
  • Taking fonts with you. Use SAVE AS and go to TOOLS. Choose EMBED FONTS and embed them all. This helps make sure that the fonts you choose are displayed when you get to another computer that might have a different set of fonts.
  • Use two main fonts – San serif (no tails – such as Arial) for the heading and serif (with tails – such as Times New Roman) for the body. At most add one more for excitement. Bold,italic, CAPITALIZATION and underline can be used for emphasis. Avoid crazy fonts.
  • Just because the color looks good on your computer doesn’t mean it will on the screen. Go for high contrast.
  • Use bullets for sub-points. Remove bullet spacing for main point or for no bullets at all – PARAGRAPH – BEFORE TEXT “0” – SPECIAL – NONE.
  • Control distance between lines PARAGRAPH – LINE SPACING. You can choose a specific part of the text or the whole text box depending on what you want to control. Set different spacing between continuous text and paragraphs of bullets.
  • If you mark a block of text or click on a whole text box, a DRAWING TOOLS tab should appear. Click on FORMAT and you can use TEXT EFFECTS to manage the text in a variety of circumstances.
  • TEXT FILL and TEXT OUTLINE are pretty obvious. Outline can allow you to use a weaker color (yellow – our favorite) text with a very high contrast outline.
  • The last tab TEXT EFFECTS is the interesting one.
  • SHADOW allows you to add a dark shadow around the text that can help highlight it similar to outline, but without reducing the font color space.
  • GLOW allows you to add a color “glow” around the text – significantly more than SHADOW. The glow comes up pretty weak and I like to use it to place text over pictures so the glow needs to be pretty strong to succeed. To get the strongest color, you have to choose MORE GLOW COLORS and then MORE COLORS. When you use those colors, they will be strong.
  • BEVEL makes the font look sexier. It works best on heading or title fonts because the letters are bigger and the difference is really noticeable. I usually just use the first one on the list.

Finding and Managing Images

  • Inserting Pictures
  • To insert a picture that you have, go to INSERT and then PICTURE. Go to wherever you keep your pictures to choose one already on your computer. Click on that picture and then RIGHT CLICK and COPY or click on the clipboard icon on your HOME screen to paste.
  • To best view the images on your computer, when you are in the folder where your pictures are, RIGHT CLICK then VIEW and then choose MEDIUM or LARGE ICONS. This will make it easier to find the image you want. If you want to find something you did recently, you would click on the SORT BY box in the upper right and CHOOSE DATE MODIFIED and the newest files will be at the top.
  • If you want to search for a picture elsewhere, Go to Click on IMAGES. Enter search terms – type in a description of what you want. If you don’t like the choices, try and rephrase your search.

Click on the image and it will open larger. Similar images will also be displayed to the right for you to consider. If the image isn’t at least 200 x 300 (500 is better), it will probably look fuzzy on the screen. When you see a white/gray checkerboard around an image, that means the image has no background and you can paste it directly onto your slide with no background. When you find the one you like, RIGHT CLICK on the image and choose COPY IMAGE. Go back to your PowerPoint and click PASTE from the main menu or RIGHT CLICK and PASTE.

  • Using PRINT SCREEN or Fn PRTSC to copy your current computer screen. Choose where you want to put it and PASTE.
  • Using the SNIPPING TOOL. If you don’t find it on your computer, use the FIND function at the bottom of your START MENU.
  • To make pictures (or anything) bigger or smaller, click on the object and pull the corner out or in. Pulling the corner helps to retain the pictures proportions.
  • More picture editing/managing using RIGHT CLICK
  • RIGHT CLICK – SIZE AND POSITION. With this menu you can crop the picture from any side and change its size proportionally (or unproportionally). Also, if you PASTE an image and it seems enormous, go to the width field on this screen and enter “8.” The image will now be smaller, but it will appear to be floating in never-never land. Drag it downwards and you will find the slide you are working on or RIGHT CLICK and CUT or CUT with the scissors icon on the HOME taskbar. Then go to your slide and PASTE it where you want it.
  • Layering images and text boxes – RIGHT CLICK – SEND FORWARD/BACK or FORWARDS/BACKWARDS.
  • Editing the picture – RIGHT CLICK – FORMAT PICTURE. You can adjust contrast and brightness to make image brighter or darker. You can also change the fill or border color on shapes.
  • Just as the DRAWING TOOLS tab came up when text was highlighted, a PICTURE TOOLS tab will come up when an object is clicked. Click on FORMAT and options will appear. There are preset options that you can choose from as well as specific options.
  • PICTURE SHAPE allows you to trim the image into one of many preset shapes.
  • PICTURE BORDER creates a border around the picture. The width and the style line can be chosen from many options.
  • Under PICTURE EFFECTS, there are a number of options. My favorites include:
  • SHADOW creates a shadow as if light is shining on the picture from a particular direction.
  • GLOW is similar to glow for text. It creates a colored glow around the image.
  • SOFT EDGES is interesting as it feathers out the edges of the picture. You might use it somewhere that text and image overlap. You can choose the depth of the edge.
  • BEVEL, produces a look like the edge of the image is finished in a nice way.
  • A unique type of image is a .gif. A .gif is an animated image that repeats a short action over and over as long as you let it. It works just like a picture as far as copying and pasting it onto a slide. When you do your search, do it for “school bus .gif” or “school bus animated” instead of just “school bus.” Some won’t work in Google so I ignore them. A number of times I have tried to go from Google to the web site a .gif is on, my anti-virus software has gotten excited, so I don’t do that anymore. These can get irritating, so don’t leave them on the screen too long.
  • Use and click on the satellite icon in the bottom left corner to create local images. The easiest way to move the images is the Snipping Tool.
  • Use your smart phone to gather local images and video. Email the images to yourself and copy and paste them into the PowerPoint.
  • Use ANIMATIONS. There are two kinds of animations.
  • The first is how slides transition. When you choose ANIMATIONS, you should see options. You can choose how and how fast slides will transition. I seldom use these.
  • The second is CUSTOM ANIMATIONS. These can be used for images, text boxes, shapes or video. This allows you to move things onto and off the screen and for bullets in a text box to appear sequentially. Once you have clicked on this and you click on the item you wish to animate you first choose, generally ENTRANCE or EXIT. There are multiple choices for each and when you choose one it will preview it for you. You can then choose how long that will take. By clicking on the little dropdown box that appears next to the item in the list, you can adjust when it will come in and how, whether it comes in with the previous item or with its own click. For text boxes, text will be animated – by paragraphs one at a time or as a whole.
  • Hint - Sometimes it is easier to create additional slides than mess with animations. In the line of little slides to the left of your screen, click on the slide you were going to animate, RIGHT CLICK – COPY, or just choose COPY at the top left of the screen, then click right below the slide and choose PASTE by the same actions. Now you have a duplicate of the first slide and you can add or subtract whatever you wanted to without messing with the animations. This way you don’t have items stacked on top of each other so it’s hard to work further on the slide.

Downloading, Inserting and Editing Video (and Music)

There are three ways to put video into a PowerPoint. You can insert them, embed them or hyperlink them. I have had much better luck with inserting.

  • To download a video from use the search function to find your video and then insert the letters “ss” into the URL. This uses the program. You can download the program or just use it without downloading (my preference). So if the video address is then get your cursor right before the “youtube” and type in “ss,” so the URL will be www.SSyoutube.com/xxxxxxxx. Hit enter and a screen will appear to download the video. Click on download and the video will be downloaded to your DOWNLOADS folder. You can move it from there to wherever you are building your presentation. This may work from other sites with video libraries; it will not work for videos on TV station web sites. There are some programs that will do that, but it involves loading a lot more stuff on your computer. Most of the good stuff gets to Youtube pretty quickly.
  • Editing the video is the next step. Very often a download has just what we want plus a lot of stuff we don’t. If the video is a news story, we might only want the actual video of the accident taking place. So now that you have the video on your computer, open Movie Maker. (It is on just about every non-Apple computer and they probably have a similar program.)

You can also use this to convert video you get from sources that your computer doesn’t want to play. Often stuff from phones or camcorders is in a format that your computer doesn’t like. You can simply import it and then save it in the standard format provided.

  • Movie Maker has a function that creates Movie Maker Projects. This allows you to work on a project and save it in the working format to continue at a later time. If you are working on a longer project, then use this. If you are just trimming a video and creating the segment you need all in one sitting, then you don’t need to worry about “projects.”
  • You add video(s) to Movie Maker just as you would choose a file for any other program. You can add one or more videos, just have them in the order you want. At the bottom of the screen on the right is a slider bar that allows you to set the compression of the imported video above. The “+” setting will allow you to work with more detail.
  • Sometimes when you import a video, Movie Maker decides it needs to clean it up. If so, a bar will open on the bottom left and you will be able to observe its progress. Nothing you can do to stop this.
  • First, click on the PROJECT tab and choose the dimension of the screen you will be projecting on – probably 4x3.
  • Next click on the EDIT tab. This will allow you to create a new START or END POINT for the video and discard the rest. It will also allow you to SPLIT the video. When you split the video it helps you create segments. If you split it at the beginning and end of a piece you want to take out, you can then DELETE it. You can also create segments and drag them around – change their order.
  • There are two ways to set these points – you can use the slider under the main video or you can click on a spot in the lines of video on the right. There is usually some trial and error trying to get it just right.
  • The ANIMATIONS tab allows you to create transitions between segments – fade in for instance.
  • The HOME tab let’s you do a bunch of stuff. If you click on one of the little icons with an “A” in it, a whole set of TEXT TOOLS will come up that you can use to overlay text on the video.
  • The SNAPSHOT icon lets you create a still image of whatever frame the video is showing. It will then lead you to save that image, perhaps in your pictures folder – you choose – so that you can import it into your PowerPoint. You could use that as your hyperlink object.
  • If you have imported video from a phone and it is upside down or sideways, there are icons to straighten that out on the HOME tab.
  • There is more there, but I’ll jump to how do you save the movie. Again on the HOME tab, choose SAVE MOVIE. It will ask you where to put it and what to call it. Use the format (.wmv) that it suggests and save it like any other file.
  • Hyperlinks need to be “linked” to an object.
  • This requires you to go to the computer and click on an object. If you don’t want to have to aim too hard, you can create a rectangle, INSERT – SHAPE – choose the rectangle and make it the size of the whole screen. RIGHT CLICK and choose FORMAT OBJECT and choose NO LINE and make the FILL COLOR 100% transparent. This will create an invisible object that you can click on anywhere on the screen. Remember that once you put this there, you can’t get at stuff underneath it without moving it.
  • So if you RIGHT CLICK on any object, one of your choices will be HYPERLINK. This will take you to a screen that gives you lots of choices – such as files on your computer (a movie you have saved or a different PowerPoint or other file) and places you have search recently.
  • If the file is on the computer, browse for it like you would for any file. If the video is on the internet, copy the URL, go to the address line RIGHT CLICK and PASTE the address into the space.
  • You can also use the hyperlink to jump to another place in the presentation without forwarding through all the slides you decided not to cover.It also allows you to jump to a specific different file while within your current presentation. For instance, you might plan your presentation in a way that you want to skip some slides or a video if you are running late.
  • Inserting Video
  • My personal preference is to insert a video. INSERT – MOVIE choose movie from a folder. (If you are using PowerPoint 2010 or newer, the Windows Explorer Insert Video dialog box, select the file you want, click the drop-down on the Insert button, and choose “Link to file” rather than “Insert.”) You will be asked if you want it to start automatically or when clicked. Automatic is easiest. Don’t move to that slide until you want it to play.
  • When you have clicked on the video, you will see a bar for MOVIE TOOLS, chose that and you will be given a few options. You can choose for the movie to play full screen – probably, you can adjust the volume level or choose for it to be muted and you can choose for it to continuously replay or to just play once.
  • If the video has black space on the right or left or top and bottom it is because it was created for a different screen size. You can stretch the video off the screen on the sides so that the black part is off the slide so that the actual video image playing will be larger.
  • The third way to put video into a presentation is to embed it. Since Office 2010 PowerPoint has been using embedding as the default because everyone forgot to bring along the videos that they had linked to their presentations when they left their own computers. Embedding is very simple, but drawbacks are it may not work on earlier versions of PowerPoint and the video becomes a permanent part of the PowerPoint file which means that the file can grow to an enormous size, which could prove awkward for moving it around, emailing it, etc. To embed a file, open a standard slide and click on the movie icon that is in the group of icons in the middle of the largest text box. Navigate to where the video is on your computer and choose it to embed it in the presentation.
  • Music works very much like video. INSERT – SOUND. Your computer might also dislike some audio files such as .wav files. To convert audio files, save it to your computer and then use to import and convert the file to .mp3.

Thanks for Listening