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Learn PowerPoint with this complete PowerPoint tutorial, quizzes and exercises.
PowerPoint is a powerful tool that was developed to help anyone create amazing presentations, no matter what their technical ability.
But too many people use PowerPoint the wrong way.
What is the wrong way?
Well, I’d say it was any way that makes your audience wish they weren’t watching your presentation. Or worse, puts them to sleep.
I am sure you have you seen PowerPoint presentations like that.
What made them boring?
Too much text?
Endless bullets?
Learn PowerPoint with this complete PowerPoint tutorial, quizzes and exercises.
PowerPoint is a powerful tool that was developed to help anyone create amazing presentations, no matter what their technical ability.
But too many people use PowerPoint the wrong way.
What is the wrong way?
Well, I’d say it was any way that makes your audience wish they weren’t watching your presentation. Or worse, puts them to sleep.
I am sure you have you seen PowerPoint presentations like that.
What made them boring?
Too much text?
Endless bullets?
Maybe the presenter just read the slides?
But PowerPoint presentations don’t need to be boring, and that is why I decided to create this course.
My goal for this course is twofold:
To teach you how to use PowerPoint, so you are comfortable and competent finding your way around the interface. When you need to create a presentation, I want you to feel confident in using PowerPoint, even excited.
To explore the basics of good presentation design. We’ll consider what makes a presentation boring and try our best to avoid those things. We’ll look at how you can keep your audience engaged and interested in what you are saying by strategically using the tools built into PowerPoint.
The ultimate goal of this course is to teach you to create engaging PowerPoint presentations that entertain and educate your audience, while keeping them awake and focused on you. I want to teach you to create PowerPoint presentations that you are proud of, and people talk about – in a good way.
This course uses PowerPoint from Office 365, so it is the most up-to-date version. If you use an older version, the screens may be a little different.
What is covered:
a thorough understanding of the PowerPoint interface and how to use it.
How to set up your PowerPoint presentations the correct way from the start.
The principles of good design when it comes to PowerPoint presentations. You'll learn about the mistakes most presenters make and how to avoid them in your own work.
The slide master, and how to use it effectively in your own workflow, to make creating presentations easier and more efficient.
How to insert objects into slides, align them, selecting them with the selection pane, Z order, grouping, and much more.
Adding an formatting text, including word art to add a fancy twist to your text.
Adding shapes, joining shapes, flipping and rotating, and the format shape options. We'll also look at the format Painter, as well as a range of merge tools built into PowerPoint to create new and interesting ways to manipulate shapes.
Adding pictures as well as removing picture backgrounds inside PowerPoint.
The benefits of adding vectors and icons.
Smartart.
Adding charts and configuring them to show only the information you want them to show, with a look at chart elements, and chart data.
Adding and configuring tables to hold data.
Adding audio and video.
Choosing the best transitions for your slides.
Adding animations to your slides and using them strategically to draw the eye of your audience to the part of the slide you are focusing on.
Transition and animation timing.
Motion path animations.
Using the animation pane to fine tune the sequence of animations on your slide.
Stacking animations so that a single object can have more than one animation on a slide.
Setting up the slideshow to run full screen or in a window, or using the outstanding presenter view which gives you all of the tools you need to create that perfect presentation.
Printing stuff, including handouts for your audience or notes for yourself.
The course includes over a dozen practice exercises for you to have a go at, as well as solutions to those exercises where appropriate.
With 12 quizzes, you'll be able to test your progress as you go through the course.
We will end the course by creating a demo presentation of a real-world application while trying to incorporate the ideas we discussed about good slide design to make our presentation stand out from the crowd. By the end of this course you will be both confident and competent in using PowerPoint to create amazing presentations.
This is a short introductory video on the course you are about to take.
This is a quick question to gauge your experience so far with PowerPoint, and for me to learn what you want to get out of this course.
An introduction to the purpose of PowerPoint.
There are lots of different versions of PowerPoint. This course uses PowerPoint 365, which is the latest version. The newer your version of PowerPoint is, the closer your screen will look like mine.
This lecture takes you on a quick overview of the PowerPoint interface.
The Quick Access Toolbar gives you access to the frequently used features in PowerPoint, saving you time.
The ribbon bar was designed to make navigation around the interface easier. Does it manage that? Well it depends how you work, but I like it. This video takes you through the various tabs of the ribbon bar.
This video revisits the status bar to look at it's features in a little more detail.
There are some very useful keyboard shortcuts in PowerPoint, even if you are not usually a shortcut user. This video shows you some essential shortcuts that I am sure you will use when designing slides.
A look at how to use the built in Spell checker on your presentations.
This video looks at selecting the correct language for your presentation.
Get some practice using and configuring the Quick Access Toolbar.
A quick exercise to create your own keyboard shortcut crib sheet.
This quiz will check your knowledge on the subject matter discussed in the introductory section of this course.
This lecture introduces this section on PowerPoint workflow.
In this video, we'll look at the options you have for creating a new presentation.
How many times has your computer crashed and you've lost everything? That's why saving is such a good idea, and in this video, we'll look at just that.
Changing the colour scheme, fonts and backgrounds of your presentations can be done on the design tab. This video shows you what is possible, and how your changes here affect the Slide Master.
The Slide Master controls the layout and design of your slides. This video is a quick Slide Master Primer.
There are a few ways to insert a new slide in PowerPoint. We'll explore those in this video.
The insert tab in PowerPoint is full of objects you can insert into your slides. In this video, we'll insert some objects into the slides we've created so far.
Animations can bring your slides to life. This video shows how to add animations to the objects on your slides.
These are visual transitions from one slide to the next. In this video, we'll play around with the transitions.
PowerPoint gives us a number of "presentation views" that we can use as we review and develop our presentation.
Before presenting the slideshow, it's always a good idea to check everything. The Review tab gives us some useful options.
And finally it's time to play our presentation. The slideshow tab allows us to set up and run the slideshow the way we want to.
Put your knowledge of PowerPoint to work and create a short presentation.
Tests your knowledge of the Basics covered in the Orientation section.
What will make your slideshow stand out from other slide shows? This video introduces the idea of good design that we'll cover in this section of the course.
Slides have a purpose. This video explains that purpose and gives an example of how a slide can be used to help clarify something for your audience.
The dimensions of your presentation is vital and the sooner you set this, the better.
PowerPoint has a built in grid and guides feature to help with your design. This video shows how you can use them, and customize them to suite your needs.
There are hundreds of fonts available to you, but that doesn't mean you should use lots of different fonts in your presentations.
With lots of colors available to you, how do you make sure your slide presentations meet with good design theory? The answer is to use a color palette.
Text is the basis of many presentations I have seen, and most of these presentations are enough to put you to sleep. This video looks at how text should be used.
Slides should not be cluttered with unnecessary information and distractions. This video looks at what that means.
If you've got data to show your audience, think about the best way of presenting that data. A table is rarely the answer.
Animations and transitions add a little movement and excitement to your presentations, but they are easy to abuse.
Slide reveals are essential to great presentations.
This lecture is an exercise to allow you the chance to put good design ideas to work.
Testing your understanding of the good design techniques discussed in this section.
This video introduces the slide master as a way to make your presentations consistent across the entire presentation.
The reason I don't use a slide master in the traditional way is because of the limitations they impose on creativity.
When you design your Slide Master, you can make good use of a number of placeholders that will designate areas of your slide for specific pieces of content.
Let's create a simple slide master from scratch.
A few tips and tricks for using your slide master to create a presentation.
Although pretty limited these handout masters can get copies of your slides to your audience.
The notes masters are probably a better bet for your audience, or for you as the presenter if you want to practice from a physical copy of your presentation.
A quick exercise to setup a Slide Master, save it as a theme, and then apply it to an existing presentation.
To check your understanding of the Slide Masters.
A presentation should tell a story and PowerPoint has a great toolbox for that end. In this section of the course we will start looking at adding and manipulating objects to help us make that story entertaining, educational, and enjoyable.
It's vitally important to be able to zoom into an area of the slide you need to work on, so this video shows how easy it is to zoom in and out to a specific area.
The ability to perfectly align objects on the slide is a skill you need to master. Fortunately, PowerPoint give you some great tools which we'll explore in this video.
Z-Order is the way objects on top of each other appear in layers. We can control these layers, and use them to our advantage, as shown in this video.
The selection pane is a useful tool for selecting objects in your slide. This video shows how to use it.
The ability to group objects means you can then treat multiple objects as a single item. This can be very useful, so we'll explore the options in this video.
This exercise will give you some practice at adding, aligning and adjusting the z-order of objects on the slide.
To check your understanding of the basic tools needed for inserting stuff.
There are a number of different ways we can add text to a slide, including text boxes, WordArt and shapes.
This video looks at the formatting options you have with text.
WordArt is a feature to add fancy, emphasised text to your slide.
Get some practice working with text boxes.
To test your knowledge on adding text.
This video will remind you of some keyboard shortcuts, and how to manipulate shapes on the slide.
This video looks at the range of shapes you can add, including draw-your-own polygons.
A nice feature is that you can snap lines to shapes, and they stick!
This video looks at flipping and rotating shapes.
Every shape you add to a slide can be manipulated to look the way you want it. This video looks at the options you have for those shapes.
All shapes can have text in the middle. This video looks at the options available to you for formatting that text.
The format painter is an easy way to copy the style of one object and paste it onto another object.
You can change the shape of any object on your slide by editing the points that define it. This video shows how to do this.
The ability to merge shapes together in different ways, gives you plenty of options when designing your slides.
Here is a task for you to try for yourself. I'll show you how I did it in the next video, but have a go yourself, first.
This is my solution to the previous Union Jack flag task I set you.
Get some practice adding shapes and manipulating them.
To test your knowledge on adding shapes in PowerPoint.
This section of the course looks at the variety of pictures you can insert into your PowerPoint slides.
In this video, we'll look at adding pictures to a slide, and manipulating pictures.
This video shows you how to remove the background from an image you insert.
Vectors and icons are images that offer a couple of unique features, which we'll discuss in this video.
This video looks at the SmartArt options in PowerPoint.
This exercise will give you some practice manipulating images.
To check you have the basics covered.
This section of the course looks at adding charts to a presentation.
Adding charts is easy in PowerPoint, and this video looks at the different types of charts natively supported by PowerPoint.
Charts can contain quite a lot of elements to help provide the information you need for your presentation. In this video, we'll go through the chart elements and see how to show/hide those elements.
The most important part of any chart is the data, so this video explores how you can edit the data, and only display the parts of the data you want included.
Since we are about to look at formatting elements of a chart, I thought I would share this tip.
This video looks at the formatting options for the chart title.
This video looks at the formatting options for the chart legend.
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