My recommendation is to choose your PowerPoint theme prior to building your presentation, because much of the placement of presentation elements will depend on the font sizes, placeholder locations, and background art of a theme.  Changing from one theme to another after the presentation is built can, in some cases, be very annoying because it requires lots of fine tuned changed to the presentation that are time consuming.  On the other hand, sometimes the change can be a breeze, and a new theme can breath new life into an old presentation.  It is easy enough to preview changes, to see if you want...

I’ve just got back into the office today, after taking a nearly five week vacation. (Yes, I really can accumulate a LOT of vacation time.) I lumped in a good deal of time staying around home, taking care of yardwork and such, and spending quality family time too. However, I also took a thirteen day road trip out to Saint Louis alone, and that made for an interesting experience that I wished to share. Preparing for my trip, I made what is for me a momentous decision: I would not bring a laptop with me on my travels. I’ve lugged laptops with me on flights before, so deciding against bringing...

Becoming proficient at the Office programs makes the difference between finishing your work early or staying late.  Or for the student, getting the assignment in without a sweat or staying up all night with tedious, time consuming operations.  This post on a minor topic is one of those “little things” that can make the difference.  It is about the context menu in the Normal View thumbnail pane (the narrow pane on the left of the screen in Normal View that displays a thumbnail of each slide in your presentation. Right-click any of the thumbnails in the thumbnail pane and you will see the...

In out last post we described creating a new PowerPoint presentation by creating a blank slide, adding text, creating another slide adding more text, and so on.  This is indeed the way many people build their presentations.  There are others who prefer to outline their presentation first, and then build the presentation based on the outline.  This post discusses the various ways to outline with PowerPoint or with Word or Notepad and then import to PowerPoint.  Finally, it discusses how to import a Word “outline” based only on Word document heading styles, a powerful technique to capture...

This one is a quick overview on how to create and save that very first, blank presentation in PowerPoint 2013.  For the bare beginner this can be a little daunting, but it is actually quite easy.  Step one, of course, is to develop the materials you will be using for the presentation.  Your topic will dictate whether you have charts, photos, tables, specific diagrams, and so on, of course, but for purposes of this post I want to go over the technique of creating and saving a presentation.  In future posts we will be working through the creation of an actual presentation on the topic of the benefits...

Today we will take a quick look at the various views in PowerPoint 2013.  While you will spending 95% of your time editing slides in what is called Normal View, it is important to understand the other views and to know why they exist.  Along the way we will discuss how to print a text outline of your presentation, print your speakers notes under a thumbnail of your slide, how to hide/unhide and/or re-arrange your slides, the new way to preview your slideshow, and a bit about the new presenter mode. As I say, Normal View is the dominant view, so PowerPoint starts in this view.  It is the view that...

Much has remained the same between the User Interface familiar to users of PowerPoint 2010, but the 2013 edition features some not insignificant tinkering around the edges and small improvements/relocations of interface elements.  The status bar at the bottom of the screen has been reworked, dialog launchers are still with us, but are on the wane in favor of task panes anchored to the right of the screen, the tab system and ribbon are in full flower, with some notable improvements, and there is a remarkable and very welcome improvement to labeling, formatting, and filtering charts.  This post will...

If you just don’t like the new Start Screen in PowerPoint 2013, and long for the days when PowerPoint started up with a plain, blank presentation there are a couple of things you can do about it. 1.  When you start PowerPoint 2013 and see the start screen, simply press escape and normal view will appear with a blank presentation loaded, just like the old days.  (The blank presentation is based on the minimalist default theme called Office). 2.  If you are one of those people who hates extra keystrokes you can change PowerPoint’s behavior permanently by clicking the File Tab, choosing...

As mentioned yesterday, the PowerPoint 2013 Start Screen has a search box that allows users to search thousands of templates and themes at office.com.  In this post I will describe how to create presentations from templates, how to pin templates to the Start Screen for later use, how to recognize and convert presentations to the new default 16:9 screen aspect ratio, and how to delete unwanted templates from your file system and get them to disappear from your start screen (not the same thing). Themes, Layouts and Templates First, let’s review some basic PowerPoint terminology.  Templates used...

The first time you start PowerPoint 2013 you will see the Start Screen.  The Start Screen is divided into four main areas: 1.  A Recent area with a list of the files you have opened recently. The default number of files that will appear here is 25, but may be changed in the File > Options > Advanced > Display area.  Of course, the very first time you open PowerPoint the list will be empty, but it will populate over time. 2.  Beneath the Recent area is the Open Other Presentations area. Click this link in order to search your file systems, both local and cloud-based. Note that I have...