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...

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...