Microsoft PowerPoint Essentials

Description

The chances are good that you will, someday, be required to create a presentation. And there’s no denying that adding visuals to your presentation will make it stronger, more engaging, and easier to understand. One of the best tools you can use to create strong visuals that will enrich your presentation is Microsoft PowerPoint.

Flexible, easy to use-and even fun-PowerPoint is a dynamic and practical application that can help you improve your presentations by enhancing them with visual elements, so your audience better understands and engages with the information you are providing. With templates and tools that range from the simple to the sophisticated, you can easily create images, animations, charts, maps, graphs, and more without needing expensive design programs or graphics tools.

The Great Courses has partnered with ITProTV to bring you 33 lessons that will introduce you to both the fundamentals and some of the lesser-known tricks to making phenomenal presentations using PowerPoint. In addition to being introduced to the PowerPoint environment, you’ll learn tips on how to add slides to a presentation, insert text and images, and create tables and charts. From there, you’ll learn how to enhance a presentation with design themes, animations, and transitions. And, you’ll get valuable tips for preparing and delivering a robust presentation. While this series uses the Windows operating system with PowerPoint 2016 locally installed, you’ll find the interface and tools within many versions of PowerPoint remain the same or similar enough that you can easily navigate different applications.

University of Florida faculty member Vonne Smith started her teaching career with a global IT training company, teaching Microsoft® Office and Adobe® Creative Suite applications more than 15 years ago. She knows PowerPoint inside and out, including the elements that most commonly frustrate users. Accompanied by her co-hosts Aubri Spurgin and Wes Bryan, she will take you through adding text and tables, inserting images and icons-even creating or adding 3-D models.

Professional, Practical, Personable, and Powerful

Much like defining yourself as a “cat person” or “dog person,” many Microsoft Office users consider themselves “Excel people” or “PowerPoint people.” Those who find joy in creating pivot tables and inserting automated mathematical formulas into Excel cells may dismiss PowerPoint as being a creative program for clip art and star-wipe animations that prioritizes appearance over logical functions. Yet, PowerPoint is packed with practical uses-including highly developed tools for charts, graphs, and tables.

Consider the chart. Professional-looking charts are fairly easy to create and manipulate in Excel. Many Excel users probably would not consider turning to PowerPoint for chart creation. Yet, with a number of preformatted and templated chart options-some quite stunning-you’ll find it’s simple to translate complex data into easy-to-understand visuals and go beyond the standard limitations of Excel by personalizing the visuals with colors, fonts, and images.

With Vonne as your guide, you will discover how to use:

Data series;
Category axes;
Legends;
Data labels; and
Data tables.
Once you’ve mastered the components of your chart, you’ll examine how to enter and edit data, insert a chart into your presentation, and change the type of chart you wish to use without losing your data.

Crafting Creative Communications

While there are loads of practical tools in PowerPoint, at its heart, it’s still a creative program. Vonne delves into how to “spice up” your presentation with graphics and visuals. Starting with the foundations of how to use images including file types, resolution, and image size, Vonne takes you through the steps to insert various types of graphics-from photographs to screenshots. You’ll learn how to edit and recolor images right in PowerPoint. And she’ll continue to provide professional tips such as how to compress images to keep your presentation a manageable size.

In addition to images, Vonne will cover how to use shapes, where she’ll also introduce you to helpful tools such as:

Resize;
Rotate;
Format gradient fill;
Align;
Group;
Merge; and
Ruler guides and smart guides.
And, for Microsoft Office 365 subscribers, Vonne will share some ways to take your presentation visuals even further with 3-D models.

Awesome Advice for the Amateur and the Accomplished

If you’re new to PowerPoint, going through this course step by step, you’ll gain everything you need from the foundations to the finishing flourishes. If you’re experienced with PowerPoint, this course offers valuable techniques and uncovers tools that are often overlooked, and which can make your work much easier-and better overall.

Rounding out the insights provided about using PowerPoint itself, Vonne concludes with an overview on how to present your slideshow so you can feel confident about the technicalities of your delivery.

You don’t need to master fancy design programs or animating tools to incorporate visual cues and multimedia into your presentation. PowerPoint’s easy-to-use interface, combined with sophisticated templates, allows you to create visually stunning, engaging, and impactful presentations. Once you’ve uncovered all the tips and tricks to making phenomenal presentations, you’ll wonder how you managed without it all this time.