 In this video, I want to talk about creating a PowerPoint that can serve as the background for a video. So there are some formatting principles that seem to be quite obvious, is that keep your text short, make your transitions proportionate to the needs of the video, not too many, perhaps not too few. Keep the background relatively simple and again relevant to the needs of what you're trying to show. Now, there are some tools that can help you with all of that inside PowerPoint and they are using smart art, icons and photos and also learning how to use a template to help make the creation a bit easier. So I want to focus here on smart art and icons. So smart art is a way of transferring outlines. This is an outline that came from my mind map. And then with one click of the mouse, I simply transformed that into a chart like that. And then I had to sort of do a few more things to make the formatting look like this. But then the other nice thing once I've done this, I can easily transform it into another format that perhaps looks like this or something like that. So smart art inside PowerPoint is very useful in letting you create some useful lists that aren't just unusual bullet points that people of course are talking about when they talk about death by PowerPoint. The other thing that you can do is use just simple text and full screen picture background. So that's something that is very easy to do in PowerPoint. Now you can bring in some online pictures. There are many sources of images. You can make them a bit translucent as well so that they're not perhaps as overpowering as as full as sort of fully colored pictures. And then you can get pictures for free, really nice, high quality pictures on Pixabay. And there are some other sources of information about other sources of free videos about Pixabay, pixels, or unsplash, or the two common sources that I recommend. You can get really, really good images and they're completely free to use, including for commercial purposes. Now PowerPoint also has many advanced functions. Now you can embed videos as backgrounds as you've already seen in some of my other videos. You can use 3D objects, transitions, animations, screen recordings, or you can save PowerPoint as video. So all of these things are also available to you in PowerPoint. So for example, if I want to embed a video like this, you can see there's a video as a background. So now all of a sudden I'm not just on a static page. I can also record my screen as I already said. And so this is an example of something you saw in the previous video, where now all of a sudden you see what was happening more. And in PowerPoint, there is a function for screen recording right inside my video, right inside the PowerPoint built-in. So as you can see, PowerPoint has many other features that you can use to build a nice video background. Now you should use them judiciously and perhaps, for example, transitions not to have too many or animations not to have too many. But the power of PowerPoint, I think, is something to perhaps explore. And there are many courses on lynda.com, for example, that can show you how to do some of the more advanced things with PowerPoint. And also online, many people can teach you how to create very complex PowerPoint presentations. And the important thing is to remember whatever you can put in PowerPoint can be your background in a video when we're using our tool RapidWork.