 creating presentations with PowerPoint. When deciding on a tool to use to create your presentations, the first thing that probably comes to mind is PowerPoint. With the PowerPoint desktop app and browser app, you have a lot of options to choose from, making it an excellent choice. Creating a great PowerPoint presentation is a skill that anyone can benefit from, both in the classroom and in the workplace. It's no wonder that it's been an industry standard for years. That being said, it can be very easy to make your presentation look dated or cluttered. There are so many new features on newer versions of PowerPoint to take advantage of, that it can be overwhelming trying to create the perfect presentation to go along with your meticulously researched content. This is why it's so important to learn how to create a PowerPoint presentation from scratch. Even if you're familiar with PowerPoint, a refresher will help you to make a more engaging, professional slideshow. The first step is outlining your content. Decide on a working title and some main points that you want your audience to take away from the presentation. This will give you a rough structure that you can begin to fill in with more details. If you can, try to frame your content as a narrative. Stories and personal anecdotes help your audience to relate to you and your content. To learn more, watch our storytelling video on the Learning Portal. The narrative format can help keep an audience engaged, but you need to back these stories up with relevant data and examples to boost your content's credibility. This can be done through relevant charts or infographics to keep your presentation visually interesting. Once your content is nailed down, you're going to begin to design your presentation. First, open PowerPoint, and a page with templates will pop up. Here you can choose from one of Microsoft's pre-made template designs or create your own by clicking blank presentation. If this window does not appear, simply click File in the top left corner, then New Presentation. Under the Design tab, you can play around with the different slides and color templates or create your own color and font scheme to begin a custom design. There's also a tool called Designer that generates design ideas based off your content. If you do decide to use a PowerPoint template, try to make it your own by editing the design. Select View in the top menu bar, then click Slide Master. Make any changes you like, then click Close Master. This will apply to the entire presentation, so you won't have to edit each individual slide. Create a variety of slides for different purposes. You don't want your content to be the only thing differentiating your slides. Slide after slide with the exact same design will get repetitive and tedious for your audience to pay attention to. If you use the same style but create multiple variations, this will keep things interesting. At minimum, you should have a title slide and various layouts for content slides, i.e. a slide that has space for an infographic or a short video, a slide that compares two things or a slide that is mostly text. There are also layout options in the Home tab to help you get started. Once you've created a slide designer layout, you can simply duplicate them to use throughout your presentation before inputting your content. To do this, navigate to the left pane and right click on the thumbnail of the slide you want to duplicate. Then choose Duplicate Slide from the menu that appears. From there, you can customize it to meet your needs. A significant part of PowerPoint's content is usually text. You don't want to overwhelm your audience with too much written content per slide, but you still want to touch on the main points of your presentation. Think about your audience and assess your written work to imagine how it will be received by your specific demographic. Typography can also play a huge part in this. Choosing the right fonts is important. You want something clean and professional that won't be difficult to read or distract from your content. Play with font weights to emphasize certain sections like using bold for titles, semi-bold for subtitles, and regular for the body content. Feel free to offset the font you use for the body of your presentation with something more fun or stylish in moderation. No matter what fonts you end up using, make sure that you're consistent so your presentation looks cohesive. If you're loading your presentation onto a computer other than your own and you have to incorporate new or unusual fonts, make sure you save the font with your presentation. To do this in PowerPoint, go to File, then Options, and click Embed Fonts in the file box. The Insert menu has the potential to be your best friend when creating a unique PowerPoint presentation. You can insert images you found on the web or created yourself, as well as utilize Microsoft's huge library of images. More recent versions of PowerPoint now come included with a large collection of images, icons, cut-out people, stickers, and illustrations. From the Insert tab, tap Icons. Here you can search for and choose your desired graphic. This goes for videos as well. Click on Videos in the Insert menu. You can upload your own, insert something from the web, or browse Microsoft's stock video library to find something that meets your needs. PowerPoint also provides the user with a bunch of great shape options. With some formatting, the potential for a good design with shapes is almost endless. Click on Shapes from the Insert tab to explore all the options. When you draw a shape, a menu called Shape Format will automatically appear. Here you can use Edit Shape to change shape to something different while maintaining the original size or even edit points to create a completely custom shape. If you have multiple shapes on your page, you can select them and tap Merge Shape. Here you can choose from Combine, Union, Intersect, Subtract, and Fragment to create a variety of custom combinations and more accurately measured custom shapes. You're also able to take existing images and turn them into new custom shapes. Click on your image, select Picture Format in the option bar, then choose Crop and Crop to Shape. The SmartArt can also be very useful. It enables you to create diagrams, infographics, and flowcharts in no time to give your written content more visual interest. Simply click SmartArt under Insert and select a diagram that works best for you. From here, basically fill in the blanks with your own information. For more in-depth stats, you can use the Charts feature. Choose the type of chart that you wish to insert and then click. Use the small spreadsheet that pops up to enter your data. You're able to change the color and design of your shapes, charts, and SmartArt in the Format tab that appears when you click on them. Once your slides are designed just the way you want them, you can decide to add slide transitions or animations. Done well, they can add a little bit of movement and interest to your presentation. To access transitions, select the Transitions tab from the menu. From there, you can preview and select all the transitions you'll need. To further customize, click Effect Options and play with the features until you achieve your vision. Animations can be very interesting to reveal information or help to emphasize a specific point. To animate an element, first click on it, then choose Animations from the top menu. You will then be able to preview and choose whichever animation you'd like to use. Then you can customize it by selecting Effect Options. Here you can choose when you'd like the effect to appear and how you like it to behave. If you have multiple animations on one side, you can change their order by clicking on the Animations Pane button. When you've finished, save your presentation to an appropriate folder on your computer. Depending on where and how you're giving your presentation, it might be best to save your slides as PDFs. If anything goes wrong on the day of the presentation or the computer you're presenting on doesn't have PowerPoint installed, at least the slide content and design will be ready just in case. The only downside being any animations, transitions, or embedded video will not play. Just click File, Save As, and then choose File Format and select PDF from the dropdown menu. When your presentation is complete, it's time to begin rehearsing. The more you practice, the better you'll know the content and the technology and you'll settle into the presentation, thus appearing more comfortable and confident to the audience. PowerPoint has a tool called Speaker Coach, an AI feature that can help you rehearse your presentation by highlighting pace, wordiness, complexity, informal speech, and more. You can find this under the Slide Show tab. Click on the Rehearse with Coach. You can learn more about this in the Presenting tab in the module on the Learning Portal. If rehearsing on your own, try using Presenter View under the Slide Show tab. This tool includes a timer and a clock, a presentation display, and an area for notes where you can write anything you think could help your presentation, such as reminders or even spoken script. When the day comes for your presentation, you'll want to click Play From Start under the Slide Show tab and suddenly advance to your next slide or animation with a click. If you get stuck at all, there are plenty of helpful content as well as tips and tutorials on the Microsoft website and the internet as a whole. With this knowledge under your belt, you should now have the tools to create your best PowerPoint presentation yet.