PowerPoint Workshop Handout
How to start a PowerPoint presentation from a template (and from scratch)
If you go to the Start menu (at the bottom left hand corner of the screen, and then up to New Office Document, you’ll open a window with several icons you can click on to start Office Documents. Two of them relate to PowerPoint—Blank Presentation, and Autocontent Wizard (with the Orange PowerPoint icon).
If you click on the Blank Presentation, it will start with a blank setup, but it will prompt you immediately for the type of slide you want to start with. After doing the title slide, you can then go to the Insert pull down menu and select New Slide, and you will be prompted again for the type of slide (which is helpful). Eventually, to have more than a simple black and white slide show, you will want to go to the Format pull down menu and select Apply Design Template to add an overall, colorful design to your slide show. (This is worthwhile, but beware of the obnoxious ones). You can change your mind later about the design and apply a new one whenever you want to.
If you click on Autocontent Wizard, you will be lead through a series of steps to select the Type, Style and Options for your PowerPoint Slideshow. Then the program will create a multi-slide generic slideshow that you can then go though and change to be your presentation. Also, at any time you can change the overall design template by going to the Format pull down menu and selecting Apply Design Template.
How to enter text, images and clipart
Entering text is similar to Word—the templates have preformatted insertion points where you can enter or replace text.
Placing pictures or clipart is also the same—simply go to Insert and then down to Picture, and then to either From Clipart or From File. After you place the image it should be “floating,” meaning that you can move it around and resize it as you please.
The lure and risks of special effects
PowerPoint has a slew of special effects you can apply to the Slide Transitions and Text flow, etc. Be warned that most of the effects can be obnoxious and distracting, so use the carefully.
To apply a slide transition to one slide (or all slides), go to the Slide Show pull down menu and select Slide Transitions. You can then pick from all sorts of transitions and apply them to that slide or all slides.
To apply a text flow effect, highlight the text you want affected, and then go to the Slide Show pull down menu and select either Present Animation or Custom Animation. Select the effect you want. To then see what it looks like, you need to change from Editing PowerPoint to Presenting PowerPoint, which is done by changing the view using the view buttons at the bottom left hand corner of the screen. The little button for normal editing looks like a white title slide. The little button for presenting the show looks like a projection screen on a tripod. Click on it, and then hit the mouse or right or left arrow keys to see how you animation will affect the text. To go back to editing, click on the normal Slide Show editing button again—little white title slide icon. There are also view buttons for Normal View, Outline View, and Slide Sorter view. Check them out.
In PowerPoint, less can be more. Instead of typing everything you are going to say into your PowerPoint slides, consider just listing your main points and then talking about them. One good way to each PowerPoint is to use the 4x4x4 method with students—no more than four slides, no more that four points per page, and no more than four words per point. If they can’t talk for a minute about any of the points, then those points are removed. The goal here is to use the slides as an outline for an oral presentation—not as a replacement.
Also for students, strongly consider having them do full MLA citations for every text and image source on the slide where the materials appear. There have been too many cases where documentation for PowerPoint has been forgotten about or done very poorly. If they don’t have the citation, the material has to be removed from the page.
PowerPoint can be printed out one slide per page, or two slides, or three, or four slides, or six, or nine slides per page. In the print menu, change from printing slides to printing handouts. With three slides per page, for example, there’s a nice area for notes beside each slide. If your group is small, it can be really nice to print out the presentation in this format and hand it out to your audience for future reference. There are also Outline and Notes printout options (which can be used as your hand-held notes during the presentation. Check them out.
Saving Presentations as web pages
A good PowerPoint presentation can make a pretty good web page, and this can be done very easily.
One way is to simply email your PowerPoint file to Lou Paff and have him process it for the web.
Or, you can do it yourself by saving it as a web page. Do this by going to the File pull down menu and selecting Save As Web Page. Please note that this will create two things—the web page file and an accompanying folder of files, and to publish this on the web you need to send both to Lou to process for the web page.
To see a sample PowerPoint Presentation that is on our web page, go to
http://www.oes.edu/LS/News/RisksBenefitsTechUse.html