February 1, 2003

Students and professionals alike, at some point in time during their careers, are asked to give a presentation related to a course item, an assignment, an introduction to something, a product review or a progress report. With multimedia being integrated into all institutions, businesses and offices, gone are the days of overhead projectors and A4 or 35mm transparencies.

We now live in age of hi-fi data-shows, laptops and remote controlled presentations with 3D surround sound systems. What does that mean to people who are going to deliver a presentation?

Simple, they have to make it over a PC and a software of choice — Microsoft PowerPoint, being the most widely used one. No doubt, making a presentation in PowerPoint is not a big deal. Even your school-going brother can do it, but to make it effective, sleek and sophisticated is what we are concerned about in this article. Maybe you think it is difficult but, believe me, it is not difficult at all. Everybody can learn to do it with just a little effort. Just remember: what your audience would like to see is something that stands out, something that’s not run of the mill — something really creative. Now what you to do? The answer is to make use of facilities provided by the software itself and use some of your own creativity and aesthetic sense.

Slide layout

We are talking about PowerPoint XP here, as this is the latest version available. When you press the New File button, what you see is a blank presentation with two items of texts, Click to add title and Click to add subtitle. This is the default Slide Layout — the key to ensure proper content placement on your slide throughout the presentation.

You can change the layout from the Task Pane. This pane is there on the right side of your PowerPoint screen and if it’s not there (or you have close it), use View a Task pane to make it appear again. At the top of task pane, you see the aspect of your presentation you want to change. At first, Slide Layout is selected by default.

Inside the pane, there are different categories of layouts namely; Text, Content, Text and Content and Other Layouts. Choosing these layouts, you lay the basic foundation and places where your items would go in the presentation. Assuming we have to have a headline at the top, with some text in bullet form, on the left hand side, and a picture on right hand side — we select the first layout from Other Layouts (you have to scroll down in the Task Pane to browse the layouts).

The main advantage of using Slide Layout is that it helps placing content on each slide at exactly the same position. Bullets appear automatically with fonts sizes pre-set to look good. On each slide, you will see the place holders Click here to. . ., where you can put in your desired text. Forget about changing manually the fonts, colours and attributes.

Slide design

There is a dropdown box at the top right corner of the Task Pane. Click to see that its Slide Layout selected at this time. Select Slide Design > Design Templates from the dropdown list. As you see, the dropdown has three categories for Slide Design. When you select any of these three, the rest two appear inside the Task Pane so that you don’t have to go to the dropdown list again to select them.

In the Design Template view, you will see a collection of background themes for your slides. As you click on them and see them applied to your slides, notice that how the colours and styles of Click here. . . texts also change. Say, you select a design which is predominantly blue in hue; title colour will automatically change to sky-blue. Bullet characters also change to fit in the theme of the design.

The text layout selected, you select the content theme here as well, but what if it’s the colour that’s not satisfying you? Here comes the way out, the Colour Schemes. The background you selected was not like an image pasted on your slide, Microsoft has kept it open to an extent that you can have the same background in some other colour, too. If you don’t like the sky to be blue, you can make it orange!

Slide master

What if you don’t like the default text layout for some reason? Say, you want every heading of the slide to be underlined or every bulleted text to be italics, using Slide Master, you don’t have to manually change these setting on each slide of your presentation. Go to View a Master > Slide Master. Here, you see the master layouts for your slide. For example, you select the text Click to edit Master text styles and turn it italics. (Click Close Master View from the box that appears on screen as soon as you enter the Master View). Now on your slide, you see the text Click to add text has turned italics.

Animated GIFs

In PowerPoint XP, you can insert animated GIFs. While designing, they appear static but during the slide show, they come to life! If you have some collection of animated GIFs over CDs, you can use them to add visual appeal to your presentation (also, you can use the internet to search for these). Keep in mind that transparent GIFs work best, as the background of your slide shows through them.

Header and footer

Go to View a Header and Footer. You are presented with a dialog box where you can select to display a piece of info you want to be seen on all the slides. In Date and Time, you can either have PP take care of inserting dynamic date (automatic update) or can insert a fixed date/time using text area called Fixed. You can put whatever you like in the Fixed filed, not necessarily date and time; the text appears on the bottom left. The second option is of Slide Number, handy to keep track of where you are in your presentation. The third field is Footer, whatever you write here is shown in the bottom center of your slides. You can place your title, assignment title or something of that sort.

Built-in pen

During the slide show, right click anywhere and select Pointer Options > Pen. Your mouse pointer appears with a pen icon — now you can draw, write, mark circles and lines on your slide screen. This doesn’t alter your presentation and is only temporary. You can remove the markings by again pressing right mouse button and selecting Screen > Erase Pen. When you start your slide show, there is no mouse pointer shown. By selecting pen, you introduce one. To hide it again, r-click on your slide and select Pointer Options > Hidden. There’s also an Arrow option there in the Pointer Options choices that shows the normal mouse pointer during slideshow.

What you shouldn’t do

Don’t change font style, colour and size of your text from slide to slide. All headings and text should be consistent. Also, bullet style used should be same throughout. All you text on all the slides should be placed at the same place. You don’t have to take care of these issues if you use the Slide Layout functionality properly.

With your content, be brief and to the point. Bulleted text catches attention more than chunk of filled text (which no one reads during the presentation!). Make sure you use a dark background for an onscreen projector — a data-show or some other device projecting on a curtain etc where your presentation wall is going to be white.

Remember, the more time you spend making your stuff, the more polished your presentation will look. Don’t wait till the eleventh hour if you want to have a professional looking presentation. Hope you do a little better the next time you give your presentation!

Next time we’ll take a look at some more features that are introduced for the first time in Power Point XP.

The writer is a young scholar of BS program at the University of Karachi

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