Chap 2: Create presentations

2.1. Starting and saving presentations

To work efficiently with PowerPoint 2013, you need to know the best way to start a presen­tation. The screen displayed when you start the program provides the following options for starting a new presentation:

• Blank presentation: If you know what your content and design will be and you want to build the presentation from scratch, you can start with a presentation based on the Blank Presentation template.
• Design template: Creating attractive presentations from scratch is time-consuming and requires quite a bit of skill and knowledge about PowerPoint. You can save time by basing your presentation on one of the many design templates that come with PowerPoint. A design template is a blank presentation with a theme, and sometimes graphics, already applied to it. Some templates supply only a title slide and leave it to you to add the other slides you need; other templates supply an example of each of the available slide layouts.
• Content template: From the PowerPoint starting screen, you can preview and download presentation templates that are available from the Office website. These templates provide not only the design but also suggestions for content that is appro­priate for different types of presentations, such as reports or product launches. After downloading the template, you simply customize the content provided in the tem­plate to meet your needs.

You save a presentation the first time by clicking the Save button on the Quick Access Toolbar or by displaying the Backstage view and then clicking Save As. Both actions open the Save As page, where you can select a storage location.

When Computer is selected as the save location, clicking Browse in the right pane displays the Save As dialog box, in which you assign a name to the file.

2.2. Entering text in placeholders

On each slide in a presentation, PowerPoint indicates with placeholders the type and posi­tion of the objects on the slide. For example, a slide might have placeholders for a title and for a bulleted list with bullet points and one or more levels of secondary subpoints. You can enter text directly into a placeholder on a slide in the Slide pane in Normal view; or you can switch to Outline view, where the entire presentation is displayed in outline form, and then enter text in the Outline pane.

Exercise 1

Open a new, blank presentation, and save it as BuyingTravelA in Documents. Close the Notes pane, and then follow the steps.

1. On the slide, click the Click to add title placeholder. Notice that the cursor appears in the center of the box, indicating that the text you enter will be centered in the placeholder.
2. Enter Buying Trips. (Do not enter the period. By tradition, slide titles have no periods.)
3. On the View tab, in the Presentation Views group, click the Outline View button. Notice that the text you just entered in the title placeholder also appears in the Outline pane, adjacent to a slide icon.
4. On the slide, click the Click to add subtitle placeholder, and enter Ensuring Successful Outcomes, without the comma. (As you enter titles and bullet points throughout the exercises, don’t enter any ending punctuation marks.)
5. Press Enter to move the cursor to a new line in the same placeholder, and enter Allison Kalisa, Purchasing Manager.

6. Save the presentation.

              TIP We won’t usually tell you to save your work; we assume you will save periodically.

Now let’s enter text in the Outline pane.

 7. Click a blank area of the Outline pane to position the cursor to the right of the word Manager.

8. Press Enter, which creates a new subtitle line.

9. Press Shift+Tab, which promotes the subtitle line to a second slide, as indicated in the Outline pane by the slide icon. Notice that a new slide, with placeholders for a title and either a bulleted list or a graphic, is displayed in the Slide pane, and the status bar displays Slide 2 of 2.

10. Without clicking the slide, enter Overview as the title of the slide, and press Enter, which creates another slide.

 Instead of adding a third slide, let’s add a bullet point to slide 2.

 11. Press the Tab key to convert the new slide title to a bullet point with a gray bullet.

12. Enter Preparing for a buying trip, and then press Enter to add a new bullet point at the same level.

13. Enter Traveling internationally, and then press Enter.

14. Enter Meeting the client, and then press Enter.

 If you know what text you want to appear on your slides, it is often quicker to work in the Outline pane. Let’s add two more slides to the outline.

 15. Press Shift+Tab to create the third slide.

16. Enter Preparing for a Buying Trip, press Enter, and then press Tab to add a bullet point.

17. Enter Know your needs, and then press Enter.

18. Close the BuyingTravelA presentation, saving your changes if you want to.

Exercise 2

You need the BuyingTravelB presentation located in Documents to complete this exercise. Open the presentation, close the Notes pane, switch to Outline view, and then create a third slide which looks like the figure below:

2.3. Adding and deleting slides

After you create a presentation, you can add a slide by clicking the New Slide button in the Slides group on the Home tab. By default in a new presentation, a slide added after the title slide has the Title and Content layout. Thereafter, each added slide has the layout of the preceding slide. If you want to add a slide with a different layout, simply select the layout from the New Slide gallery, which changes to reflect the layouts available in the template on which the presentation was based.

1. On the Home tab, in the Slides group, click the New Slide button (not its arrow) to add a slide with the default Title and Content layout.

 KEYBOARD SHORTCUT Press Ctrl+M to add a slide to the presentation.

2.4.Importing slides from existing sources

If your presentation will contain information that already exists in a document created in Microsoft Word or another word processing program, you can edit that information into outline format, save it as a Word file or an .rtf file, and then import the outline into a PowerPoint presentation.

For the importing process to work as smoothly as possible, the document must be format­ted with heading styles. PowerPoint translates Heading 1 styles into slide titles, Heading 2 styles into bullet points, and Heading 3 styles into subpoints.

If you often include a slide that provides the same basic information in your presentations, you don’t have to re-create the slide for each presentation. For example, if you create a slide that shows your company’s product development cycle for a new product presentation, you might want to use variations of that same slide in all new product presentations. You can easily tell PowerPoint to reuse a slide from one presentation in a different presentation. The slide assumes the formatting of its new presentation unless you specify otherwise.