10 Best PowerPoint Tips and Tricks

You all must have ended up making poor PowerPoint presentations due to rush or lack of time. A presentation must be good enough to draw the attention of your audience and keep them intrigued.

Below mentioned are the top 10 tricks to create a PowerPoint presentation in a short period of time:

Simple Presentation

A PowerPoint presentation must be simple and should not contain any vibrant themes or graphics. This usually distracts your audience from the subject.

There are a lot of tools that make your PowerPoint presentation appealing, such as audio clips, transitions etc. But use them only if they’re required and not just to pile up and experiment.

Customized Background

PowerPoint allows you to select a theme for your presentation that is similar to your topic. Not only it picks up a theme, but you can also customize it accordingly.

To customize a background:

• Go to the ‘Menu Bar.’
• Click on ‘Design Tab.’
• Select the ‘Page Setup’ button.

You can also customise width and height of background accordingly. Also, you can enter the amount of slides you want your customise background to be put.

Duration of the Transition

A Transition in Microsoft PowerPoint is the effect applied when you jump from one slide to another. Transitions make your presentation more presenting, but it is also essential to set the duration for the same.

• Go to the ‘Transition’ tab.
• On the right side of the screen, the ‘Section Timing’ option will be available. Here, you can set the duration for your transition.

You may set the same transition duration for all the slides by selecting ‘apply to all’ or by individually setting different durations for all the slides.

Set Audio with the Presentation

To set an audio file to your presentation:

1. Open Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation
2. In the ‘Insert’ Tab, select the ‘Media’ section.
3. Select the ‘Audio’ tool. A window will appear from where you can locate and select the audio file you want to put in the presentation.
4. Click on the ‘Insert’ tab.
5. To play the audio automatically across multiple slides, select ‘Play across slides’ from the drop-down.

Also, there are 3 other options available to you:

• Loop Until Stopped – The option plays the audio file on repeat until or unless stopped manually.
• Hide during Show – This option hides the audio icon while you play the presentation.
• Rewind after Playing – This option rewinds the audio/video clip once it is played alongside the presentation.

Zooming in-out

Sometimes you feel like putting more emphasis on certain content than the other. For example, pie charts, graphs etc. Thus, zooming it helps a lot.

This is placed on taskbar on the lower right hand side corner of the screen. By sliding the slider towards right will zoom in the screen, while sliding it to the left side will zoom it out.

This can also be done with the help of a keyboard by simply pressing the ctrl key and use the mouse.

Use of SmartArt

Using SmartArt in a PowerPoint presentation is a smart move to represent various organizational charts or hierarchy of something.

The steps to create a smart art or an organisational chart are:

• Click on the ‘Insert’ tab.
• Select the ‘SmartArt Graphic’ in the ‘Illustrations’ section.
• Opt for Hierarchy.
• Pick a layout from the right side and click ‘Ok.’
• Hierarchal Box lets you write the text you want to mention.

Inserting Watermark

You must have heard about one’s copyright? Copyrights are made to save one’s work from copying. For protecting your content from being stolen by any other party, you can add a Watermark to your content.

Following are the steps to do so:

• Open the Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation.
• In the view tab, select ‘Slide Master.’
• After this, Select the type of Watermark you wish to add as text, image etc from the insert tab.
• Once selecting of Watermark is done, you can place it to the right position.
• Go to ‘Close master View’ option in the ‘Slide Master’ tab and save your watermark.

Text Shadow

This is also an option to make your presentation look creative. Just as mentioned above, do not add a lot many things as it diverts the attention of your audience.

Here are the steps in case you want to try this tool:

With the help of the mouse, drag and select the text. In the menu bar, you’ll see a ‘Format’ tab appear.

Select the ‘WordArt Styles’ section and then the ‘Text Effects’ button.

A sub-menu will appear. This sub-menu will contain a variety of text formats that could be applied to the text. You can also take a live preview before applying any of these.

Put your Presentation to Loop

Putting your PowerPoint presentation on the loop will continuously play your slides with a pause. For doing so, the steps are:

• Open the PowerPoint presentation.
• Select the ‘Slide Show’ tab.
• Press the ‘Set Up Slide Show’ button.
• Now, put a tick on the checkbox for loop under show options.

Saving Presentation as PDF

Sometimes you lose all the formatting in case you open your file on some other device. Presentations can be saved as Pdf files too.

Steps for the following are:

• Once making of the presentation is completed, go to the ‘file’ option and select ‘save as.’
• Give a name to your file and choose a location.
• Keep the file type as ‘Pdf’ next to the ‘save as type’ drop down menu.
• Click ‘save.’

Source url:- https://williamsblogpoint.wordpress.com/2020/05/07/10-best-powerpoint-tips-and-tricks/