I'm organizing a team building workshop for my company, and I think a PowerPoint presentation
is just what we need. When I open PowerPoint a new, blank presentation
with one slide appears by default. If you want to create a new PowerPoint presentation
while you're already in PowerPoint, you can do this from the Microsoft Office Button.
Just click the button, and select New. The New Presentation dialog box appears and
Blank presentation is selected by default. You would just click Create and a new, blank
presentation would open. I'm actually just going to close this since
we already have a blank presentation open. By default, new presentations are given a
name such as Presentation 1 which you will want to change when you save the document.
Also, you'll notice that we are in Normal View which is the default view where you will
actually create your slides. In the big area here we have the slide pane,
which is where you will work directly on one slide at a time.
The default slide that appears is a blank Title Slide layout that has placeholders for
a title and subtitle. Placeholders are the boxes with the dotted
borders. They can contain many different things including
text, pictures, charts, and more. Let's start by inserting text into one of
the placeholders. Just click your mouse in the placeholder and
you'll notice that the placeholder text disappears and your insertion point is now visible.
Once you see the insertion point, you can begin typing your text.
We'll call this 2008 Team Building Workshop. And when we are done, we can click outside
the placeholder so we can see our text without the dotted lines.
And we can do the same thing with our subtitle and insert our text over the placeholder text.
Ok, now that we have our text on the first slide, I am ready to add a new slide.
To add a new slide, just click the New Slide Command.
A menu appears with your slide layout options. A slide layout arranges your slide content.
For example, you may want both text and a picture on the slide, or just a picture.
Layouts contain different types of placeholders that you can use depending on what information
you want to include in your presentation. For example, we have the Title Slide layout
that has placeholders for a title and subtitle. And a Title and Content slide layout where
you can insert a title and some content in the area below.
It looks like that content could be a variety of things such as text, images, charts, and
more. A Section Header slide, a Title Only slide,
one with content in two areas, and several other layout options.
The best way to become familiar with each of these layouts is to just give them a try
and see what works best with the information you want to include.
I have some info about what people can expect to gain from the workshop.
I think this slide layout will look best, so from the New Slide command, I'll just click
Title and Content. Now a new slide appears in the center and
in the pane to the left. We can type our title What You Can Expect
to Gain in the title placeholder, and then select the content placeholder.
You'll see some images in the center of the placeholder.
If we hover over each of these you can see some of the types of content you can insert
such as tables, charts, clip art, and photos, or if you want to insert text you can just
begin typing. As soon as you started typing, you may have
noticed that the icons disappeared. This placeholder now functions like a text
box, which we will learn more about in lesson 3.
When you're creating PowerPoint presentations, you'll want to remember to use the fewest
numbers of words possible to get your point accross.