Inevitably, a professor will assign a PowerPoint presentation for you to put together. Slide shows are all well and good (and slightly more interesting than writing an essay), but I’ve seen many that lack a certain coherence. Or maybe I’m just old-fashioned and like to think that a slide show that’s meant to be a single entity should also have a uniform design from slide to slide. Either way, I believe using the master slide is the easiest way to maintain a PowerPoint.

How to use the Master slide
The master slide can be found under View > Master > Slide Master. To go back to normal view, just go to View > Normal.

Changing the format of the text is also easy. Just highlight the text and change the font and color as you normally would. The body text is independent from the title text.

Any pictures that you have in the master slide will show on all slides. While that in itself is a nuisance, I’ll outline later how it can be used to your advantage.

One: Making a background without an image editor
Maybe other people will tell you something different, but I believe that the background of the slides makes a huge difference in presentation coherence. Yes, I know how much it delights some people to bombard their classmates with a midnight blue background followed by a bright yellow, but I find that annoying. And it hurts my eyes.

That doesn’t, of course, mean that your background has to be boring. Since you can adjust the brightness, contrast, and size of picture right in PowerPoint, you can make a nice background with a stock photo. First, find a picture that you like on Google Image Search or something similar. It doesn’t have to be particularly large or clear, but it should be something that won’t distract your audience. You probably should not use portraits of people because they distort easily. For example, my most recent presentation was one of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, so I chose a picture of the book on the right.

Save the picture and import it into PowerPoint by using the following commands: Insert> Picture> From File. Now drag the picture so that it aligns with a corner of the slide. (This is so that you may be able to move it around after you send it to the back.) Since we’ll be using this as the background, send it to the back of all layers by doing right-clicking on the image and doing the following: Order> Send to back. This way, you’ll know that it will always be behind the text, even if new dialog boxes are added.

Now, drag the corners of the picture so that it fits the slide. You shouldn’t be too worried about distortion, unless you went against my advice and decided to use George Washington’s face as your background. And graininess doesn’t really matter either, as it’ll be taken care of in the image adjustments.

Next, right-click on the image. You should have a menu that has an option that says “Format Picture.” Click on it. If you don’t have this menu, make sure that you have the image selected. You’ll know by the white dots on the corners of the picture. Since the picture is behind all of text boxes, you need to click on a place where the text boxes are not.

In the Format Picture dialog box, click on Picture. Here you will have the Brightness and Contrast bars. Adjust them as you see fit. Making something brighter will make darker colors on them easier to read; decreasing the contrast will keep any places from being purely black (however, you won’t have very much white, either). When you’re done with that, you now have a nifty background, without using an outside image editor!

Two: Changing the Fonts
This one is slightly less complicated than making a background. But it’s just as important.

Here is the cardinal rule for main text: it has to be readable. And not just almost, maybe, I-think-I-can type of readable, I mean boringly so. Which means you’re stuck with the usuals: Tahoma, Verdana, Times New Roman, Arial, and maybe, just maybe, Garamond. I prefer Garamond myself. Sometimes, fonts like Century Gothic don’t work on other computers, so if you’re planning on showing the presentation in a class where you can’t bring your laptop, you should stick to the old staples.

Titles give you a little more leeway to play with font face and color, but you might run into some problems if the font you’re using in the title isn’t on another computer. In this regard, you have a couple of options. One, of course, is to make a widely-used font larger and more stylized. (PowerPoint offers a drop shadow style that makes nice-looking headlines.)

Or, you can embed fonts so that they will definitely show up on another computer. While this guarantees that your fonts will show up, it also makes the file size larger. But if you want, here’s how to do it: go to File> Save As…. In the Save As dialog box, click on Tools> Save Options…. Then check the box that says “Embed True Type Fonts.” And there you go, your fonts are definitely going to show up when you present in class.

Three: Navigation Buttons
While this may not be practical for linear presentations, it does help when you plan to be doing a lot of hopping between slides. One button that may prove useful in presentations is the home key. This way, you can always return to the beginning of your slide show without having to quit out and go to the first slide. This is more useful if you have a content slide that allows you click through to any slide. (Which is something I’ll cover in a later post.)

To add the home button the master slide, do the following: Slide Show> Action Buttons> Home Button. The home button looks like a little house. In PowerPoint 2003, the button defaults as a sort of teal button, as you see on your right. 99% of the time, that’s not going to be the color scheme you want.

If you just want to change the color, double-click on the action button. A dialog box called “Format AutoShape” will appear. Here, you can adjust the color and the transparency of the button. This is especially helpful for people who like the home button design, but don’t like its color.

There’s also a way to make any image an action button. For the example on the right, I used a WordArt image that I created right in PowerPoint. To make your image into an action button (specifically, the home button), right click on the image and then select the Action Settings option.

To link to a certain slide, you need to click on the button that says “Hyperlink to.” To make the button into a “home” link, highlight the option that says First Slide.

Navigation buttons are highly useful when you you’re doing a non-linear presentation that requires a lot of hyperlinking. Be creative!

Four: Customizing Animations
Everyone knows that a good PowerPoint slide has animations. I mean, it’s there, so we might as well use it, right? And there’s something inherently cool about seeing a piece of text get boxed in. But I’m really lazy when it comes to animations, and I also think that having too many different kinds of animation gets distracting.

The master slide makes it very, very simple to customize animations. Just right-click on the text box that you want to animate and then choose Custom Animation. From here, you can add any animation scheme that tickles your fancy. Try not to make it too elaborate though… You know you’ve gone too far when your PowerPoint might actually start to resemble an acid trip gone bad.

For your main bullets, you probably want to keep the entrance animations simple. And it’s up to you whether or not you want your title to be animated. It only makes your presentation longer, so watch that if you’re supposed to be working within a specific time frame.

Five: Customizing Slide Transitions
Slide transitions are another overused part of PowerPoint, but they can also make the whole presentation coherent. It’s about the same as slide animations. If you do too many different kinds, people will, at first, think, “Neat” or something similar (although, PowerPoints have been around for awhile, so you may just get a yawn). However, too many different kinds of animations can make your presentation look gimmicky. Yes, it’s only for a class. But you don’t really want to come off looking childish.

To change your slide transitions, go to Slide Show> Slide Transition. Here you can change how the presentation changes between slides. Although there is an option to make the transitions random, I like to have a little more control than that. This is another place where simpler is better. Or you could pair up random slide transitions with greatly varied custom animations. That could be how you make your presentation coherent. I’d bet, however, that only a few people could pull that off. If they’re very creative. And charming. Or something.

If you have any more tips, please feel free to e-mail me or leave me a comment. I know this only touched on the very basics, but that was the point.

This post was in response to engtech’s group writing project.

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Posted on February 19th, 2007 by Joy
Filed under: Tips