Although I don’t use this functionality very much, I have seen other people use it for their presentations so I thought I’d write a quick tutorial on how to do it.

To begin, we have to define what a Slide Transition is. A Slide Transition can be defined as the way that one slide moves to the next slide during a Slide Show. For example, during your presentation, if you want to make Slide 1 “dissolve” to reveal Slide 2 when you advance from Slide 1 to Slide 2 during your show, you would use a Slide Transition.

To enable a transition on a slide, you must first access the Slide Transition Menu. The Slide Transition Menu should be shown on the right hand side of your screen by default when you start a new presentation (Note: this is for Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, it might be slightly different for later versions). This is shown below:

(This picture has been cropped so that the placement of the menu can be seen.)

The arrows at the top of the menu (1) allow you to switch between the Slide Transition Menu and the New Presentation Menu. If the Slide Transition Menu is not shown, use the arrows to navigate to it if the New Presentation Menu is shown. If neither is shown, you can open the Slide Transition Menu by performing the following steps:

1. Click on Slide Show on the top menu.
2. Click on Slide Transition…

Now that the menu is open, click on the slide you want the transition to occur on. The transition you put on a slide will happen when the slide is shown. For example, if you want Slide 1 to dissolve into Slide 2, you should select Slide 2 and enable the dissolve transition. In the case of Slide 1, any transition you enable on your first slide will occur when you first start your Slide Show.

The list shown in the above screenshot displays the types of transitions you can apply to your slides. There are a variety of transitions, play around with them to see which one suits your presentation. The rest of the Slide Transition Menu is shown in the screenshot below:

First, you have the Modify transition menu. It allows you to change the speed and sounds associated with the transition via the Speed and Sound drop downs. Setting the speed of the transition is pretty simple; see which one works best for you. The sound specified will play when the transition occurs. If enabled, the Loop until next sound check box will keep playing the specified sound until another sound is specified during another transition on another slide. This is an important point, because even if you have another transition in your Slide Show, if it doesn’t have a sound associated to it the previous sound will keep playing if that check box is enabled. If you want to stop this sound from playing but don’t want to have to specify a new sound to play, set the sound to Stop Previous Sound.

Next, the Advance slide menu allows you to specify how the transition will occur. If the On mouse click check box is enabled, the transition will occur when you manually advance to the next slide. If the Automatically after check box is enabled, the transition will occur after a certain amount of time has passed. The amount of time can be specified below the check box. For example, say on Slide 2 you specify to transition to Slide 3 after 5 seconds. Once your Slide Show gets to Slide 2, it will pause for 5 seconds and then move to Slide 3.

The last set of options are the buttons and a check box at the bottom of the menu. Their functions are as follows:

1. The Apply to All Slides button will apply your current settings to all the slides in your presentation.
2. The Play button show how your settings will work when the current slide is presented in the Slide Show.
3. The Slide Show button will launch a Slide Show of your presentation.
4. When enabled, the AutoPreview check box will do a quick preview of your slide each time you change the transition settings for that slide. This is similar to the Play button.

The above are the basic components to use when putting a Slide Transition into your presentation. One word of caution: be careful with how you use these in your presentations. Only use them when they are necessary, don’t throw a bunch of transitions in there just to have them in your presentation. Remember, you want the audience to focus on your content, not a ton of different flashy transitions.

New article on Creating a Professional Presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint, take a look for some good tips.

Check back later today for some more article updates.

There are a number of differences between a college Microsoft PowerPoint presentation and a presentation created for your work. A lot of these tips might seem like common sense, but it is the finer points of a presentation that your audience will pick up on, and which will define how much they take from it and if they take it seriously.

The following is a checklist containing the more common points to look for when creating a presentation for your work. It is a good idea to print something like this out and go over it before you turn your presentation in for any kind of review.

• Use a Template - If you can, you should use the standard template that your company, project, etc. uses for PowerPoint presentations when creating your own presentation. This is what your audience will most likely be expecting, and if not (for instance in the case of a new client) this is what you want them to expect from here on out.

• Consistent Font Style - You should use a consistent font style throughout your presentation. Places where exceptions to this rule could occur are:

  • Cover Slide - The first slide in your presentation will usually have fonts, etc. that are not found in the rest of your presentation. This is fine, as it can be standard slide for your company’s presentations, or just the standard for your project. It also can be the attention grabber for the presentation, so you will actually want it to stand out.

  • Headers/Footers - The header and/or footer for each slide is usually part of the template that you and your company use for PowerPoint presentations, so it is most likely not going to be in the same font as the body of your slides.

  Other than the above two examples, you should use a consistent font style across sections of your slides. For example, your body text on each slide should share the same font, as well as any headers or footers that exist outside of your template.

• Refrain from using Clip Art - While it may seem ingenious at the time to make a slide with a big “Idea” light bulb on it, it won’t win you any points with your audience. Clip Art is very generic and really adds nothing to the presentation, it just clutters it up. On the other hand, if you want to use actual pictures of your subject matter, that’s fine.

• Use Bulleted Thoughts - One of the biggest mistakes that you can make when putting a presentation together is putting too much information on the slide. This usually occurs when paragraphs are used instead of concise and bulleted thoughts. The point of each slide is not to be a Word document; it is just supposed to have points that you can talk to while doing your presentation. Too much information per slide will quickly cause your audience to lose interest and you can pretty much give up hope of them walking away having learned anything. Be concise, and strive to only bring across your main points to each slide.

• Get Peer Reviewed - This is probably the most important piece of advice to remember. Before you turn your work in, you should always get it peer reviewed as well as reading it through yourself. It’s easy to get lost in your project when you’ve been “in the weeds” for a long time, so it’s always a good idea to take a step back and have somebody else take a look at it. It’s also a good idea to put it away for a little bit and then go through the presentation again yourself to get a fresh perspective on it.

The above tips are a good start to a checklist that you can use before you turn in any of your presentations. You should add to it with information specific to your job. This will save everybody review and revision time and make your first draft that much better.

Check out the new article under Humor for a good laugh (at my expense of course), and under Microsoft PowerPoint for the first part of a beginners tutorial on using Microsoft PowerPoint.

This article is aimed at people new to PowerPoint, and possibly new to creating professional presentations. If you are already familiar with PowerPoint, it might give you a few good tips to sharpen the presentations you create.

This will be a number of articles stringed together because of the size of the topic.

What is PowerPoint?

Let’s start with square one: What is PowerPoint? In short, PowerPoint (formally known as Microsoft Powerpoint), is a part of the Microsoft Office suite of software that allows the user to create a presentation.  It has rapidly become the staple by which many professionals perform presentations for all different varieties of topics and fields. 

The Basics 

Now that you have some inkling of what PowerPoint does, I’ll introduce the basics.  To start, you can recognize a PowerPoint presentation on your computer by the symbol below:

 

 

Also, all PowerPoint files have a “.ppt” extension.  Once you have Microsoft Office installed, you should be able to launch PowerPoint from either Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft PowerPoint or from a shortcut on your desktop (depending on your install). Once it’s launched, your ready to begin.

A New Presentation

Upon launch, your PowerPoint will look something like this (this may vary slightly depending on your version):

This is a blank presentation.  You have your basic top level office tool bar on the top (if you are not familiar with other office applications, this is your main tool bar where you can save files, change setttings, etc.)

Before the main section can be explained, the structure of a PowerPoint presentation should be discussed.  Basically, PowerPoint presentations are made up of “Slides”.  Each slide contains a seperate piece of information for your presentation.  When presenting, you run a “Slide Show”.  This basically shows the slides, fullscreen, in the order that they appear in the left hand slide bar. 

The left hand slide bar can be seen as a way to navigate between slides, as well as order your slides.  As stated above, the order of the slides here is the order in which they will be shown during the “Slide Show”.  You can drag the slides around in here to change their order.  You can also insert a new slide from this tool bar by using the right click menu and selecting New Slide.  Alternatively, you can use the Insert -> New Slide to accomplish this from your main top level tool bar.  Also, this view shows a small preview of each slide.

The main section displays the contents of the slide that is highlighted in the left hand slide bar.  This is where you can edit individual slides.  You can insert pictures, text, charts, etc. into this area.

The right hand menu on the screenshot is a basic Microsoft Office navigation and creation tool that is found in newer versions of Microsoft Office.  It’s functions will not be discussed here.

 This concludes Part 1, an introduction to PowerPoint and the basic user GUI (Graphical User Interface).  In Part 2, we will delve into the basics of creating a presentation and some of the more common editing tools.