Office 2013 Digital Classroom

PowerPoint Lesson 3: Designing a Presentation

A great slide deck can hold the audience’s attention while supporting the speaker; it’s clean and clear, but also beautiful on its own. In this lesson you’ll learn how to take advantage of PowerPoint’s design tools while avoiding PowerPoint cliché.

What you’ll learn in this lesson:

• • Adding titles and text to your slides
• • Formatting and styling slide elements
• • Creating custom slide designs
• • Customizing and exporting a visual theme

Starting up

You will work with files from the PPT03lessons folder. Make sure that you have loaded the OfficeLessons folder onto your hard drive from www.digitalclassroombooks.com/Office2013. If you need further instructions, see “Loading lesson files” in the Starting up section of this book.

Building better slides

A good PowerPoint presentation isn’t really about the slides; it’s about a person communicating with an audience. A well-designed slide deck can illustrate a point that might be difficult to express in words, or subtly reinforce the speaker’s message; it can flash hard data behind an impressionistic speech, or put mood lighting on a technical talk. It can even tell a story all by itself, not needing a speaker at all. Lots of presentations are boring; but they can also be beautiful.

The previous lesson explored PowerPoint’s slide show creation workflow, from initial outline to final style touches. ...