How to PowerPoint

If you read good presentation books like Slide:ology and Presentation Zen, they’ll typically refer you to use photos for your slides rather than clip art.  Generally this isn’t a bad idea.  But there’s no reason to be dogmatic.

The reason that these books recommend not using clip art is because a lot of the clip art is dated, and many presentations mix and match the clip art used.  So you end up with amateurish slides that are neither consistent nor visually interesting. 

That doesn’t have to be the case. 

First, the Microsoft Office Online site is updated daily with all sorts of new clip art (and pictures).  They look really good and will definitely enhance your slides.  Second, much of the clip art follows a similar style.  By using the same style, you can get away from the amateurish look and create really nice presentations that look great and are consistent.

So the trick is to locate the clip art that follows the same style.  That’s what we’ll cover in this quick tutorial.  Basically, you’ll:

• search for the clip art you like
• click on the properties
• locate the style to see similar images

Clip Art Styles Tutorial

Click here to view the tutorial.

I have noticed that a lot of the newer clip art doesn’t have a style listed in the properties.  You can see an example of this at the beginning of the tutorial.  In those cases, you can fine tune the search via the keywords until you see all of the similar images together.

Check out How To Design Custom PowerPoint Templates for E-Learning (Plus 8 Free Templates) via the Rapid E-Learning Blog.

You’ll learn how to build your own PowerPoint template and you have access to download eight high quality templates free of charge.

Here are two posts from the Rapid E-Learning Blog that provide excellent audio recording tips and tricks.

I get a lot of questions about microphones and getting good audio.  I think the single biggest thing you can do to get good audio quality is to switch from a headset microphone and buying a desktop microphone.

You can hear the quality differences in these two examples recorded on the same laptop in the same environment.

• $30 headset
• $72 desktop (with no pop filter or any other type of adjustment)

You’ll notice that the headset microphone doesn’t sound as good.  You also hear the pops of air and movement of the mouthpiece.  That’s why I use a desktop microphone. It just sounds better, which most likely means less editing and retakes.  Plus bad audio is worse than a bad screen.

4 Simple Tips for Recording High-Quality Audio

• Invest in a good mic.
• Maintain a consistent environment
• Get rid of ambient noise
• Dampen the sound

13 More Tips to Help You Record Narration Like the Pros

• Place your microphone in the right position
• Record a demo to make sure it all sounds right
• Listen to the audio playback with headphones
• Don’t get distracted with animations and annotations
• Make sure your script is conversational and easy to read
• Stand up while recording
• Don’t ad-lib
• Have plenty of liquids available
• Get rid of the plosives
• Record 10 seconds of silence
• Relax and don’t rush your words
• Mark your retakes
• Dampen the sound

This post from the Rapid E-Learning Blog introduces some PowerPoint experts I met at a recent conference.  There are also some links to free resources that will help you in your quest to master PowerPoint.

Here’s what you can find in the post:

• PowerPoint MVPs
• Free tutorials
• Free software
• PowerPoint resources
• Valuable elearning blog posts

Check out the post, These PowerPoint Experts Can Make You a Star to get access to the free resources and helpful links.

If you regularly modify the free clip art you get via the Microsoft Office site, then you want to keep these 15 clip art styles close at hand.  You can learn more in this post 15 Interesting Clip Art Styles for Your E-Learning Courses via the Rapid E-Learning Blog.

The Rapid E-Learning Blog has a great post on how you can unzip your .PPTX files in PowerPoint 2007.  This is valuable because now can access the images you have in your PowerPoint files.

• Keep all of your images in one location.  Move the media folder to a place where you save your images.  Rename it to match the course and all of your images are now in one place. 

• Quickly save clip art images to your slides and then save the .PPTX file.  It’s easy to just drag and drop images to a PowerPoint 2007 slide.  Add images to your slides and then extract the file to have quick access to all of the images.

Go to the post and view the quick tutorial.  There’s also a link to a free image viewer and a program that lets you unzip your PowerPoint files.

Here are three blog posts I did for the Rapid E-Learning Blog that deal with graphics and visual design.  You’ll learn how use blurred images to direct the learner’s focus and how to quickly create silhouette characters and clip art.

If you don’t have a graphics editor and want to use more than PowerPoint to build your graphics try these:

Paint.net:  Free graphics editor that lets you do most of what you need to do.

Photoshop Elements: Great alternative to the more expensive full version and does all that you need.

Change the Focus of the Image

Blur Your Course Into Focus discusses ways to use a blur filter so that you can direct the learner’s focus.

Create Silhouettes

3 Easy Ways to Create Silhouette Characters shows three ways to quickly create silhouette characters for your slides.

How to Use Silhouettes

Following up the post above, here’s 5 Ways to Use Silhouette Graphics in Your E-Learning Course.  In this post, you’ll learn different ways you can use silhouettes on your slides and in your elearning courses.

These three posts will help you build better graphics for your slides and elearning courses.