In the tutorial he covers how to save the assets you create and use in your PowerPoint slides.  One of the benefits of creating your graphics in PowerPoint is that you can easily share the development files.

He also discusses three image formats and how they work in the slides.

PowerPoint Tutorial

Click here to view the tutorial.

There are a number of ways to start working on your PowerPoint slides.  Some people like to start with a template or choose a theme.  I usually like to get my content outlined and kind of right before I work on the look and feel of the presentation.

In today’s post I am going to show how to use the outline view when starting your PowerPoint presentation.

How to Use Outline View

• Create a new presentation.  You can use a template if you want, but I just start with a blank slide.

• When you get to the slide, click on the Outline tab. Then add your slide titles.  When you hit Enter, you stay on the same level and can enter another slide title.

• If you want to add a subtitle (or bullet point), press on the Tab key.  That takes you down one level.
• To go back up a level, press Shift + Tab.  It’s as easy as that.

I like to quickly outline my thoughts using the Enter, Tab, and Shift Tab keys.  Once I have my basic content outlined, I’ll start working on the slides.

PowerPoint Tutorial

Here’s a video tutorial that walks you through the steps above in more detail.

Click here to view the PowerPoint tutorial.

In an earlier post, we covered keyboard shortcuts for PowerPoint 2003.  Today, we’ll look at the differences in PowerPoint 2007.

CTRL Key

Just like PowerPoint 2003, you can use the CTRL key for quick access to features. 

ALT Key

The big difference between PowerPoint 2003 and 2007 is the ALT key feature.  When you click on the ALT key in PowerPoint 2007, you get visual cue for all of the available shortcuts.  This makes sense since this version of PowerPoint uses the ribbon toolbar and not a dropdown menu.

To activate a feature, select ALT and then the letter or number associated with the feature.

PowerPoint 2007 Tutorial

Here’s a quick tutorial that shows how to use the keyboard shortcuts in PowerPoint 2007.

Click here to view the tutorial.

Keyboard shortcuts are a fast way to work with your slides and objects in PowerPoint 2003.  The key is to learn the shortcuts for your most common tasks.

The CTRL Key

Most of the features in the drop down menu offer a keyboard shortcut.  You’ll see them next to the feature.

If the shortcut is active and available to use, it will be in black.  If it’s inactive and not available, it’s grayed out.

The ALT Key

When you look at the top of the toolbar, you’ll notice that some letters are underscored.  For example, the file menu read as, File.  When you press the ALT key, that will highlight the menu.

Then select the underscored letter and it will active the menu item.  From there, just keep pressing the underscored letter of the feature you want to use.

In the example below, we want to insert a new comment.

• So we press ALT+I since Insert is underscored.  That opens the insert menu.
• Then we select M for comment and it will create a new comment.

It takes a little getting used to, but once you got it, you’ll find that it does make working in PowerPoint much easier and faster.

PowerPoint 2003 Tutorial

Here’s a quick tutorial that shows how to use keyboard shortcuts in PowerPoint 2003.

Click here to view the PowerPoint tutorial.

In the older versions of PowerPoint, you had to delete the image and replace it with another.  Then you’d have to reapply the effects and animations.  That’s not the case anymore.

All you do now is right click on the image, and select Change Picture.  From there you select a new image. And voila! You have a new image with all of the animations and effects intact.

Here’s tutorial that gives you some more detail so you can see it in action.

PowerPoint Tutorial

Click here to view the tutorial.

So you can see, it’s pretty easy and a big time saver, especially if you pre-build animations to be reused.  It definitely comes in handy if you build rapid elearning courses.

Do you have any simple time saving tips?

One of the things I don’t like about the ribbon in PowerPoint 2007 is that I can’t customize it the way I want.  While that’s the case, I can customize the Quick Access Toolbar.

Basic Steps

The tutorial below has a lot more detail, but here are the basic steps:

• Click on the quick access toolbar dropdown menu
• Select or deselect one of the default features
• If you want to add more features, click on More Commands

• Select a feature in either column
• Choose to add or remove it
• Use the arrows to arrange the order of the features

PowerPoint Tutorial

Click here to view the PowerPoint tutorial.

In an earlier post, I showed how to create a table in PowerPoint and this quick tutorial walks you through the basics of changing your table style. 

Here are the basic steps:

• Create a table and select it on the slides
• Click on the design tab to view table designs.
• Select a format.
• Select the preferred table style option to customize the rows and columns.

To get more detail, view the PowerPoint tutorial below.

PowerPoint Tutorial

Click here to view the PowerPoint tutorial.

PowerPoint Tutorial

Click here to view the tutorial.

Basically, you’ll

• Select the image
• Choose format
• Recolor
• and Set Transparent Color
• Then click on the color you want to be transparent. 

The only downside is that you can only select one color.  And it removes that color regardless of where it’s at on the slide.  For simple images with solid color backgrounds, this works great. 

What do you do to remove the background from your images in PowerPoint?

Here’s a quick overview of the workspace:

1. Office button: common to all Office applications.  Save, print, etc.

2. Quick access toolbar: customize and add features you want to access.

3. Slide thumbnail: access slides via thumbnail; can also access outline view.

4. Ribbon toolbar: features grouped in context for easy access.

5. Slide pane: the slide where you add content.

6. Placeholder icons: click to add specific content like charts & pictures.

7. Task pane: these open up specific to certain features like clip art.

8. Slide notes: add presenter notes or transcript.

9. Change view: switch between normal, slide sorter, or slide show.

10. Zoom: zoom in or out on slide content.

11. Fit to window: quickly fit the entire slide into the current window size.

PowerPoint Tutorial

Here’s a video tutorial that quickly walks you through the workspace area.

Click here to view the PowerPoint tutorial.

PowerPoint gives you a number of ways to quickly create tables.  You can:

• Insert the table using the placeholder
• Create a table with the grid
• Draw a table on the slide with the pencil
• Insert an Excel spreadsheet

The tutorial below goes through the steps in detail.

Click here to view the PowerPoint tutorial.

Here’s an outline of the basic steps:

• Click on the placeholder and choose the numbers of columns and rows.  You can always add or delete them later so don’t worry if it’s not exact.
• If you don’t have a placeholder to click on, select TABLE from the INSERT menu.

• Once you have a table on the slide, you can edit it using the table properties with the ribbon toolbar in PowerPoint 2007 or the tables and borders toolbar in previous versions.

If there’s data in the table that you want to manipulate, like adding cells together, then you’re best bet is to insert the table as an Excel spreadsheet.

To learn more about working with tables, check out some of the other tutorials.