PowerPoint 2013 Essentials

Creating and Saving a New Presentation
With PowerPoint 2013 there are several ways to create and save new a new presentation. Now personally, I'm not a big fan of templates, I like my slides to cater to the message I am delivering and the audience to which I'm speaking. And since that's hard to predict, I usually prefer designing my own slides after I've written my presentation. So I usually just begin with a blank presentation. To create a blank presentation, we first need to open PowerPoint. So jumping down, clicking that PowerPoint icon then double clicking on that blank presentation Voila! There's a completely blank presentation. From here you can then design your slides by adjusting the slide masters and this is something I will demonstrate in a later lesson or by adding additional slides text boxes, shapes, charts, diagrams, you can really add just about anything you want to these blank white slides. It's really up to you, in fact, the rest of this course is dedicated to showing you what exactly you can do to these blank PowerPoint presentations so hold on this is going to be a fun ride.

Slide Design 101
You're watching the lesson titled "Slide Design 101" and as the title suggests, this is merely an introduction to a very complex topic, as such, think of this lesson more as a starting point, but don't worry, at the end of the lesson, I'll give you some suggestions for further study and so, with no further ado, let's talk about this. We've all seen this at some time. Perhaps we've even been guilty of this ourselves. I know I have. The phrase, "Death by PowerPoint" has many meanings. None of which are specific to PowerPoint software, but to how presentation software is used as a whole. Some use the phrase generically to mean any boring presentation. Others use it to describe ugly or cluttered slides. Some use the phrase to describe a presentation that is rigid, oversimplified, or littered with bullet point after bullet point. Now, personally, I use the phrase, "Death by PowerPoint" a bit more loosely and believe that "Death by PowerPoint" at its root, refers to any visual that fails at its intended purpose. Following that, there are also many reasons why a slide or PowerPoint presentation will fail or fall short of audience expectations or even the presenter's promise.

Creating Slide Transitions
Slide Transitions often get confused with something called PowerPoint Animations. A Slide Transition refers to the visual movement between slides. In other words, it's the action from one slide to the next. On the other hand, an Animation refers to the action or actions that occur on one slide, and Animations we'll be covering in a different lesson. Now as for Transitions, in PowerPoint 2013 you have a variety of transitions from which to choose. There are subtle transitions such as Fade, Push, Cover, and there are more exciting transitions such as Gallery, Window, and a variety of others from which to choose. Now just be sure to exercise caution, as too many different style transitions back to back can pull focus away from what you are presenting. Therefore it's best to stick with one or two subtle transitions. And going back to what I said in an earlier lesson about how the design or tone of your slides should match the tone of your overall presentation, that same principle applies here to transitions. So be sure to pick transitions that fit the overall tone of your presentation.

Introduction to Animations
There is so much that you can do with Animations and PowerPoint. So much, in fact, that I could probably have a separate full length course on just animation and animation techniques. So for this course, I will just be introducing the essentials for animating in PowerPoint. To start, PowerPoint allows 4 types of animations. There are entrance effects, which will control how an object first appears on a slide. There are emphasis effects which will effect an object already appearing on a slide. Exits effects will control how an object leaves the slide. And motion paths will move an object around on a slide. Any one or any combination of these effects can be applied to almost any text or object in PowerPoint. For example. This spinning globe uses just one motion path, whereas this slide has many animations applied to both text and to shapes. So there really are a lot of things that you can create with just a few basic animations.