while we are preparing slidenotes.io to take care of presentation design for you, here are some pointers to be more efficient with the tool that most of us currently use. yes, we use PowerPoint in our day jobs. a lot. more than you could fathom. no, more than that. yes, life can be difficult. that’s why we know so much about presentations.
we’ll write more about good design and information architecture for presentations in subsequent posts. things that will work to elevate your slidenotes and your presentation design. perhaps even your greeting card game. stay tuned: sign up, if you haven’t and please tell your friends and colleagues to do the same.
sign up for our beta testjust like keyboard shortcuts, the Quick Access Toolbar enables you to keep important commands right at your fingertips. pinning an individual collection of your very personal most used buttons to the bar directly above the slides will speed up your workflow significantly – one step at a time:
the choice of commands is highly personal depending on your work routine. nevertheless, for your inspiration, we would like to share the ones which we as slide designers find most helpful:
[Display the Selection Pane], [Group], [Ungroup], [Rotate Objects], [Merge Shapes], [Edit Shape], [Send to Back], [Bring to Front], [Align Center], [Align Middle], [Align Objects Left], [Align Objects Right], [Align Objects Top], [Align Objects Bottom], [Distribute Vertically], [Distribute Horizontally]
when you are working with a lot of objects on your slide, the Selection Pane is a real gem of a tool - and as such well hidden in the depths of the PowerPoint user interface.
the list you are now looking at features every object and group of objects on your slide.
but, oddly enough for a computer program, PowerPoint has a seemingly unstructured way of numbering the objects at this list.
unspecific objects named by arbitrary numbers. not very helpful.
so if you want to profit from the Selection Pane you better get used to rename the objects on that list.
why? because you can give objects meaningful descriptions to find them again later:
right. look for the image part you named ice cream cone instead of object number 11 if you want to change the color of just the cone. much better.
so now you can actually start to use this tool to:
if just thinking about all the extra time you would spend on renaming every object on your slides terrifies you - we get that. and it truly does not make sense for everyone and every slide. but if you ever struggled with one of the tasks above you very much know how annoying and time consuming this can be. So if you tend to fight that struggle a lot, do yourself a favor and get used to renaming at least groupings. it is time well spend. even more so if you work in a team.
and keep in mind that you never have to rename the same objects twice. just store, copy and paste them - their name always sticks, even if you put them into a whole other Power Point presentation.
no matter what it is that you are trying to communicate with the help of your presentation - your main goal is to be taken seriously. you want your slides to look professional.
so what is the one thing all serious looking slides have in common?
they are neat. they are nice and clean, well structured and easy on the eye. arranged.
fortunately, PowerPoint offers a quite powerful arrangement tool, allowing you to align objects with a few simple clicks:
You can also do this with various objects at a time.
and you can align different objects to each other:
when doing so, note that the selected objects will always align to the one object which is sitting at the very end of the direction you are choosing to align to. for example if you choose [Align Left] the object sitting the most left of your selection won’t move at all. all the other ones will stay at their current horizontal axis but jump to the left until they align.
the Alignment Tool also comes in handy if you want to make your slides look even more appealing to your audience by using the Rule of Thirds:
as this popular composing guideline advises you to arrange your visuals based on a grid of nine equal segments, it is that what you need to build for your slide.
now, there is an option for adding Guides in PowerPoint: just right click anywhere on your slide and add some.
but anyone who tried this will know, that manually adjusting these guidelines can be kind of nerve wrecking - especially if you want to achieve exact measurements like three thirds of your slide size.
the Alignment Tool on the other hand offers to distribute objects evenly, so that you can use this little work around to build your grid in just a few simple clicks:
now you got yourself a shipshape grid.
you can group and use it like it is or change it for Guides - which you now know where exactly to put.
presentations are better off without a lot of text, but sometimes important information cannot be displayed in another way.
when working with paragraphs on your slides you want them to fit nicely into the rest of your design. This sometimes needs a little bit of arrangement. or in other words: time. time you can use on every slide over and over again or time you can wisely invest in the preparation of sample designs for later use.
in this preparation phase, a hidden PowerPoint feature comes in handy: Lorem ipsum sample text.
formatting text and objects is one of the top time guzzling tasks when working in PowerPoint.
so if you ever catch yourself setting the same formatting attributes over and over again, this one is for you:
right in the [Home] menu ribbon there is a tiny magic brush with a complicated name:
Copy formatting from one location to apply it to another.
and this really is all it does, but by doing so, it can save you so many clicks and therefore even your after-work hours.
this trick works for objects and texts across your whole presentation - “interslidal” so to say.
and even better: if you double click on the brush you can apply the formatting to an infinite number of targets. all in one fast and easy work flow.
and the best part? the same concept also works for animation when using the Animation Painter sitting in the Animation menu ribbon.
this way, you never have to set the same animation again. just store your old ones in a PowerPoint catalogue and apply whatever you need to reuse.
designing slides often requires making adjustments so a big part of the work in PowerPoint is scaling the same objects up and down.
to avoid deformations of the original measurements while doing so, use this little trick:
while scaling works very well for almost every object in PowerPoint - it really does not for text.
scaling in this case will only change the size of the Text Box and not the size of the actual letters of the text.
of course you can always adjust the Font Size and in many cases, this works really well.
but the thing with Font Size is: you have to guess. you have to guess, try, fail, guess again, try - and fail.
this can be especially nerve wrecking when you are trying to adjust a font to very certain size. Like a logo type attached to a symbol. or an illustration of an object with text on it.
in this case, it is far more convenient to convert your text into a PowerPoint Shape for these are manually scalable:
see, powerpoint isn’t all bad. you just need to know how to coerce it into submission. again: we’ll write more about good design and information architecture for presentations in subsequent posts. things that will work to elevate your slidenotes and your presentation design and more.
so please, sign up if you haven’t and please tell your friends and colleagues to do the same. we’ll throw in one more PowerPoint goodie (an absolute treat!) and you can expect other helpful guides in the near future. ever wanted to know how to use encrypted communication without hassle?