PowerPoint classes

Working with Pre-Built Templates & Themes

Powerpoint 2007 and PowerPoint 2010 have hundreds of ready-to-use templates and color/font schemes. For example, when creating a new presentation, you can choose from a list of topic-specific templates, and then modify your new presentation to select a color-coordinated set of bullets, sub-bullets, and fonts. In this part of the class we cover how to:

Use templates when creating new presentations
Change your presentation's look by applying color and font themes
Work with the confusing slide master options

Adding Images, Photos, Sounds, & Music in Powerpoint

Over the years PowerPoint has evolved to become a true multimedia authoring tool similar to Adobe Flash. It is surprisingly easy to learn how to incorporate multimedia effects into your presentations. Imagine spicing up a dry chart of sales and expenses with the sound of a crowd cheering and a photo of a pile of dollar bills. By the end of this part of the class you will know how to:

Insert, crop, and resize photos
Find and insert clip art
Add sound and music clips

Adding Videos & Animation in Powerpoint

Adding motion to slides will definitely wake up your audience. The aforementioned chart could be made to gradually materialize and then move to the side to make room for a video of your sales team cheering. By the end of this part of the class you will know how to:

Integrate video clips
Animate text, shapes, and charts
Create a Photo Gallery presentation

Formatting your Text into SmartArt Graphics & Tables

Slides with just headlines and bullets can bore your audience after a while. PowerPoint offers "SmartArt" as a way to format bullet text into shape diagrams that make it much easier and quicker for your audience to grasp. Examples of shape diagrams include: organizational charts, process flows, matrices, and pyramids. In a similar vein, we also cover how best to display your text and data in a table. You may have seen simple black and white tables before, but the new features of Powerpoint 2007/2010 add several formatting effects and tools that make it easier to work with tables and make them look more elegant. During this part of the class we show you how to:

Convert your text into the appropriate diagram
Understand the different types of shape diagrams
Format tables

Creating an Interactive Powerpoint Presentation with Action Buttons

Ever wish you had buttons on your slides you could click to navigate between slides or launch some animation effect? Action Buttons are small icons that can start a video, switch to the next slide, or launch a web browser. After this section, you will be able to:

Add navigation action buttons so you can page backward and forward or navigate to a specific slide
Add action buttons that launch animation effects so you can interact with the items on a specific slide

Sharing, Reviewing, & Distributing Powerpoint Presentations

Typically presentations are often collaborative efforts, created by more than one person, and distributed to different sets of people. This poses several challenges both when creating and distributing presentations. We will show you how teams can review presentations and post comments to them, as well as how to digitally sign a presentation, set passwords to restrict permissions, and send it to people who don't have the PowerPoint application. After this part of the class, you will be able to:

Set review options and post comments on a presentation
Check spelling and grammar
Finalize and password-protect presentations
Save presentations as a CD packages, individual image files, or web pages

Integrating Powerpoint with Word & Excel

PowerPoint can be tightly integrated with your MS Word and Excel files. You can build slides based off Word outlines, embed "live data" Excel datasheets and charts, and even insert a phrase from a Word document (such as a copyright) into your presentation as "lined content" so that any changes to the phrase in the Word file are replicated to the Powerpoint file. After this section, you will be able to:

Create a presentation using a Word outline to establish structure and flow
Embed and link content between different types of Microsoft Office files
Create a hyperlink on a slide to open other Office documents

Prerequisites:

Good understanding of MS Windows file management, and the concepts of right-clicking and selecting the properties of an object
Intro to MS PowerPoint or equivalent experience: basic understanding of slide navigation, drawing objects, and text formatting

Intermediate Powerpoint classes are offered at four locations::

PowerPoint 2007/2010 Intermediate Class