Creating and Designing Slides

Slideshows, or presentation software documents, are made up of a collection of “slides” or pages. These pages can have text, pictures, charts and graphs, and even multimedia elements like sound and video. Depending on the presentation software you use, you may be presented with a setup wizard when you first start a new presentation. This will allow you to pick out preset styles for things like fonts and colors to be used, the background images to be shown on slides, and how the layout of the presentation will appear. All of these elements together are called the presentations theme. Most programs that have you pick this at first will also let you change it later. 

The first slide you’ll see when starting a new presentation is a title slide; there will be a place to put the title, subtitle, and author information for the presentation. 

To add a new slide, simply click the “new slide” button in the top menu ribbon. To add a specific slide that uses a preset layout, click on the drop-down arrow on or next to the new slide button.

Within a slide, you can add text boxes, images, drawings, tables, charts, and multimedia using the Insert menu. You can format most of these objects the same way you would in any other productivity software program. You can also create hyperlinks to other slides in the slideshow, which can help with navigation, especially if you are designing an interactive presentation.

To view your slideshow, choose the “Start Slideshow (From the Beginning)” button in the Slide Show menu, or “Begin Presentation” in the View menu, depending on the program you use. You can also choose to start the slideshow from the active slide in the edit window.

There are a lot of ways to customize how your slideshow will display with the following common options:

• You can decide whether to have your slideshow advance with a mouse click or keystroke, or you can have slides advance automatically.

• You can choose to have a transition occur between slides; sometimes fading from one slide to the next looks better than abruptly switching. Usually, the more subtle a transition, the better it looks.

• If  you are working with multiple monitors, Presenter view can help you see what is coming up next and any speakers notes you have added to each slide.

• You can also choose to print your slideshow. Printing a handout to have multiple slides displayed on one page, or to have slides organized with a spot for people to take notes, may be useful for people to refer to during the presentation. These options are available from the Print menu.

When presenting a slideshow to an audience it’s important to remember that they are there to listen to you talk, not read information off a screen. Use your slides as visual aids to support your spoken words, not as a script. Maintain eye contact, speak clearly and confidently, and engage with the audience by asking questions and encouraging interaction. Most importantly, practice!