3 Rules for Professional Slides in PowerPoint 2013

When creating a professional presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 there are three rules that should guide you.

First Rule: Not too much on one slide. When you crowd your slide with unnecessary words your audience will spend the entire time trying to read instead of listening to you. Keep it to a few words that you can elaborate on.

Rule number two: Keep it clean. This includes clutter like clip art, pictures and diagrams. The fewer items you have the more focus people will give to them. Only include important items.

Last Rule: Less is more. I would elaborate but that would be breaking the rule.

Watch the free video here, transcripts for the entire video follow:

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Video transcripts:

Hello again and welcome back to our course on PowerPoint 2013. In the previous section, we started our first brand new presentation and we setup the slide size and orientation and a background color. In this section, we’re going to start to put some content into this presentation. Now the subject of the presentation is creating our first presentation. Now we created this presentation initially by choosing Blank presentation and the single slide that we get we can select on the left there and the slide itself is shown here. Now I didn’t actually type in the words that you can see there. They are what are called placeholders, and the Click to add title and Click to add subtitle are indications that I can now enter some text on to this first slide. And literally if I click on the title, it appears to disappear. The cursor appears and I can type in my title. Now my title is going to be My First Presentation. Now when you’re using placeholders, that’s basically what happens. You click within the placeholder and you type the text. Let’s try that with the subtitle, and there we are. That’s the first slide ready. Note that as I’ve typed the thumbnail on the left, there it’s been updated to reflect what I’ve typed and that while I’m working on the slide, here you can see on the Ribbon that I’ve got a drawing tools contextual tab, a format tab as well.

So how about a second slide now? Let’s go to the Home tab and we’ve got in the Slides Group a New Slide button. The button is in two parts. The top part is the new slide, the lower part gives us the option to choose, as you’ll see in a moment. I’m just going to click on the top one for the moment. And if I do note that although it appears as a second slide here, the placeholders have a different layout to the one that I had on that title slide. But let’s fill this in anyway and I’ll talk about that issue in just a moment. So put a title on the second one, then click in to add some text. Note that in this case the text is in the form of a bulleted list. So having typed Design tab, I’m going to now type and you can see what I’ve done here. I’ve said the first thing I did was to set the slide size so I went to the Design tab and the Customize Group and then just to remind myself on the Design tab in the Customize Group it was the Slide Size command. So there we are. That summarizes how we set the slide size.

So now I have a presentation with two slides in it. Let’s suppose I want to now add a third slide and I know that the next thing I did when I made this presentation was the format background. So the contents going to be pretty much like the content of this one. I just need to change a couple of things. But if I go back to the Home tab and click this time on the lower part of the New Slide button watch what happens. Now when I click, what I see are a number of what are called Slide Layouts. The first one, the title slide layout, that’s the one that I started with. It had a title in the upper part and a subtitle in the lower part. But there are various other layouts that are available given the template that I’m using. Slide 2, the one I added, was the title and content layout. Again, it’s in two parts. The upper part is a smaller space for title, a heading for that particular slide, and then the lower part can contain content. Now I want to look at this content again in just a moment. I’ll come back to that. But then I have various other layouts. There’s a section header layout. There’s a two content layout where I can have two items of content side by side. I can have a comparison layout, title only, blank, content with caption, and picture with caption. Now depending on the template I’m working with, I may have other or different layouts to this and I can in fact create my own layouts. But for the moment we’re pretty much dealing with the default here.

Let me do title and content again. Now this gives me Slide 3. Note that our newly inserted slide will appear after the one that’s selected. So I had Slide 2 selected, Slide 3 appears after it. And it has the layout that we saw just now with Slide 2. Now this kind of layout is one that you’ll see very often in PowerPoint 2013. We have a title at the top. We have Click to add text and this defaults to a bulleted list because that is a very common type of content for PowerPoint presentations. But the presence of these little icons in the middle indicates that we can actually put all sorts of different content in here. And if I hover over those icons, you can see the sort of things we can put in. By clicking on an icon, we will put in the corresponding type of content. So for instance on the first one it says Insert Table, Insert Chart, Insert a SmartArt Graphic, Pictures, Online Pictures, Insert Video. So this particular layout is a very powerful one in terms of the kinds of thing that we can put into the content of the slide. Now we’re going to come back to this later. In fact, we’re going to spend a lot of the rest of the course looking at how we insert these different types of content into slides.

So it will be a very straightforward job now to click in the title there of this layout of slide, put the new title in, Format Background, and basically put in very similar text to the text we used on Slide 2. But instead of that, I’m going to do something you’re probably not expecting and that is that with Slide 3 selected, so click on Slide 3, I’m going to press the Delete key and delete Slide 3. It really is as straightforward as that to delete a slide.
What I’m going to do this time is I’m going to create Slide 3 by copying Slide 2. Now first of all, if I was doing this with mouse and keyboard with Slide 2 selected I could for instance go up to the Clipboard Group on the Home tab on the Ribbon and one of the options on there, the middle one on the right, is Copy which will copy a slide. And having copied the slide and making sure I select in this case Slide 2 itself, to paste it I could paste Slide 3 and it would be an exact copy of Slide 2. Alternatively, if I’m using touch let me just touch on Slide 2. That brings up the minibar, tap on Copy, again tap Slide 2, and tap on Paste, and I’ve done copy and paste using touch in that case.
Now with Slide 3 selected I can click inside the title. This is no longer Set the Slide Size. And of course, the other thing that needs to change and there’s Slide 3. Now I’m going to have a little run through of this presentation in just a moment to finish this section off. But first of all, you can see one of the problems which is going to be a bit of a recurring theme throughout the course and that is that some things that you apply such as in this case the background to a slide, you have to be careful whether you’re applying them just to one slide or to the whole presentation. So if I go back say to the first slide there which we had that sort of light blue background to, back on to the Design tab, back on to Format Background, the color we had, you remember? We selected there. It’s still selected. What I would really need to do is to say Apply to all and that background is then applied to all of the slides in this particular presentation.

So we’ve created our first presentation in PowerPoint 2013. We have three slides. We have a nice blue background. It’s very plain but that will help to make it very easy to read. Let’s see what it’s going to look like onscreen. Now when I’m doing this I have a number of options for how to view this onscreen and I’m going to talk about those options in the next section. But for the moment I’m going to use one of the views that’s called the Reading View. So I’m going to go into Reading View now. You can see the first slide. Note that because it’s a widescreen presentation on a non-widescreen computer display, we’re going to get the letter box effect. Don’t worry too much about that. And I step through the presentation using the arrow keys on my keyboard. So the right arrow key takes me to the next slide, again to the next slide, and then I can use the left arrow key to take me back again. And that gives me some idea of how my first presentation is looking. And when I finish previewing my presentation, I can just click on the Normal button on the status bar and get me back into the normal mode for working on my presentation.

So that’s it on the first presentation and it’s now your turn to do the next exercise. What I’d like you to do is to do a presentation with four slides in it. The first slide will be a title slide and the other three will be as follows. Each slide will have as its title the name of one of the tabs on the PowerPoint 2013 Ribbon and then listed underneath in bullet list form, the same basic layout as we have here, will be the name of three of the groups on that tab of the Ribbon. My answer to this example-03 in the provided files and you can use my example if you need to as a guide. But as I say, it’s four slides in total, the first one will be the title of the whole thing, possibly with your name as the subtitle and the other three are the names of three tabs and for each of those three tabs three groups that are on that tab. I’ll see you in the next section.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!