How to Create Great Presentations

great presentations

Most often, PowerPoint is used to create presentations, since it is delivered in the MS Office software package and is the most accessible for users. The basis for great presentations is good material. Better to prepare a large amount of material. There will be more opportunities for giving a proper look for a finished presentation. Next, we’ll look at how to make a presentation on a computer with music and photos.

Let’s consider several possible sources:

Text filling. To create text blocks, books, thematic periodicals or their electronic equivalents are suitable. Also, various reports on the necessary topic will come to the aid. Various publications on Internet resources or even posts on the forums will serve as the material for making great presentations.
Images, graphs and diagrams. The author’s content is best used to the maximum. Your own photos and images will be great content. Schemes and graphs can be drafted with your own hand, if there are special editors. One of the presentation techniques to optimize the speed of creation is using ready-made presentations.

Video and music. Creating a high-quality video and audio series is a time-consuming and costly process. Therefore, here you can use materials from third-party resources.

It is also important to take into account the time allowed for the performance. For a short one, it’s better not to create a cumbersome presentation with video and audio accompaniment. It is better to briefly state the essence, and distribute additional materials to the audience.

With a ready-made presentation plan and collected material, you can start creating a presentation. The whole presentation consists of separate slides. First you need to start the PowerPoint editor. In the top menu of the tabs you will need the “Home” tab. There is the block “Slides” in it, in which the button “Create slide” adds pages.

Due to these operations we have a simple slide. You can change the layout of the elements on it using the appropriate menu. To do this, do right-click on the desired slide in the navigator and select “Layout …” from the menu and select the desired one in the drop-down menu. Add a few more pages.

New pages are just white. For the sake of a good image it is necessary to give them decoration. To do this, select the desired page in the navigator. Here, you will need the “Design” tab. In the “Themes” block, there will be a button of the same name, clicking on which you will get a list of all available buttons. The result is obvious; the presentation received an appearance.

Adding and working with text

To add text content, special blocks are used. The text in them can be simply printed or copied. The configuration of the arrangement of blocks is quite easy to change with the mouse, dragging a special frame.

Adding and editing tables and graphs

Graphs and diagrams express extremely different processes. To add one to the presentation, you will need the “Insert” tab in the top menu bar. In the “Illustrations” block there will be a diagram icon which will open the creation window. It will be necessary to select the type of diagram from the presented library.

After selecting the required one, a spreadsheet will open for editing the parameters. The changes you make to it are reflected in the diagram configuration in the presentation. To insert a table, you will need the same tab of the top menu as for the chart. In the left part there will be a “Table” block and the button with the same name, which will bring up the configuration window. Filling of cells of the table occurs in the same way as text fields.

Adding and decorating images

Good themed images will make the presentation more interesting. It is better to use one image for one slide, but of the highest quality. The insertion is done on the same tab as the diagram, but the “Picture” button is responsible for the image. Next, you just need to open the directory where the collected materials are stored and add the necessary one.

Adding video and audio

It is important to use various audio-visual materials only where they are appropriate. They are appropriate in short speeches. They will be useful for more detailed reports or explanations of complex concepts. Audio and video is added from the Insert tab in the top menu bar. In the right part, you can find the “Multimedia Clips” block. Clicking on it will call the choice of the file type to add. Then you just need to select the desired file from the directory with the materials. After that, a warning will appear that the playback of the video starts with the opening of the page.

Creating an animation for changing slides

A beautiful transition between the slides makes the presentation more interesting for viewers. How to add it? It is enough to select the necessary page in the navigator and go to the tab “Animation” in the top menu bar. By clicking on the “Transition scheme” button, a list of all possible transitions will open. It is important to remember that the selected transition only affects the selected page. For each, it will have to be installed manually.

The same effects can be added to the elements of the page. For this, there is an item “Animation” in the mentioned tab. It is necessary to select an object, click on it and select the item “animation settings.” A list of possible options will appear, which will allow you to create animation in the presentation.

View and configure a finished presentation

To start a slide show, just press F5 or select the appropriate item in the top menu bar. Before saving, it is better to assign the necessary settings to the demonstration in the corresponding window. The adjusting of the settings depends on the type of report and the presentation plan. Creation of the presentation on the computer is complete. If you want to learn more presentation techniques and if you want to make a professional presentation, check out other posts on our blog, for example, What Is a Presentation and How to Complete It.