You started! Hurrah! You chose to start from scratch with a blank presentation. Now what?
It can be a bit daunting when you first start with a blank presentation – you get one slide, called the Title slide, and it is sitting there winking at you waiting for you to add the title. Then you need more slides as you build the structure of the presentation, and of course you will need to add your content to your slides too.
But let’s focus first on adding slides to your presentation and the different kinds of slides available.
Slides are added from the Slides group on the Home Ribbon.
When you click on New Slide, PowerPoint will do just that – a new slide will be added to the presentation. If it is the first slide after the Title slide, this will be a standard slide that has a title place holder and a space for content of different kinds.
However, what if you want a new slide with a layout other than that on the standard slide? Click the drop-down arrow on the New Slide button and a selection of 9 layouts are available to you. Click on the layout you want to use, and there’s your nice new empty slide with that layout, all ready for you to use.
If you have chosen to use a different slide layout, when you next click directly on New Slide, that new slide has the same layout as the slide you were just working on.
Reuse Slides
Suppose you created a killer presentation last week and in it there are a few slides that took you forever to build. Instead of reinventing the wheel and starting over, you can reuse those slides and add them directly to a new or existing presentation. You can also choose whether the slides should keep the original formatting or match the destination presentation. Just think how much time this will save you!
And it’s so easy to do. Open the presentation where you want to reuse the slides you created previously and go to the place in the presentation where you would like to add them. Click on the Reuse Slide button in the Slides group on the Home tab.
Select the presentation you wish to pick slides from – either from the list of recommended presentations or by searching for a presentation. You can choose whether to Insert All slides from that presentation or select them individually. To keep the formatting from the original presentation, tick the Use source formatting box.
If you would like to open the presentation in PowerPoint to see it better, you can do that too.
Change the Layout of a Slide
You may find that you have created a slide but it doesn’t quite work and you would like to change the layout. Just click on the slide to change and then click the drop-down arrow under Layout from the Slides group on the Home Ribbon. Select the layout you wish to use and hey presto! It’s applied.
Reset
If you have made lots of modifications to a slide, the Reset button can take it back a step. This can be really helpful when you have been looking at different Design ideas and want to reset the slide back to how it was before.
What next?
Now you’ve got the hang of using the different slide layouts and adding slides, you can go ahead and add your content – bullet points, images, charts, organisation charts, tables, there’s just so many options in PowerPoint to enable you to produce exciting and engaging presentations to impress.
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