ESSENTIAL MICROSOFT OFFICE 2010: Tutorials for Teachers

Copyright © Bernard John Poole, 2010. All rights reserved

POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS

9 Creating slide shows and related teaching

materials

LEARNING OUTCOMES
This lesson introduces you to the basic features of PowerPoint which are particularly valuable in
the teaching and learning environment. You will learn how to use PowerPoint to capture your
ideas in outline form and convert those ideas into multimedia presentations. You will also learn
how to use the application to create your own presentations both from scratch and with the help of
one of the PowerPoint Wizards.
Most people think of a slide show as a way of presenting a series of still images or photographs
using a slide projector. If you think about it, however, a slide does not have to be a still image;
using PowerPoint it can also be an audio or video clip. For that matter, a slide does not have to be
even a picture; it can also be text, an outline of ideas, whatever you want.
PowerPoint provides an easy-to-use multimedia presentation production system, which you
will no doubt enjoy learning and which you and your students will find useful for individual or
group projects of all kinds.
In the various courses that you take as an Education major you learn how to design curricula,
with lesson plans and unit plans. You also learn methodologies for effective teaching. The better
the teacher you are, the more PowerPoint will empower you in your work.
Here, then, are the topics that will be covered in this lesson:
 introductory thoughts about presentations;
 PowerPoint at work;
 building the presentation;
 adding bells and whistles to the presentation;
 printing presentation handouts.

A caveat before you begin:

In the earlier tutorials for Office 2010, the steps to accomplish the tasks assigned have been rather
detailed. This time, however, the directions will be less specific, especially in the latter half of the
lesson, because PowerPoint is a program you can figure out by playing with it. You’ll find that
you’ll soon become confident about how to design and develop high quality multimedia slide
presentations. So relax, and have fun!

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9.1 SOME INTRODUCTORY THOUGHTS ABOUT PRESENTATIONS

Making a successful—well-designed, content-rich, pedagogically-sound—PowerPoint
presentation requires forethought and advance preparation. It’s rather like what good cooks or
chefs do before starting to cook a delicious dish of food. They read the recipe, make sure they
have all the ingredients they need, gather all the ingredients together—the raw food such as
vegetables and eggs and milk and wine and spices and other flavoring—what they call the mise
en place. They make sure they have all the tools they need to do the job.
Good cooks doesn’t start cooking till they’re good and ready.
In the same way, you have to get your thoughts together, know what you’re going to talk
about, and have your audio-visual material gathered together in one place (mise enplace) so that
when you come to create the presentation, it’s a snap.
A good presentation, like a term paper, is usually based on an outline, such as is illustrated in
Fig. 9.1 and Fig. 9.13 later in the lesson.

Each of these icons

represents a slide in
the PowerPoint
presentation

Fig. 9.1 Outline (Normal View) for the Tudor Monarchs presentation (annotated)
Take a good look at Fig. 9.1—study the annotations especially
You see on the left an outline of the text for each slide in the Tudor Monarchs presentation.
Think of the titles and text for each slide to an outline you would have made for a high school or
college paper. Similar, right? This is why the outlining tool is built into PowerPoint—to help
you plan.
Remember the golden rules of successful design: Rule 1—Plan; Rule 2—Plan; Rule 3—Plan!
These golden rules apply whether you are designing a term paper, an audio-visual aid, a class
outing, or a class syllabus and schedule.
You might begin with a brainstorming session to help you get an outline. During
brainstorming, members of the group would come up with as many ideas as possible related to
the topic of the project. Nobody's ideas are rejected in the early stages so as to encourage a fertile
flow of useful suggestions.

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The result of the brainstorming session might be a somewhat disorganized list of ideas. This list
might have been entered directly into the computer during the brainstorming session, or it might
have been collected on a blackboard or flip chart. Before changing the list into outline form you
would re-organize it so that the ideas flowed naturally and logically from one to the other.
Along the way you might toss out some of the ideas for one reason or another. Eventually
you'll have a working list which would end up as an outline, perhaps in a word processor document.

9.2 POWERPOINT AT WORK

Let’s see these ideas and others at work by looking at an example of a PowerPoint presentation.
Turn on your computer and open PowerPoint 2010
Make sure you have your Work Files for Office 2010 available in the disk drive
In the File menu select Open
PowerPoint now brings up the Open dialog box (Fig. 9.2)

Fig. 9.2 The Open dialog box

In the Open dialog box, navigate to the Work Files for Office 2010 folder >
PowerPoint Files, then open the document Tudor Monarchs.ppt

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Fig. 9.3 shows the Tudor Monarchs presentation in Normal View as it appears on your screen right
after you open the document.

Slide View Tools

Fig. 9.3 The Tudor Monarchs presentation

Take a look at the Slide View tools in the lower left corner of the PowerPoint window (Fig. 9.3).
You'll use these tools a lot while you're developing your slides, so let's get a close up view of them
right away and find out what each of them is about (Fig. 9.4).

Fig. 9.4 The Slide View toolbar (annotated)

Normal view

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This is the view you see illustrated in Fig. 9.3 above. It is the one you'll use most of the time while
you're actually putting information on each slide. In this view you have the left hand frame where
you have the option to either see a thumbnail of all your slides or the outline for your presentation.
In the center of the window you have the slide you are actually working on—the active slide. Then,
over in the right hand frame you have the Task Pane where you'll find all the help you need to
develop your presentation.
Slide Sorter view
This is the view you see illustrated in Fig. 9.5 and it is the one you'll find most useful when you
want to get an overview of your show since you'll be able to see most all your slides at once. You
also can easily move your slides around, changing the order to suit your purposes. This is why it's
called the Slide Sorter view.

This is the
Slide Sorter
tool

Fig. 9.5 The Slide Sorter View of the Presentation

Reading View
Use reading view to deliver your presentation not to an audience (via a large screen, for example),
but instead to someone viewing your presentation on their own computer. Or, use Reading view
on your own computer when you want to view a presentation not in full-screen Slide Show view,
but in a window with simple controls that make the presentation easy to review. You can always
switch from Reading view to one of the other views if you want to change the presentation.

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Slide Show view

When you click on the Slide Show button, you'll be able to see how the slide you're actually
working on (the current or active slide) looks when you run the slide show. You'll use this button
when you've been working on a slide for a while and you want to see how it will look to your
audience during your presentation.
You'll find yourself using these tools frequently to switch from one view to another as you
are developing your PowerPoint presentation. Let's check out the Slide Sorter view now.
Click on the Slide Sorter tool in the Slide View toolbar (you can also access
these views from the View Ribbon in the Presentation Views Group, by the
way)
Take a look at the Slide Sorter View window that is presented to you now (more or less the same
as Fig. 9.5 on the previous page, though your screen may be a different width, so the slides may
be arranged differently across the page).
The presentation you are looking at demonstrates some of the basic features of PowerPoint.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to build your own presentations along the same lines.
It’s time you learned about the Tudor Kings and Queens of England.
In the Slide View toolbar, click on the Slide Show button (or from the View
Ribbon in the Presentation Views Group, select Slide Show)
Features to look out for in the demonstration presentation
While you click your way through the presentation, look out for the following PowerPoint
features that have been used in the creation of the Tudor Monarchs slide show.
Transition effects and text preset animations
The transition effects from one slide to another and the text preset animations (which determine
how the text will arrive on each slide) have been set at random for the demonstration. This is to
give you some idea of the variety of transitions and animations you can use in PowerPoint. But
this is not necessarily a good thing to do.
Normally you would not want to use so many different transitions and animations since it
might distract from the impact you are trying to make. A good designer homes in on a style that
he or she likes best for a particular theme and tends to stay with it for all the slides in the show.
Inserting clip art, pictures and other media
Microsoft Corporation maintains a rich database of clip art on a wide range of topics. This online
database is available to all the programs in the Microsoft Office suite. You just have to go to the
web to access it if you are a registered user of Office or other Microsoft programs.
Fig. 9.6 illustrates the Insert Ribbon from which you can choose to include clip art and other
media (such as photos, movie clips, sound files, and so forth).

Fig. 9.6 Ribbon for inserting images, illustrations, and other media

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Take a closer look at the Images Group by moving the mouse arrow over
Picture to read the description of what the tool is used for—to Insert a Picture
you have saved in a file on your disk
Now do the same for Clip Art and Photo Album, and, in the Illustrations
Group, check out the Shapes, Smart Art, and Chart tools, noting what each
tool can be used for to illustrate your presentations
Notice, too, the Insert Ribbon > Media Group, with its tools for inserting
Video (like movies and video clips) and Audio (sound)
You can download clip art, photographs, sound files, video clips and other media from a file you
have saved on disk, or from Microsoft’s collection on the Web, or you can bring onto a slide all
kinds of charts and tables from other Office programs such as Word or Excel.
You can even scan pictures directly onto a slide, so if you have a scanner connected to your
computer, you’re in business. If you’re looking for multimedia material to accompany your slides,
the Web is the place to go. Companies, universities, schools, and individuals, especially teachers,
are creating and making available magnificent multimedia materials. These materials are available,
mostly free of charge, from websites such as flickr.com, youtube.com, and so forth.
PowerPoint makes it easy to incorporate such material into presentations, with or without
accompanying text.
Buttons and Hidden Slides
Notice the use of buttons to allow the user to control movement through the slides, thus making
slideshows both interactive and non-linear—in other words, the user decides the sequencing of the
slides. In the Tudor Monarchs slide show there also is a Hidden Slide (slide #5) which is only seen
if you click on the button to see the answer to the question posed on slide #4.
If you are still viewing the slide show, you want to get out of the slide show first before the
next exercise.
Hit the Esc(ape) key on the keyboard to exit the slide show
Now, in the Slides menu on the left of the PowerPoint window, click on Slide
#4 to make it the active slide
In the Slide View toolbar at the bottom right of the window, click on the
Slide Show button—or from the Slide Show Ribbon > Start Slide Show
Group, select From Current Slide)
Slide #4 is now showing on your full screen.
Now, do NOT click on the orange button at the lower left of the picture of
Henry VIII to find out the answer to the question as to why Henry VIII broke
away from the Church of Rome—instead, click anywhere else on the screen
PowerPoint skips the next slide (slide #5) and jumps directly to slide #6! This is because slide #5
is a hidden slide which can only be reached if you click on the orange button on either slide #4 or,
since you missed it, slide #6.
Hit the Esc(ape) key again on the keyboard to exit the slide show

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Now in the slides menu on the left of the window, look at the icon for slide #5
and notice that the slide number has a box around it with a line running
diagonally across the number (Fig. 9.7)

Notice the boxed number

indicating a Hidden Slide

Fig. 9.7 A Hidden Slide is identified in the Slides menu by the box around its number

The orange buttons (orange only because that’s the color the author chose for them) are called
Action Buttons. Action buttons and hidden slides give you control over how you want the user to
view the presentation.

Now click on the orange button on slide #6 to go back to the previous slide
so you can check out the answer to the question

This shows you that you can create interesting interactive learning materials using PowerPoint.
Lesson 10 will help you learn more about interactive presentations such as this. Your students, too,
will have a lot of fun using PowerPoint to develop projects of all kinds for every subject under the
sun.
Let’s continue checking out the rest of the slide show about the Tudor Monarchs.

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Timing considerations
Fig. 9.8 shows the Slide Sorter View of the presentation and highlights where PowerPoint
indicates the timing for each slide.

Timing settings

Fig. 9.8 The Slide Sorter View showing the time each slide will show on the screen
before automatic transition to the next slide
You’ll notice that under each slide is a number on the left, indicating which slide it is in the
sequence of slides in the presentation, and a ":30" on the right, showing that the slide will
transition to the next slide after 30 seconds.
Now, 30 seconds is more than enough time for anyone to read and absorb the data on slides
such as those in the Tudor Monarchs presentation. So you might think 30 seconds is too long to
hold the user’s attention. Won’t they get antsy waiting for the next slide?
Well, if you look at each of the slides, you will see that there is a button which the user can
click on to control when to proceed to the next slide. Thus, by allowing a generous amount of time,
along with user control, you're allowing each individual student the freedom to proceed at his or
her own pace. The speed at which our minds absorb data varies enormously from person to person.
So you always want to design teaching materials and lessons in such a way as to address individual
student needs and the timing features of PowerPoint allow for this.

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Acknowledgements: Always give credit where credit is due

The last slide in any presentation, just as the last item in a term paper or the credits that run at the
end of a movie, should usually be your list of sources cited or used—your Acknowledgements
slide (Fig. 9.9).

Fig. 9.9 The first Acknowledgements slide

So… If you haven't already done so, in the Slides menu click on the first
slide and, in the Slide View toolbar at the bottom right of the window, click
on the Slide Show button—or from the Slide Show Ribbon > Start Slide
Show Group, select From Beginning)
Click your way through the presentation now (you can click the left button on
your mouse to do this, or hit the space bar, or use the arrow keys to go
back and forth through the show, or click on the Action Buttons on the slides
themselves to proceed to the next or previous slide)
The slides have been timed to allow the user to easily view and read what is on each slide
without feeling rushed. If you want the slides to proceed at a faster pace, simply click on the left
mouse button or hit the space bar.

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When you have finished reviewing the Tudor Monarchs slide show, exit the
show by right clicking the mouse, then select the last item in the menu to
End Show or, slightly quicker, click on the Esc(ape) button in the top left
corner of the keyboard
So much for an overview of PowerPoint. No doubt you are anxious to start creating your own
presentation. The next section will help you do just that.
Close the Tudor Monarchs presentation when you are ready to continue with
the tutorial

9.3 BUILDING THE PRESENTATION

Preparation of the outline
You are going to prepare a simple outline which will give you the experience to prepare your own
outlines when you're done with the tutorials.
It's tempting to just barrel along into a presentation, like someone tempting fate at Niagara
Falls! But you should resist doing so at all costs because you'll save yourself no end of time in the
long run if you carefully plan what you want to do. You really have to think ahead if you want to
get where you want to go. Otherwise, there's no telling where you'll end up!
To create an outline, here are the steps to follow.
From the File menu select New then double click on the Blank presentation
icon (Fig. 9.10) to open a new PowerPoint presentation

Fig. 9.10 New Presentation dialog window

When you first open a new, blank presentation in PowerPoint 2010, the program presents you with
the Normal View (Fig. 9.11), with the Slides and Outline tabs on the left.

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Tabs to select either

Slides or the
Outline view of the
presentation

Fig. 9.11 The screen at the start of a new blank presentation

PowerPoint thus provides a lot of help while you're developing your presentation.
The first slide layout, by default, is the Title slide layout. This is because you would normally
want to start out a presentation with a slide that displays the title of your show, along with sub
titles such as your name and so forth. You don't have to use this slide layout, of course. PowerPoint
provides slide layout templates from which you can choose for any slide, including one layout
which is blank. In other words, you can create slides from scratch, entirely of your own design, in
which case you would select the Blank Slide layout. Let’s take a look at these Slide Layouts now
(Fig. 9.12).

Slide Layout tool in

the Slides Group of
the Home Ribbon

Fig. 9.12 Slide Layouts

In the Slides Group of the Home Ribbon click on the Slide Layout tool

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Check out each of the templates, including the Blank template.

Typing the outline entries
Right now you need the Outline view in the left hand pane, in order to start work on the outline.
As you will see, the outline will be merged into the slide show with little effort on your part,
thanks to PowerPoint’s slide layout features.
Click on the Outline tab at the top of the left hand pane
PowerPoint now presents the Outline view (Fig. 9.13), with a small slide icon in the top left corner,
waiting for you to begin entering the text for your first slide.

Outline Tab

This icon
represents the
textual content
for the first slide

Fig. 9.13 The Outline view in the left hand pane

Before you begin, however, you should save the presentation with an appropriate name so that you
can then easily save your work as you go along. Remember, this is always a wise precaution.
Giving a new document a name and saving it on your disk helps you to get into good habits about
saving your work. You should teach your students to be equally careful when they are developing
work on a computer.
Make sure you still have the disk with your Work Files for Office 2010 in the
drive, then from the File menu select Save As, navigate to your USB drive,
locate the Work Files for Office 2010 folder, open the Data Files folder, then
create a new folder called PowerPoint Presentations and click on OK
Name the new PowerPoint document Screenbeans, and click on Save
Don’t start typing text just yet. Fig. 9.14 illustrates the outline you are going to create. Use it to
guide you when you work your way through the directions that follow on the next page.

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Fig. 9.14 The outline for the Screenbeans presentation

On the left side of the window, next to the small icon for the first slide, type the
title No Problems, Only Solutions (see Fig. 9.14 above) then hit Enter on the
keyboard

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PowerPoint now goes to a new slide, thinking that you are finished adding text to the first slide.
But you need to add a sub-title on the Title slide. To do this, you need to increase the list level.
Fig. 9.15 illustrates the Increase List Level tool in the Paragraph Group of the home Ribbon
that you use to do this.

Increase List Level tool

Fig. 9.15 Increase list level tool

In the Paragraph Group of the Home Ribbon, click on the Increase List Level
tool now, then type By [your name]—type your own name, of course!—and hit
the Enter key
So now your first slide will look something like this (Fig. 9.16):

Fig. 9.16 The first slide in your presentation will look something like this
That’s all you need on the first slide. Now you need to go to a new slide. To do that in the outline,
you must decrease the list level. The tool to do this is right next to the tool for increasing the list
level (Fig. 9.15 above).

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In the Paragraph Group of the Home Ribbon, click on the Decrease List
Level tool now
Now you are ready to type in the entries for the second and remaining slides (see Fig. 9.14 for the
content of each slide). First, however, you must change the slide layout.
In the Slides Group of the Home Ribbon, click on the Slide Layout tool
Next, in the selection of templates that pops up, locate and double click on
the layout for a Two Content slide (Fig. 9.17)

Fig. 9.17 The Title, Text, and Content slide layout

Now, return your attention to the left hand frame of the PowerPoint window so
you can continue with Slide 2 of the Outline
Type Confusion for the second slide title, and hit Enter
Switching levels
You already learned how to do this, but let’s review the steps. Switching levels means moving up
or down in the hierarchy of topics on each slide.
If you look at the second slide in Fig. 9.14 on page 294, the word Confusion is at the top level,
then what immediately follows—indented—is lower level text A problem often presents itself…,
etc. When you switch to the next level down, the text is automatically indented to the right, that is
to say the level is increased.
So, to summarize, moving the text to the LEFT decreases the list level in an outline. Moving
the text to the RIGHT increases the list level in an outline.
For the remaining slides you have to enter text not only for the Title of each slide at the top
level, but also for the sub-text. This text will be at an increased list level than the title. As we
already observed, to change levels in an outline, PowerPoint provides list level control tools as
illustrated in Fig. 9.15 on the previous page.
Go back and take a look at Figure 9.15 now before proceeding

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In the Paragraph Group of the Home Ribbon, click on the Increase List
Level tool for the next text you are going to type into the outline
Look at your outline now and notice that the next entry you type will be indented and bulleted.
Type the lower level text for the second slide (A problem often presents
itself…) from the illustration in Fig. 9.14 on page 294, then hit Enter
Decreasing the level
That is all you need by way of text for the second slide. As you can see, you must decrease the list
level for the new slide 3. To do this you use the Slide Level tools once more.
In the Paragraph Group of the Home Ribbon, click on the Decrease List
Level tool to start a new slide for the next text you are going to type into the
outline
As you see, this begins a new slide (slide 3). You should be starting to get the hang of this by now.
So go ahead and complete the rest of the outline (using Fig. 9.14 above on
page 294), increasing and decreasing the text levels as you go along
When you have typed the title and text entries for slide #9, be sure to save your
work again with the document name Screenbeans
Before you go on, in the left hand pane, click on the Slides tab so you can
see the thumbnails of all your slides (Fig. 9.18)

Click on the Slides

View tab to see
thumbnails for all the
slides in the show

Fig. 9.18 The Slides View in the left-hand frame of the PowerPoint window
Neat!
Adding the pictures to the slides

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For Slides #2 through #9 you are going to put a graphic of a Screenbean1 in the Content
placeholder. This job has to be done directly on the slide.
You should still be in Normal view, so click on the thumbnail for Slide 2 in the
show to make Slide 2 the current slide
You can see the large version of the slide in the PowerPoint window (Fig. 9.18 above). The Two
Content layout lets you put a title at the top of the slide, and either text or some other visual content
in the lower left and/or lower right placeholders.
Let's take a closer look at the Content Selector tools in the lower left and lower right frames of
a typical Two Content blank slide (Fig. 9.19).

Content
Selector
tools

Fig. 9.19 The Two Content slide layout

Insert Chart

Insert Table Insert SmartArt Graphic

Insert Picture from File Insert Media Clip

Insert Clip Art

Fig. 9.20 The Content Selector tools

1 Screenbeans are cartoon characters created by Microsoft, Inc.

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As illustrated in Fig. 9.20 above, you can insert a table (from Access, say); or a chart from Excel;
or clip art from Microsoft's gallery of clip art; or a movie clip that you made yourself or that you
downloaded from a CD-ROM or from the web; or an organization chart, or any picture that you
have saved on disk.
If you click on the Insert Clip Art tool, PowerPoint brings up the Clip Gallery, as illustrated in
Fig. 9.21.

Type a
search
string here

Fig. 9.21 The Microsoft Clip Art Gallery dialog box

As you can see in Fig. 9.21, you would type in a word or phrase you want to search for (in this
case the word “problems”), and the software finds dozens of possible clips that you can use on
the slide. However, the set of Screenbean pictures that you are going to use for this presentation
are from Microsoft's clip art gallery, and they may not be available on your computer since you
may not be working online.
So for the sake of this exercise, a PowerPoint Files folder has been prepared inside the Work
Files for Office 2010 folder on your disk drive, in which are stored the 8 Screenbean clip art

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items you will use for this presentation. They are stored, not as clip art, however, but as pictures,
so you will use the Insert Picture from File tool in the Content Selector tools (Fig. 9.20 above) to
put the pictures on your slides.
Make sure you still have your Work Files for Office 2010 in the disk drive
Now click on the Insert Picture from File icon in the Content Selector tools
(Fig. 9.22) so you can add a picture from a file already stored on your disk (the
Confused Screenbean)

Fig. 9.22 Insert Picture from File icon

In the Insert Picture dialog box, navigate to your Work Files for Office 2010,
open the PowerPoint Files folder, and inside this folder open the
Screenbeans folder
In the Screenbeans folder there are the 8 pictures you need for the next 8 slides in the presentation.
Table 9.1 lists the pictures in the order in which you should use them in the slides.
Slide 2 Confused
Slide 3 Contused
Slide 4 Juggler
Slide 5 Inspired
Slide 6 Nowwhat
Slide 7 Elated
Slide 8 Yayyy
Slide 9 Jubilee
Table 9.1 The sequence of pictures in the Screenbeans presentation

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In the Screenbeans folder, double click on the document named Confused

(“Confused” with an “f”, not “Contused” with a “t”!)
PowerPoint inserts the Screenbean figurine inside the right side placeholder, with handles around
it so that you can re-size it, if necessary, to fit neatly inside the borders of the box. You probably
won't need to do this, but feel free to do so if you want.
Check to make sure the art is correctly positioned on the right side of the
slide, then click anywhere off the image, in order to set it in place, then scroll
down to slide #3
Repeat this exercise for the next seven slides, loading the Screenbean images
in the order they are listed in Table 9.1 above
When you are done with slide #9, Save the Screenbeans PowerPoint
document before you move on to the next exercise

9.4 ADDING BELLS AND WHISTLES TO THE PRESENTATION

Setting timings for the slides and adding transitions
This task should be done while you are in the Slide Sorter View.
Click on the Slide Sorter View in the Slide View toolbar at the lower right of
the PowerPoint window
For this exercise, you are going to add the same timing and transitions to all the slides, though you
could, if you wanted to, use different transitions or timing for each individual slide.
In the Home Ribbon > Editing Group > Select menu, choose the option for
Select All (or press Ctrl-a on the keyboard)
Now, in the Transitions Ribbon, in the Transitions to This Slide Group, click
on the More Slide Transitions button (Fig. 9.23)

Click on the
More Slide
Transitions
button to see
more slide
transition options

Fig. 9.23 The More Slide Transitions button

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This button drops down a menu of the complete selection of slide transitions available in
Microsoft’s PowerPoint presentation software (Fig. 9.24).

Fig. 9.24 Transition Slides menu

To get a Live Preview of any of the transitions, click on a Transition in the
menu and watch the highlighted slide in the Slide Sorter view
Try several of them to get a feel for how they work, then select the one you
most like
Next, in the Transitions Ribbon > Timing Group, click in the check box next
to After: and increase the Advance Slide time to 10 (ten) seconds, but leave
the check mark in the box next to On Mouse Click, so now the Advance Slide
options will look like those illustrated in Fig. 9.25

Fig. 9.25 Advance Slide Timing settings

This will allow the user to advance to the next slide either manually (by clicking the mouse) or
automatically (after 10 seconds).

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Finally, for a sound effect, in the Transitions Ribbon > Timing Group, click
on the arrow to bring down the Sound: menu (Fig. 9.26)

Fig. 9.26 The PowerPoint Sounds menu

Choose Drum roll (if you don’t hear a drum roll when you run the slide show,
it may be because the speakers on your computer are turned off—muted—or
maybe you don't have speakers on your computer at all)
You are going to Apply these timing and transition effects to All the slides, but you should bear in
mind that you could have different effects for each slide if you wanted, simply by going from slide
to slide, setting the options, and not applying to All Slides. But, for the sake of this exercise, let’s
apply these settings to All Slides
Click on Apply to All Slides (Fig. 9.27)

Fig. 9.27 The Apply to All option in the Timing Group

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Notice that the timing value ":10" has appeared underneath each slide in the Slide Sorter view.
Choosing Slide Designs
PowerPoint gives you all kinds of assistance in the design of your slides. So far we've used the
default selection of Slide Layouts, which help with the general layout of each slide in your show.
But the Design Ribbon lets you select from an extensive set of pre-formatted slide designs
involving graphics, colors, and animations. Let's check out some of these options now.
Stay in the Slide Sorter view, and click on the Design tab to bring up the
Design Ribbon (Fig. 9.28)

Click on the
More Design
Themes button to
see more Slide
Design options

Fig. 9.28 The Design Ribbon

Design Themes
The easiest way to make your slides more interesting is to use one of the pre-set Design Themes
that come with PowerPoint (Fig. 9.28 above). You can select from a large set of Design Themes,
most of which are quite attractive. Let's try some of them now.
Use the mouse pointer to select a Design Theme by clicking on it—for the
sake of the exercises that follow, choose a Design Theme that has a different
color background than white
PowerPoint quickly applies the selected design template to all the slides in your show so you can
check it out. If you wanted to apply the Design Template to just a few slides, you would first select
the slides you want, then click on one of the other Design Templates. Let's try that.
Hold down the ctrl key while you click on any three or four of the slides in the
show
Now, in the Design Ribbon > Themes Group, click on a Slide Design
Template different than the one you chose before
Voilà! You see how easy it is to create a mix of different and attractive slides.

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PowerPoint is a beautiful program which is so easy to use once you know what's available to you.
You can go to town when you're designing slides, as long as you know all the tips and tricks—the
bells and whistles—offered by the software. Let’s check out a couple of other features of the
software.
Color Schemes
First select all the slides in the show.
Press ctrl-a on the keyboard
Built-in Color Schemes
Maybe you liked one of the Slide Design templates you were just checking out, but you decided
that the Color Scheme wasn't what you were looking for. Well, you can do something about that
by using the built-in Color Schemes. Or, if you want to choose your own colors, you can go with
a custom Color Scheme. Let's try some of the standard Color Schemes first.
In the Design Ribbon > Themes Group, click on the Colors option to bring
down the Color Schemes menu (Fig. 9.29)

Fig. 9.29 Built-in Colors menu

Click on any one of the Color Schemes—try a few of them to see how they
look
Just as for the Design Templates, you don't have to apply a Color Scheme to all slides. You can
select one or more of the slides and apply the Color Scheme to those alone.
Custom Color Schemes
Each new installation of PowerPoint starts out with a limited set of standard Color Schemes, and
there may be none that you particularly like. Color is, after all, a very individual thing. Customizing
a Color Scheme is easy enough, however, and if you put together a Color Scheme you really like,
you can add it to the set of standard Color Schemes.

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In the Design Ribbon > Themes Group, at the bottom of the menu of color
themes click on Create New Theme Colors…
Fig. 9.30 shows the Create New Theme Colors dialog box, which allows you to customize the
color of every feature of a Design Theme (Text Backgrounds, hyperlinks, etc.).

Fig. 9.30 The Edit Color Scheme dialog box

Click on any of the small color boxes to bring up a palette of Theme Colors
for that feature of the slide’s design theme (Fig. 9.31)

Fig. 9.31 Custom theme Colors

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Now click on one of the Theme or Standard Colors (Fig. 9.31 above) to select
from a palette of 256 colors (the standard color palette)
Remember, though, that your PowerPoint presentation is going to be viewed by an audience of
people whom you want to impress with the attractiveness of your slides—you want the slides to
be eye-catching and engaging. So beware of choosing colors that may be jarring or quite simply
inappropriate. For this reason, unless you think you have a good sense of color and design, it’s
probably best to go with the sets of built-in design themes and color schemes.
However, if you do have a good feel for design and color, you can use the Custom Color Mixer,
which will allow you to select from over 16 million colors!2
Click on More Colors… (Fig. 9.31 on the previous page) to bring up the
Custom Color Mixer (Fig. 9.32)

Fig. 9.32 The Custom Color Mixer

Take whatever time you need to familiarize yourself with these color selection tools.
After you have selected some new colors for TextBackgrounds and Accents,
and so on, click on the Save button to save your Screenbeans presentation
before proceeding with the tutorial
Making the Screenbean images transparent
One problem still remains to be fixed before we move on. If you selected a design template with a
background other than white, the Screenbean images, with their white background, look odd
against the slide’s other-colored background. Here's how you can fix this.

216 million because, for the Custom Color palette, Office uses 24 bits (24-bit color), which translates into 224
colors—precisely 16,777,216 different colors

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First, in the Slide View tools (lower right of the PowerPoint window), clilck on
the Normal View so you can work with individual slides
Now, in the left hand frame, click on the slide thumbnail for Slide #2 to make
it the active slide
Next, on the large version of the slide (Confusion) on the right side of the
window, click on the picture of the Screenbean image, then, above the Format
tab click on Picture Tools (Fig. 9.33)

Then click on Picture Tools

First, click on the

picture

Fig. 9.33 The Picture Tools toolbar

Now, in the Picture Tools Ribbon > Adjust Group, click on the Color button
to bring down the set of Color Options (Fig. 9.34)

Fig. 9.34 Color Options in the Picture Tools Ribbon

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Click to select the Set Transparent Color option towards the bottom of the
menu (see Fig. 9.34 above)
Now slide the mouse (which has changed to a different cursor for the
Transparent Color tool) across to the Screenbean picture and click on the
picture’s white background
Hey presto! The Screenbean picture is now transparent and has the same background as the rest of
the slide.
Now do the same with each of the Screenbean pictures on the other slides
Save the Slide Show when you're done
Checking out the presentation
It’s time to try out your show.
In the Slide Show Ribbon, in the Start Slide Show Group, select From
Beginning, and click your way through each slide at your own pace, or let the
computer time it for you, 10 seconds per slide

9.6 PRINTING PRESENTATION HANDOUTS

A nice feature of PowerPoint is its ability to provide you with hard copy versions of the slides
and/or of the outline text of a presentation. This is useful for the preparation of handouts for an
audience or a class. Here are the steps to do this.
From the File menu choose Print
Now click on the Full Page Slides box to bring up the drop down menu of print
layout options (Fig. 9.35)

Fig. 9.35 Selecting handout options for printing

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In the drop down menu, under Handouts, select 6 Slides Vertical per page
Also, click in the Color box towards the bottom of the Print dialog box (Fig.
9.36)

Fig. 9.36 Print Color Options menu

In the Color options for the slides, select Grayscale, then click on OK to print
a copy of the presentation
In the handout options, you can choose two, four, six, or nine slides per page, and you can display
the slides in order either horizontally or vertically. This handout can then be distributed to an
audience or a class for note-taking, review or reinforcement.
Save this final version of the Screenbeans show then, before you finish, go
ahead and make a backup copy of your Screenbeans presentation

LOOKING BACK
Lesson 9 has been devoted to the PowerPoint program that is designed to help in the preparation
of presentation materials of all kinds. It is not only a very useful tool, but also it is enjoyable to
work with. Outlines and slide shows will add polish to the lessons or presentations you will prepare
for your students and other groups during the course of your career. For example, a math or
chemistry teacher might intersperse her lessons with professional-looking formula charts or
chemical structures. Any teacher could make an impressive graphic introduction to a class. An
administrator could do the same for her school, the presentation to be viewed in the office by
visitors.
But PowerPoint is still more valuable as a tool for learning in the hands of your students. They
will soon learn the necessary skills to use the program with flare and they'll creating presentations

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of their own. As their teacher, you'll guide them in the direction of learning projects of all kinds
related to the curriculum K-12. In the context of PowerPoint, students will discover knowledge
and construct their own mental database of information that will stand them in good stead in their
future lives.

LOOKING FORWARD
PowerPoint is a useful teaching tool, providing added value for both the teacher and the students.
A carefully prepared and well-designed presentation, appropriately used during the course of a
class, helps the teacher stay focused and on track. A presentation that is rich in multimedia gives
the teacher the opportunity to spice up presentations in various ways that promote added interest
and engagement for students. PowerPoint also can be used to create as well as enable powerful
learning environments.
Lesson 10 will show you how to create interactive presentations in which the user learns while
responding to the material that is being presented, thus encouraging engagement, which promotes
learning. More powerful yet, PowerPoint may be best used in the discovery mode of learning,
where the students create presentations that involve research in the pursuit of knowledge,
incorporating multimedia—still images, video, and sound, along with text—in the construction of
a personal understanding of the subject matter being learned.
A thoughtful teacher will encourage her students to work together on such projects and present
their work to the class, thus applying the adage that the best way to learn is to teach.
As the saying goes: "I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand."

SKILL CONSOLIDATION
1. Prepare a presentation on the subject of the American colonies. Make sure you have at least
eight first level topics (eight slides), as well as a title slide and an acknowledgements slide.
2. Prepare a presentation on the subject of US Presidents (or any subject of your choice that you
might use with a K-12 age group appropriate to your major). Make sure you have at least eight
first level topics (eight slides), as well as a title slide and an acknowledgements slide.
3. Prepare a presentation on the subject of the American movie scene. Make sure you have at least
eight first level topics (eight slides), as well as a title slide and an acknowledgements slide.
4. Prepare a presentation in a style of your own choosing with at least three levels on the subject
of contemporary music. Make sure you have at least eight first level topics (eight slides), as
well as a title slide and an acknowledgements slide.
5. Create a slide show with yourself as the subject—you the person, you the teacher. Use graphics
drawn from any source you like. Make sure you have at least eight first level topics (eight
slides), as well as a title slide and an acknowledgements slide.
6. Create a slide show on the subject of pets. Use graphics from clip art or created in a Drawing
or Painting environment. Make sure you have at least eight first level topics (eight slides), as
well as a title slide and an acknowledgements slide.
7. Create a slide show on the subject of geometric shapes. Use graphics drawn from clip art or
created in a Drawing or Painting environment. Make sure you have at least eight first level
topics (eight slides), as well as a title slide and an acknowledgements slide.

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