PowerPoint 2016 Essentials

PowerPoint 2016 is the popular application within the Office suite to create on-screen presentations. This series starts at the very beginning by exploring the PowerPoint environment, how to add slides to a presentation, insert text and images into slides, and create tables and charts. The series continues by enhancing a presentation with design themes, animation, and transitions, then concludes with preparing and delivering a robust presentation. This series is specifically for the Windows operating system with PowerPoint 2016 locally installed.

Hello everyone and welcome to PowerPoint 2016 Essentials. My name is Vonne Smith and in this course overview we're gonna be talking about, well, what exactly does this course cover. Who should be watching this particular course. Do you need to know anything before you get started and any extra tidbits of information I have for you. So this course is going to start from the very beginning. This is an essential series, so we're going to with, well, what exactly is PowerPoint? This thing that I have right over here, this is PowerPoint. So I'm gonna show you what it is, this is an onscreen presentation application. So we're going to get familiar with the interface, like just moving around the particular environment, understanding where the ribbon is, where the slide pane is, where the speaker notes are. And then actually navigating through a presentation to understand where to find that, where to change your different views within your presentation, how to navigate through your slides and get to slide five versus slide two. So we'll go through that and then just the basics of the Windows operating system as well. So we'll cover that at the very beginning. So we will take you from the very start all the way up through adding content, that would be our next topic area. Where we're gonna add in things like text and images, shapes, we'll work with multiple shapes and how to format them, how to group them, and all that fun stuff. We'll also go ahead and show you how to put in tables. Because, of course, if you're going to be presenting information to your audience, you might need to structure that in a table. Another big one for presentations is charts. How to graph information, how to show visual representation of your data. We'll spend a decent amount of time in adding charts and how to format them. We'll also get into SmartArt. I love SmartArt, it's a great way again to show some different graphical ways to display your information instead of just text on a screen. Maybe go ahead and put it in a SmartArt graphic. And the nice thing is there's a lot of great examples in the SmartArt gallery that are pretty easy to control. We will hit that up in that particular topic. Then we'll move on to enhancing a presentation. Putting on a design theme. What is a design theme? How can I modify it or change some variations of it? How do I make my own color scheme? Then we'll also talk about the PowerPoint Designer, and talk about the design ideas that PowerPoint gives us, which is really great. It's like a newer, fresher way to format your slides and have an overall graphical experience, I would say, with that information. And it's always tied to the Microsoft out on the Internets, and for Office 365 subscribers, and it gives you some really neat, new ways to be able to present and format your information. So I really like the design ideas. We'll also talk about slide transitions, what happens between your slides when your moving through them. Animations, how to add animations to enhance your presentation and of course doing it in a tasteful way. But we might have a little fun with that animation and have some cats jump across the screen. You know how I go. [LAUGH] We'll also talk about how to add a photo album. A lot of times people wanna use PowerPoint to create a slideshow of photographs, be able to play it during a presentation or a party. So I will show you how to do that particular type of presentation. Then we'll get into how to prepare and present your actual slideshow. The all important proofing your information, making sure you run a spell check. Checking for other words in the thesaurus. Looking up things in the smart lookup feature, and just overall proofreading your information to make sure you don't have any words that are spelled correctly, but may be not in the correct content. We'll talk about how to print a presentation. Printing? But I thought this was like an on screen program. Well, yes, but having backups. Because if you're going somewhere that you want people to go away with your presentation, I'll show you how to print those out. Print out notes and all the different ways that you can organize your information to actually translate onto a printed page. And then, how to present a slide show. Just like I'm doing right now, now we have a little extra pizzazz going with me on one side and the presentation on the other. But that's just because we have a full production studio. But I will show you how to do a regular presentation in front of somebody, in front of a audience with either a projector and talk about all the different things that you may run into and how to control your presentation. So who's this for? For all Office users with a capital O, meaning, we're Office 365 subscribers, or anybody that has a locally installed version of PowerPoint. Whether you bought it as a stand-alone application, and you're not part of the Office 365 subscription, that would apply here, too. And this is a Windows-based program or series. So this is going to be for PC users only. We do have a Mac series if you're looking for that. This does start at the very beginning. So this is somebody that has a basic or no knowledge of PowerPoint. And we bring you all the up to I feel you have a really good working knowledge of Powerpoint in an intermediate level, to where you can create your own presentations and make them look pretty good. What do you need to know? Well, not much. Windows basics, how to move around the operating system. Like where is the start menu, how to open up the program, but again we cover that in the introduction. So even if you're a little green on that. We will cover that here. You don't need to know anything about PowerPoint to get started. We start from the very beginning like we've said and take you on up through here. If you have familiarity with any other Office products such as Word or Excel, that would be helpful, but it is not required to be able to use this product. Exercise files are available for most every episode. Some of the episodes I just use a file new, so there's nothing to follow along with. But if you wanted to follow along with the files that I'm working in that particular episode, you are more than welcome to download them and use them. And any episode notes that I have. I do refer to my notes quite frequently. And say like all these links are in the episode notes, so you are able to get those notes for each one. You could get all the exercise files right here within this course overview. And you will have all the files available to you or if you need to pick and choose for individual episodes. And if anything's missing or something's just not just right, just go ahead and contact us and we'll make sure to take care of that for you. As always, there are tons of different ways to do things in PowerPoint. I might cover ways one and two, but there might be three, four and five. There might be other ways to do things by right-clicking or going to a different button. So do know that that's always available in all of your Office products. Updates, updates do happen, I am an Office 365 subscriber, so they're always adding new features. So if there's a button that is on your screen that's not on mine. It could be that they've added something in the most recent update. Or maybe I'm on a higher update than you are, while you're watching. So just keep that in mind, because there are lots of differences between subscription levels and what is available to who, when. And what is your policy within your organization on when they update your product. So just keep that in mind. And always searching for answers. There's a lot of stuff that even I still to this day will go ahead and go out to the Internet and search for answers to questions I have about the product. So definitely take advantage of that. Everybody uses every product for different reasons. The way I use Powerpoint might not be the same way that you use Powerpoint. But this series is all about how to put in the text, how to apply the design themes. So it's just this basic mechanics of using Powerpoint. So that's what we're going to be covering. And of course, having fun, we have a lot of fun here. We talk a lot about cats. There might be some fun little sparkles throughout there. So I hope you have fun watching this. I had fun recording it, so I will see you very soon. [SOUND]