Office 2016 For Seniors For Dummies (2016)

Part IV

Outlook

For a guide to organizing your mail in Outlook, visit www.dummies.com/extras/office2016forseniors.

Part V

PowerPoint

For five great PowerPoint tricks, visit www.dummies.com/extras/office2016forseniors.

Chapter 15

Dressing Up Your Presentations

Get ready to . . .

Understand and Apply Themes

Change the Presentation Colors

Edit Slide Masters

Format Text Boxes and Placeholders

Insert Pictures from Files

Create a Photo Album Presentation

In this chapter, I show you a variety of techniques for adding attractive and interesting formatting to your PowerPoint presentation slides. You see how to apply consistent formatting across multiple slides, and also how to format individual objects on individual slides.

In this chapter, I also show you how to insert digital photos in a presentation. Finally, stay tuned to see how to create photo albums in PowerPoint.

Understand and Apply Themes and Variants

A theme is a design set that you apply to a PowerPoint presentation to change several elements at once, including background, color scheme, fonts, and the positions of the placeholders on the various layouts. Word and Excel also use themes, but in PowerPoint, the theme feature is exceptionally strong and full featured.

All presentations have a theme, but the default theme — literally named Blank — is so plain that it’s almost like it’s not there at all. Blank uses a white background, black Calibri Light and Calibri text, and no background or design graphics.

To switch to a different theme, display the Design tab and then do one of the following:

· Click one of the themes in the Themes group. See Figure 15-1.

· Open the Themes menu (by clicking the More arrow pointed out in Figure 15-1) and then click the one you want.

Figure 15-1

Notice the several categories on the Themes menu. (See Figure 15-2.) The Built-In themes — the ones that come with PowerPoint — are always available. The theme under This Presentation is the one in use. The Custom section contains any themes you created yourself.

Figure 15-2

To create your own theme, set up a presentation’s formatting how you want by formatting the Slide Master (covered later in this chapter), and then use the Save Current Theme command on the Themes menu (see Figure 15-2) to save it.

A variant is an alternate version of a theme. Depending on the theme, a variant may include a different background, different colors, and/or different accent graphics. To choose a different variant, click it in the Variants group on the Design tab (see Figure 15.1). The Variants group also has a More arrow that opens additional choices (if available), and also a menu. You’ll use this menu in the next section.

Change the Presentation Colors

Each theme can be applied in a variety of color combinations, so you don’t have to choose between a theme that has the right style and one that has the right colors.

When you apply a theme, it appears with its default colors. One way to change those is to choose a different variant, as you learned in the previous section. Another is to select a specific color scheme.

Here’s how to choose a color scheme:

1. On the Design tab, click the More button in the Variants group, opening a menu.

2. Point to Colors, opening a submenu.

3. Click the color combination you want. See Figure 15-3.

Figure 15-3

If none of these color combinations appeal to you, create your own combination. At the bottom of the Colors menu, click Customize Colors, and then choose the exact colors you want from the Create New Theme Colors dialog box that appears.

Edit Slide Masters

When you choose a theme, the theme is applied to the Slide Master, which is a template that affects the look of all slides in the presentation. Formatting the Slide Master automatically formats every slide, and that’s a big bonus because a presentation looks more professional when all the slides match.

After applying a theme, if the appearance isn’t exactly the way you want it, you could change the formatting on each individual slide, but it’s much more consistent and easy to simply make the change once to the Slide Master and let that change trickle down to the individual slides.

To edit the Slide Master, choose View ⇒ Slide Master. The slide that appears isn’t an actual slide in your presentation, but rather a template. Or, more precisely, it’s a series of templates: one for each of the different layouts. You can make changes in these two ways, depending on the scope of change you want to make:

· To make a change that affects every slide, regardless of its layout: Click the top-left slide in the left pane. This top slide is the master for the entire presentation.

· To make a change that affects only a certain layout: Select that layout’s thumbnail image from the left pane. See Figure 15-4.

Figure 15-4

Here are some of the edits you might want to make:

· Select a different set of fonts from the Slide Master ⇒ Fonts list.

· Change the font used for an individual bullet level by selecting the text sample representing that level and then choosing a different font from the Home tab’s Font drop-down list.

· Apply a different bullet type to each line of sample text (from the Home tab) to change the bullet characters used at each level.

· Move a placeholder on the slide by dragging its border.

To move a placeholder, drag its border — not the selection handle. See the next bullet.

· Resize a placeholder by dragging one of its selection handles.

· Delete, resize, or recolor the background graphic provided by the theme (if any).

When you’re finished working with the Slide Master, choose Slide Master ⇒ Close Master View to return to Normal view. (I talk about the different views in PowerPoint in the preceding chapter.)

Format Text Boxes and Placeholders

In most cases, presentations look best when they’re consistently formatted. That means that usually your best bet is to apply formatting to the Slide Master, as I discuss in the preceding section.

Sometimes, however, you might want to format an individual text box or object differently from the rest, to make it stand out.

The easiest way to apply formatting to an object is with the Shape Styles command. Shape Styles are formatting presets that use the theme colors in the presentation. Depending on the style you choose, a Shape Style can include a border, a fill color, and special effects that make the shape look shiny, matte, or raised.

To apply a Shape Style to an object:

1. Select the object. If it’s a text box, click its outer border to select the box itself (not text inside it).

2. Click the Drawing Tools Format tab.

If you don’t see a Drawing Tools Format tab, you don’t have an object selected.

3. Open the Shape Styles palette by clicking the More arrow in the Shape Styles group. See Figure 15-5.

4. Click the desired shape style.

If none of the Shape Styles is what you want, you can also choose the background and an outline for an object separately. Use the Shape Fill, Shape Outline, and Shape Effects button menus on the Format tab. (Refer to Figure 15-5.)

Figure 15-5

To quickly change text formatting within a text box, use the WordArt Styles palette, also on the Format tab. It works just like the Shape Styles feature except that it applies to text.

Insert Pictures

One of the most common uses for PowerPoint is to display digital photos. There are a couple of ways to do that.

· Insert individual photos into presentations. I show you how in this section.

· Create a special Photo Album presentation. I explain this in the next section.

First, look at how to put an individual photo on an individual slide:

1. To insert the picture into a layout placeholder, click the Pictures icon on the placeholder. See Figure 15-6.

If you want the picture to be independent of any placeholder, choose Insert ⇒ Picture when no placeholder is selected.

2. In the Insert Picture dialog box that appears, select the picture you want to insert. Change the location if needed.

3. Click Insert. The picture appears on the slide.

4. (Optional) Move or resize the image as desired.

· To move the image: Drag it by its center.

· To resize the image: Drag a selection handle around the edge.

Figure 15-6

In addition to your own photos, you may sometimes want to use decorative or generic artwork from other sources. Office applications include a means of performing a Bing image search from within the applications themselves, so you can find an image without having to exit out to a web browser. Bing is Microsoft’s web search engine.

Follow these steps to find and insert an image with Bing:

1. Click the Online Pictures icon in the content placeholder on the slide (refer to Figure 15-6) if you want to use a placeholder. Or, to insert a free-floating picture, choose Insert ⇒ Online Pictures.

2. In the search box next to Bing Image Search, type one or more keywords that define what you are looking for, and then press Enter. An assortment of images appear. Figure 15-7 shows an example.

3. Scroll through the images, select the one you want, and click Insert.

As the note overlaid on the search results shows in Figure 15-7, the images that Bing finds within Office are licensed under Creative Commons. This means they are royalty-free images that are okay to use for non-commercial projects. However, don’t count on an image being free to use just because it shows up in the Bing search results. If you are creating a publication that will be widely distributed, or sold, you should research the images selected to make sure the owners have not placed any restrictions on their use. When you select an image in the dialog box, a hyperlink appears in the bottom left corner of the dialog box; you can follow it to the original image source, and from there you can glean information about its usage restrictions, if any.

Figure 15-7

Create a Photo Album Presentation

If you want to create a presentation that is primarily (or exclusively) photos, there’s a special feature just for you! The Photo Album feature makes it easy to create photo-centric presentations with special features such as picture edging, framing, and captions.

Before you get started, find your photos. Know where on your computer they are stored. (Check the Pictures folder! That’s where many digital camera management programs put them by default.)

Follow these steps to create a photo album:

1. Choose Insert ⇒ Photo Album. The Photo Album dialog box opens.

2. Click the File/Disk button. The Insert New Pictures dialog box opens.

3. Select the pictures you want to include.

To select more than one picture at a time, hold down the Ctrl key while you click each one.

4. Click Insert. The pictures you select appear in the Pictures in Album list of the Photo Album dialog box. See Figure 15-8.

5. (Optional) Reorder the pictures.

1. Select the picture that’s not in the right place in the order.

2. Click the up-arrow or down-arrow button below the list to reposition it.

6. (Optional) Rotate a picture or adjust its brightness or contrast (see Figure 15-9):

1. Select the picture’s name.

2. Use the buttons under the Preview pane to adjust the picture’s appearance as needed.

7. In the Album Layout section of the Photo Album dialog box, select the following options:

· Picture Layout: Choose how many pictures you want per slide.

· Frame Shape: Choose a frame shape/style for each photo.

· Theme (optional): Click the Browse button and then select a presentation theme to apply to the photo album.

You don’t have to choose the theme now; you can apply a theme change to the presentation after its creation. (Choose Design ⇒ Themes.)

8. Click the Create button. A new presentation is created using your photos.

Figure 15-8

Figure 15-9

The resulting presentation is like any other presentation, except for one small extra: Because it is a photo album, you can return to the Photo Album dialog box at any time to manage the photos and effects. To do so, on the Insert tab, click the down arrow below the Photo Album button, and then choose Edit Photo Album from the menu that appears.