- Your Quick Start Guide to Learning PowerPoint (Video)Jump directly to our quick start video to get a head start on this tutorial. Our instructor will guide you through some steps to help you get started.
- What is PowerPoint?Why should you use PowerPoint, and what are the key features?
- How To Use PowerPoint's Ribbon. The ribbon controls the key tools in PowerPoint and learning how to use it will help you master the app.
- The Steps to Create a PowerPoint Presentation for Beginners. Walk through the key steps for a complete PowerPoint beginner.
- How to Power up PowerPoint. Learn the secret to skipping ahead in building a presentation using templates that have most of the work already finished.
- PowerPoint Tools to Learn (For Presenters). Not only is PowerPoint useful for building presentations, but also for presenting thanks to Presenter View. You'll learn more in this tutorial.
- Tips and Tricks for a Successful PowerPoint Presentation. Learn some shortcuts for how to use PowerPoint quickly and efficiently.
- More Beginner PowerPoint Tutorials (Free to Learn Online). Explore other tutorials that help you continue learning PowerPoint for free.
- Microsoft PowerPoint Premium Online Courses. Watch complete screencasts of courses that guide you through building your presentation from beginning to finish.
In this tutorial, we're going to focus on working inside of PowerPoint to build a presentation. This PowerPoint guide has everything you need to get comfortable in the app. To master the app, we'll talk about and cover the most common steps a rookie PowerPoint user needs to know.
PowerPoint has a variety of views that are simply different ways to work with the same presentation. Change the view to get a different perspective on your content.
Now that you understand the layout, you've got a better idea of how you can jump to the feature you need. Let's dive a bit deeper into how you can use several of these key tabs.
What You’ll Learn About MS PowerPoint in This Guide
Think of slides as the individual units in your presentation that you can fill with content. To insert a new slide, go to the Insert tab on PowerPoint's ribbon. Then, click on the New Slide button to add a new slide to your presentation.
The ribbon menu is found across many of Microsoft's apps, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It lives above the main area of the application.
Changing theme colors is a fast way to adjust the visual look of your slides. For example, change object colors to add a bit of contrast.
Animations and transitions: fundamental elements of any deck, they should be used sparingly. When carefully applied, they create beautiful segues between slides. They can also help introduce new ideas in exact sequence. But use too many, and they become obnoxious distractions guaranteed to annoy an audience.
What's the best way to get up to speed with a new app? When you open Microsoft PowerPoint for the first time, you quickly realize that there are many features and tools. But it can feel overwhelming to know where to start. You need PowerPoint help.
In Slide Sorter view, click and drag on the slide thumbnails to reorder them. Hold down Shift, click, and press Delete to remove unwanted slides. Jump back and start working by clicking Normal on the View tab.
Premium PowerPoint PPT templates often include hundreds of handcrafted slides. For you, it’s best to select only a handful to build a slide deck. In PowerPoint, find Slide Sorter on the View tab.
4. Be Interactive to Engage the Audience
On the Design tab, click one of the themes to restyle the presentation. Or, try out a different Style thumbnail to overhaul the color theme.
- Your Quick Start Guide to Learning PowerPoint (Video)Jump directly to our quick start video to get a head start on this tutorial. Our instructor will guide you through some steps to help you get started.
- What is PowerPoint?Why should you use PowerPoint, and what are the key features?
- How To Use PowerPoint's Ribbon. The ribbon controls the key tools in PowerPoint and learning how to use it will help you master the app.
- The Steps to Create a PowerPoint Presentation for Beginners. Walk through the key steps for a complete PowerPoint beginner.
- How to Power up PowerPoint. Learn the secret to skipping ahead in building a presentation using templates that have most of the work already finished.
- PowerPoint Tools to Learn (For Presenters). Not only is PowerPoint useful for building presentations, but also for presenting thanks to Presenter View. You'll learn more in this tutorial.
- Tips and Tricks for a Successful PowerPoint Presentation. Learn some shortcuts for how to use PowerPoint quickly and efficiently.
- More Beginner PowerPoint Tutorials (Free to Learn Online). Explore other tutorials that help you continue learning PowerPoint for free.
- Microsoft PowerPoint Premium Online Courses. Watch complete screencasts of courses that guide you through building your presentation from beginning to finish.
Another feature that's a must-use is Presenter View, which is perfect for two screen setups while presenting. While your audience will see the presentation you've built on the projector or LCD screen, you'll have your own private view with speaker notes, upcoming slides, and more.
The Home tab has many of the most used tools, all in one bar.
PowerPoint Online has most of the slide tools you'd expect, including Smartart.
You'll have to click one more button to save the document to your OneDrive storage, and then you'll see the full Word Online app open in your browser with your template. Everything should look very familiar if you've used any recent versions of Word. There's the toolbar on top with the default tools—and essentially anything in the normal Home tab is still there, including font and alignment options, styles, lists, and more. Your normal keyboard shortcuts will work as normal, so you can tap Control-B or Command-B to make text bold, for instance. Or, you can select text, and a mini formatting toolbar will appear over your cursor just as in Office apps on your PC, where you can change font options and more on the fly.
You'll find the rest of the tools you need to edit your document in the other ribbon tabs in the app. There's less tools than you'd find in Word on your PC, but you'll at least find basic tools to add your own pictures or clip art from Microsoft and tweak them, along with table, header and footer tools, page layout options, and more. If you can't find anything, all you'll need to do is type the command you want in the search box in the top center, and it'll find the option for you. And if you want the ribbon out of the way to give you more space to edit, just double-click on it and it'll hide away, ready for you to re-open it when needed.
Now, before we get started, it's important to clear up a bit of confusion. These free Office apps are web apps—that is, they run in your web browser, and yet they feel more like an "app" than a standard site. You can't install them on your PC or Mac like you can install normal Office apps, and they won't work when you're not connected to the internet. That's not a huge problem, though, since most of us are online all day already. Best of all, Office Online saves the files you make online to OneDrive, which you can sync for free with your Mac or PC to see your documents when you're offline. That's not too bad for free.
Collaborating in Office Online
You’re in luck. At the new Office.com, you can use basic versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for free in your browser. They’re the same Microsoft Office apps you’re used to, only they run online and are 100% free. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to make new documents, spreadsheets, and presentations using Office, for free, and also how to open and edit your existing documents online.
You could use LibreOffice or Google Docs for free, or if you have a Mac you can use Apple’s iWork apps for far less than Office costs. But what if you really would rather just use Microsoft Office apps, since they work great with the files you already have and you’re already used to them?
Upload your existing Office files to OneDrive to edit them online
If you want to create a blank document, just click the New blank document button. Otherwise, click the Browse templates button to pick from the standard new document templates you'd see in your PC when you make a new Word document. Here you can look through the top templates or browse through the categories of templates available. When you've found the perfect one, select it, then click the green Open in Word Online button.
Small businesses that don’t make well-informed software purchase decisions—factoring in total cost, features offered, and usability—will be stuck with a solution that’s needlessly expensive and/or too complex to serve their business purposes.
It allows users to publish the video directly on Facebook or YouTube, share the link on various social networks, or download the video as an MP4 file.
In this report, we look at the top five most recommended free PowerPoint alternatives based on Capterra user ratings. To be listed in this report, the products had to meet the following criteria:
Visme offers drag-and-drop design dashboards that make it possible to create presentations quickly. It offers access to content assets such as 6,000+ icons and charts.
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For dispersed teams, consisting of freelancers and telecommuters, Google Slides is a popular choice, as it comes with real-time collaboration features.
Having said that, PowerPoint isn’t for everyone. Small companies may not already have Microsoft Office because of the costs, and freelancers don’t necessarily have the budget for proprietary software.
Design presentations with real-time collaboration. Google Slides offers built-in collaboration features that allow users to work with multiple collaborators. The tool can be accessed on a browser or iOS or Android native applications. It lets you edit presentations on your phone and then wirelessly broadcast them using Chromecast or Apple Airplay.
- Go to office.com to get started.
- Click on the PowerPoint icon/tile.
- Sign in with a Microsoft account and password or create a new free account. If you have Hotmail, you can sign in with that account as your ID.
- Click on a template. PowerPoint creates the presentation. It is saved automatically in a cloud storage location called OneDrive.
- If you’re familiar with the desktop version of PowerPoint, you’ll be able to create, edit and format slides easily as the interface is very similar to the desktop version. You’ll be able to add limited animations and transitions but you won’t be able to add audio or video from your hard drive.
- You can change the design theme at any time by clicking on the Design tab on the Ribbon and choosing another theme.
- Click on the File tab on the Ribbon.
- Choose Save As and then click on Download a Copy. The copy will be placed in your Downloads folder on your c: drive (if pop-ups are disabled in your browser). If pop-ups are enabled, you will be able to save a copy to a specific folder.
- Enter a name for the presentation.
- Navigate to the desired location (if pop-ups are enabled in your browser).
- Click on Save. You will now be able to open the file with the desktop version of PowerPoint.
You can switch over to the full desktop version of PowerPoint (assuming it’s installed) to take advantage of all of the features in PowerPoint.
The free online version of PowerPoint does have limited functionality if you’re creating a presentation in that environment, but you can open a presentation created in the desktop version of PowerPoint and make minor editing changes online without losing functionality.
Accessing PowerPoint Online
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You can access a free online version of Microsoft PowerPoint and create simple presentations on the fly or you can open presentations you’ve created in the desktop version of PowerPoint online and collaborate with colleagues. All you need is a Microsoft account (which is also free) and a password. PowerPoint Online is a light version of PowerPoint and runs in your web browser so you don’t need to install any software to use it. The free online version is available without using SharePoint and you don’t need Office 365.
To save a presentation with a specific name in PowerPoint Online: