PowerPoint tutorial

On startup you will probably be confronted with a box asking you to create what kind of presentation, or to open an existing presentation. For now, just choose "Blank presentation" and hit "OK." You will now be presented with the New Slide box, asking you to choose an Autolayout. The different slides showing are good for a variety of uses. The simplest is the bulleted list style which is quite common for lectures. This is the second in the list. Choose it now.

Now we are actually ready to start making the slides. Click in the title box and type a title. Click in the main body box and type a few lines. Bullets will appear as you hit the enter key. The New Slide button should be on the toolbar; if you can't find it, go to Insert -> New Slide. Choose that now and put in a couple more slides.

Now, surely you want them all to look the same don't you? Go to View -> Master -> Slide Master. This will allow you to set a predefined style for every slide in your presentation except for title slides, which we will add later. Right click the background of the template outside of any boxes. The three bottom choices are of most interest to us now, you see Apply Design Template..., Background..., and Slide Color Scheme.... Apply Design Template... gives you choices of the included templates which are quite nice and can be helpful in a pinch.

Choose Slide Color Scheme and click the Custom tab. You can now change your colors at will. Select "Background" and hit the Change Color button. Pick a lovely shade of blue and hit OK. Make your text a nice bright yellow by doing the same with "Text and lines" and "Title text." We'll leave the other options alone for such a simple presentation as this. Hit the "Apply to All" button. If you make a nice color scheme here that you want to keep you can add it as a standard scheme which will be saved and show up on the standard tab.

Exit that box. Now right click and choose Background. Click the pull-down menu, where you will see a few different options, and choose Fill Effects. "Gradient," "Texture," "Pattern," and "Picture" tabs show up and it should be easy to imagine the purpose of these. Choose something that looks nice or play with them later.

Go back to View -> Normal. Hit New Slide and finish typing in the body of your presentation.

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Okay, so you've typed a few slides in, and now you see they look the same as the rest of them. Before we do some things to make the slideshow a little more interesting, do File -> Save as and choose a meaningful name for your project.

(you may have noticed this is not yet finished, however it should be a good start)