PowerPoint is awesome. It can help you create some quick and easy presentation and make you look more professional. It is really a tool that can enhance your message. I’ve put together a “how-to” on making your own PowerPoint template in little to no time.
Step 1
Open up PowerPoint 7. Automatically you will have a new PowerPoint document with one slide. Remove all text boxes on the main slide. The click on the Insert Tap, then Picture and choose a nice background image. I downloaded a funky swirl background here.
Step 2
Insert the picture and position it. This will be our main background image.
Step 3
Now click again on the Insert Tap and choose Shapes. You will have a ton of options from the dropdown menu. I went ahead and chose a rounded rectangle from the menu.
Step 4
Draw the rounded rectangle onto the main slide. The default color is blue in this case. Let’s change that.
Step 5
Right click on the shape and choose Format Shape on the bottom of the pop up window. You will be presented with a new window called Format Shape. From there you can choose almost any style you’d like. I changed the background fill to gradient with some transparency, the line color and style, added a drop shadow and changed the size of the corner radius. If you have a look at the outline of the shape when selected, you will see a small yellow diamand shape. You can slide this shape towards the left or right, depending if you’d like to increase the corner radius or decrease it.
Step 6
We are still in the Format Shape window. Let’s have a closer look at the gradient option. You can play around with the Stops, add them or remove them, change the position and transparency and the color of the gradient stops.
Step 7
Here is a screenshot of the rounded corner box.
Step 8
I added another rounded shape. Just repeat the previous steps, change colors and size. When right-clicking on the shape, you can send it to the back or to the front in the drop down menu.
Step 9
Click on the left hand side where all your slides will appear and when you right-click on, you can choose to either delete or duplicate it, or add a totally new slide to your presentation.
Step 10
Now a neat feature of PowerPoint is that you can select the elements you created and when you right-click on them, you can choose Save as Picture from the dropdown. You can then place them again into your presentation or have them on file. In this case, just add more buttons. You can also add Actions to it. Click on the shape and go to the tap Insert. There choose Action. You’ll get a pop up windows with options which let’s you choose various actions.
Conclusion
This is it. It is a simple and fast template. Save it as a .potx (template file) and you’ll have it handy again for another presentation. Of course you’ll need to add some text, pictures, graphs etc.
