Create and Customise Presentations

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In the past, a speaker making a presentation to an audience would use tools such as an easel and flipchart with drawings or notes, a chalk board, overhead transparencies, hand-outs and/or a slide projector enabling him or her to show individual slides on a screen.  Nowadays there are many software programmes that do away with these cumbersome aids. These presentation packages enable you to create dynamic slide show presentations combining sound, image and text elements, which become powerful tools for engaging the interest of an audience.

Presentation packages enable the speaker to create a presentation, or slide show, simply and effectively using tools to add written notes, charts, photographs, clip art and other audio visual elements, including videos, music etc to the slides.  They also help the audience to visualise what the speaker is speaking about.

For this tutorial we will be using Microsoft PowerPoint, however many of the packages available operate using similar functions and tools.

Alternatives to Microsoft PowerPoint

Open Office: http://www.openoffice.org/
Google Docs: https://docs.google.com
Keynote: http://www.apple.com/iwork/keynote/

PowerPoint Tools

You can create a presentation in PowerPoint in just a few seconds using as few as two slides, or you can create a detailed and elaborate presentation using many slides with many audio/visual elements. Before we learn how to do this, lets look briefly at the formatting options and tools available in PowerPoint.
PowerPoint comes with a range of powerful editing tools. The PowerPoint toolbar (or ribbon) is where all these editing features and menus are found and contains all the commands used to create the slides. It is made up of seven tabbed menus. They are:

  • File
  • Home
  • Insert
  • Design
  • Transitions
  • Animations
  • Slide Show
  • Review
  • View

Within these tabbed menus are formatting and editing tools in different groups, e.g. in Insert you will find Tables, Images, Illustrations, Links, Text, Symbols, Media.  Open each tab and hover your mouse over each button in each group to see what it represents.

powerpoint tools

Creating a presentation

Testing and printing your presentation


Print version