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Ressources Powerpoint

5. Slide Design

If you only create the occasional, simple presentation then you probably don’t need to know a great deal more than this about the underlying structure of a presentation. However, if you are a more frequent PowerPoint user or need to create more elaborate presentations, then an understanding of themes, templates and slide masters (all of which are ways of applying formatting styles automatically to all your slides) could save you considerable time and improve the consistency of your presentations.

Before we begin looking at the structure in detail, it’s worth pointing out that slides are not the only components of a PowerPoint presentation. You can also include notes and format the way notes and slides are combined in printed handouts to accompany a presentation.

Apart from the text and other objects we choose to add to our slide, its appearance is affected by several other PowerPoint features. We’ll start on the Design ribbon tab.

Page Setup

This is the first group in this ribbon. It contains the Page Setup and Slide Orientation tools. Page Setup allows you to configure the dimensions of your slides. You might want to do this to match the output format that your presentation is destined for. If you intend to print the presentation rather than display it, you can choose the normal paper sizes: for example A4 and A3 or even more extreme options such as a long thin ‘banner’. More commonly, you would choose one of the various On-screen show formats. As you can see, you can also change the orientation (portrait/landscape) here

Themes

A theme is just a set of formatting rules that PowerPoint will apply to objects in your slide.  Themes comprise four separate sets of elements:

  • Colours – 4 text and background colours, 6 ‘accent’ colours and 2 for hyperlinks
  • Fonts – 1 font for titles and another for body text
  • Effects – lines, fills and effects for shapes and similar objects
  • A Background style and background graphics

Office 2007 and 2010 include an extensive set of built-in themes but if you use one of these, there is always the risk that someone else presenting at the same occasion might have chosen the same one. It is easy enough to set up and save your own theme. One of the advantages of using themes is that, if you do create a personal theme or one for your organisation, then you can apply the same theme to content in the other Office applications such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets or even emails.

To apply an existing theme, just click the required theme from the Themes Gallery.

You will notice that, as you hover over different themes, PowerPoint shows the effect of choosing that theme as a ‘live preview’ for the current slide

To customise an existing theme, or create your own custom theme, you can use the options to the right of the Themes gallery in the Themes group to choose different sets of colours, fonts and effects and the Background Styles option in the Background group to choose the background

For Colours, Fonts and Background Styles you can create your own settings as well as choosing from the built in lists. So, for example’ if you had a corporate colour scheme, you could select the Colours option, choose the ‘Create New Theme Colours’ option at the bottom of the dropdown list and choose each of the 12 colours for you colour scheme

Once you have set all the elements of your theme as you want theme, you can save the current theme as a new custom theme for use throughout Office: just select the ‘Save Current Theme’ option at the bottom of the Themes gallery drop down list and you will be prompted for a name for your new theme file which, by default, will be saved in the TemplatesDocument Themes folder.

There is one element of Themes that we have not covered. A Theme can include background graphics as well as the Background Styles. Background graphics are added and edited as part of the Slide Master which is what we will look at next.