Deep Dive: From Good to GREAT PowerPoint using Design Ideas - A Must Do!
About this lesson
Take your PowerPoint presentation from good to GREAT using Design Ideas.
Learn how to transform your slide deck slide by slide with a single click of the mouse. Every presentation needs this trick!
The tutorial starts off with a 3-minute demonstration of transforming 11 slides into a fabulous corporate-looking slide show and then dives deep into leveraging Design Ideas to maximize the visual impact.
This technique should be applied to EVERY ONE OF YOUR SLIDE PRESENTATIONS!
Topics
01:32 From Ugly to just Good
01:58 From Good to Great in under 3 Minutes
04:43 Which Versions of PowerPoint has Design Ideas
05:26 What is Wrong with PowerPoint Themes
06:05 Creating a Unique Look with Design Ideas
06:37 What is DESIGN IDEAS – Defined
08:53 Design Ideas and Color Themes
18:36 The Completed Project Slide Show
Details
Subject Microsoft PowerPoint
Software Compatibility From Office 2016 and later
Level
Course Completed
PDF Files There are not any files associated with this lesson.
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Transcript
0:04
PowerPoint has various tools to help you create nice presentations. But the same presentation tools can create a disaster. In our previous tutorial, I took you from an ugly slide deck to a respectable looking presentation. But why you would be okay giving in a corporate boardroom, you can do better. And I can help. Hi, this is Les from Power Up Training, where I bring my decades of experience to you for free. In this shorter tutorial, we’re going to take that earlier, respectful presentation and turn it into great. Our goal will be to make the presentation visually distinctive, but still professional looking, you will learn how to transform the slide quickly and with ease. To make this happen, we’re going to be using Microsoft PowerPoint design idea tool, you’ll need to be running a modern version of PowerPoint, such as office 2016, or later. And as always, if you have Office 365 It will always have the latest and greatest tools. We’ll be working on a Windows PC. But these tricks will work just as well on Apple, MacOS, computer, and best used on desktop computers or laptops. Going to the Slide Sorter presentation view we’re gonna see how that presentation looked after we turned it to a great presentation, but we’re going to do even better. The key takeaway from that previous tutorial was to not use the floating text boxes, or random objects always work within the Microsoft guardrails using the design template for that in a moment. Let’s get me out of the way so we can focus on the presentation. Okay, speeds slide deck upgrade. Starting on slide one, going to the Design Menu and invoking Design Ideas. We now get to pick and choose what looks good and fits our overall theme. Our first choice radically transforms the background into a tasteful muted photo and automatically create animations for our titles. Slide Two, lets us go from converting basic bullet points to matching icons. The designs idea tool found key words to select and match the topic. Cool. The next two Slides are before and after office design plans. We want them to be similar look, but still have a distinctive look. When we go from the current to the proposed lands. The budget slide starts off just okay, but a bit stark. Let’s try on a few styles to find one that fits her overall presentation color design theme, but still makes the numbers more readable. The issue slide as a basic SmartArt object, and a quick preview of our design choices, it becomes obvious that we now have a trend and a look that we want to apply for the goals. We should lighten it up just a bit. But I’m struggling as this slide still has too many words. Try not a few Design Ideas. I do find one that is brighter and look but also makes it easier to see the topics and supporting facts. The project team org chart gets the info across but it is dull, dull dull! There we go with a quick fix using just a couple clicks. And the project schedule is also dull. And it’s not obvious that this is a timeline. After trying on several choices. This selection is now clearly a project timeline, under just three clicks. And for concluding slide. Design Ideas offers up a word appropriate building background photo. But we’re not building a skyscraper. So that doesn’t work. But this choice of icons colors and design layout drives home the point that one we have issues, too. We have a proposed plan and three, we’re asking for the executive approval. And to wrap it up, we choose a non animated title slide that is similar to our first slide. There, the whole presentation remodeled in around 200 seconds for eleven Slides. We just went from good to unbelievably great. Now let’s get into the details to master this amazing technique. I’m working as I said before on the latest version of PowerPoint Office 365 on a Windows computer, but this will work just fine on a Mac desktop or laptop.
4:55
Do see our other video about why Design Ideas might not be a available to you. It is so complicated. First off, the minimum version level is office 2016. And even then there are some limitations. While the web and tablets do have some features, ownly the latest version of Office, or Office 365 for your desktop and laptop will always provide the most robust set of features. So, here’s the main issue. The traditional PowerPoint design themes will give you a set of professional design slide deck looks for color, font, layout, and backgrounds. But they do get boring over time. And you need a dynamic, fresh look that your audience has not seen before. You could choose a design theme. And my recommendation is to select a more nondescript theme, like this one that has a strong, thick set of lines, but simple background, and then experiment with color variants to add a new look beyond the default. But I find that’s not really enough. It can help. But we want to try something different. We need a fresh look that jumps off the screen. And the answer is design ideas. Here, I’ve selected the crop design theme and swapped into a darker color variant. But now the magic begins. If I go to the designs Ribbon Menu and find Design Ideas on the far right, so what is Design Ideas. It is Microsoft’s attempt at automated intelligence for graphic design. It will attempt to offer various design suggestions. For a specific slide that you browse and find one that seems to fit from your perspective. Find one that looks interesting, you select and it transforms the look at the target slide one at a time for backgrounds colors, fonts, and layout. And for Title layout slide, it will sometimes offer up in addition, an animated title slide as indicated by a star icon on the bottom left corner of the preview. In this example, it took the photo resized it placed it as the background. We also then change the title, font and size and subtitle, he relocated them to the center with a transparent background rectangle instead of black boxes, and then animated the word titles to appear one at a time. All those changes with one click of a mouse. While there are a bunch of different choices, that you can find a match to your personal taste, I do need to warn you that if you leave or apply one design and then come back, you may not find the original set of choices. You have no control or recalling Design Ideas as Microsoft keeps offering up fresh new ideas. For better or for worse. In those cases, you can try to undo the change and go back to the original base look and hope that the design look that you liked earlier, come back for you to choose. Okay, I’m going to choose the one design that we previewed a few moments ago. And this is a fantastic opening for our slide deck. Going to slide number two, we have a pretty simplistic looking text bullet list. And since we were already in the design that is as soon as we select the slide, it starts to offer up new Design Ideas. Once again, we can click and try on different designs to see how they look. And it’s of interest to see that Design Ideas understands our color theme choices. Watch as a choice changes to our purple variant and how the offerings have changed for us to select from. I’m going to go ahead and undo that color theme sidetrip so we can go back to match the rest of the presentation. Okay, this is an acceptable choice of colors and graphic background boxes. Maybe the text and bullet points stand out. But we have even more choices. Like the use of PowerPoint SmartArt which now puts each bullet line in its own graphic box. SmartArt is a power automated tool, and we discuss it in more depth in the above reference tutorial. But Design Ideas does make it easy with just a single click and be done. But why these colors? Well look at the color choices.
9:51
For this slide title word, see the theme colors, both the major row and then the subtle shades below. So the Design Ideas generated Slides artistically choosing from this palette of colors. Once again, with just a single click of our mouse with no expertise needed by us. But SmartArt has even more magic up his sleeve. See the choice of icons to supplement our bullet points. Looking closer, we find the magic, See how PowerPoint, investigated each bullet point to find the main text topic, then it associated a matching icon. You may or may not like the use of graphical icons, but you must admit the cleverness of Design Ideas ability to find words and marry up matching graphics. With Yes, a single click of the mouse. If we tried to do this by hand, we could have easily spent 10 minutes locating icons and positioning them on the page. While this page is interesting, I find it to be a little too small for the text. So I examine our other Design Ideas and find a more forceful and a bigger font version of icons married to our chart text bullet points. That looks good. Okay, let’s pick up the pace and find a solution. For the next two slide pages that represent the before and after of our proposed office renovation. I’ll try a few choices for the current office floor plan is an important tip. Look closely and you will see that Design Ideas is treating the architectural plans as just an image. And PowerPoint is creatively cropping out some of the picture for artistic purposes, this is not good. We want our audience to see the whole image. So we need to choose wisely. This looks great. It is the full image with a consistent background design set of elements and matching color scheme. Now under the proposed floor plan slide. And while we could use the exact same matching layout, we do want our audience to recognize we’ve moved on to a new slide. So we can scan down the list of choices. But nothing really works for me. And for the first time, we need to click see more Design Ideas, which sometimes provide better choices. And sometimes you hit gold. As I scroll down this list, I don’t see anything I really like. So I’m gonna try a third page and see if there’s any choices there by clicking to see more. And nothing there either. Okay, so we’re gonna have to go hybrid. We’ll start with a design element. And then we’re going to hand customize it. Here’s my vision, with the base overall look to match. But I want to give a space to make the new floorplan image much bigger and forefront. First, we’ll shrink down the title of the proposed plans. And then we’re going to resize the image to larger sizes. Reposition both the title and the floor plan. And the concept is to have the design ideas generate a layout with the graphical elements and Title, Location and color schemes. And from there, we can hand adjust it to our liking. And no one’s going to be able to tell the difference between the slide before and after they all match on to the next slide. And soon some trouble ahead with Design Ideas. This slide has a PowerPoint table and a chart. And just these two elements totally confuse Design Ideas. It gives up, it has no ideas for us, I have devoted a whole tutorial on the quirks of why this tool works and doesn’t work for specific Slides. See it listed above. But let’s experiment on this slide. I will select that chart, I’m gonna elect to delete it out. And once gone, Design Ideas returns with some suggestions for this simpler layout. There’s more to this. So do check out the earlier reference YouTube tutorial. There are a lot of choices for our table, and some just look horrible, and others do make the text more readable.
14:24
I miss our charts. I’m going to undo this because I think it adds more visual data to our presentation. And it’s okay for us not to use Design Ideas for every single slide as long as they still match on to the next slide. And apparently we use SmartArt to create the org chart. It looks good, so I’m not gonna mess with it. However, the following slide about current issues also use SmartArt in our creation process, but the colors are crap and they don’t match the previous slide. Design Ideas to the rescue. See how The colors now match the slide before with just another click. But I find this light does have too many words, which probably deserves some serious text editing. Let’s see what Design Ideas can do. If you look at some of the suggestions, they do make the text more readable. But we really need to come back and edit out some of those too many words. And the remodeled goal slide, we have another example of SmartArt I love SmartArt. Unlike before, the color scheme is monotone and all Design Ideas will help provide a consistent set of colors and styles, which is important to give your overall slide deck a unique editorial vision to make the presentation stand out from the crowd. As they browse through my choices, I could mimic the previous life by want the goal slide to stand out and make a bolder statement. So I need to go through several pages of suggestions. And I do find one that will jump out when we transition from the previous issue slide to the remodel goal slide more SmartArt for our project execution schedule slide. And if we look very very, very closely, we do see a light arrow indicating the passage of time. But this is way too invisible. We want to shout out timeline when this page arrives. Design Ideas presents a variety of more interesting project schedule timelines are wrestling again with too many words, which may get lost on the big screen conference room or in a small screen Zoom meeting. Browsing through the list. I like this visual timeline. But if I continue with my editing, I’m would come back and make the text items bigger with larger font with some hand customization. Next, the most important slide the summary slide where we make the request to approve our project. This slide must stand out. Design Ideas gives me some choices. They seem limited. In fact, the use of the existing photo of engineering drawings may be constrained the ideas that fit both image and words on the page. So I’m going to delete the photo and see if we get better choices to match our vision and restarting Design Ideas. From the Design Ribbon Menu, we’re now presented with a more varied set of recommendations. And this conversion from text bullet points to SmartArt bullet points is more forceful. I love this look. But I’m most likely going to come back and tweak it just a bit to change the white color font for request approval to something that stands out even more. The final slide is what I call the bookend slide, which we discussed in many of our PowerPoint master tutorials. I don’t want to end my presentation on a blank screen. So I’ll typically copy my title slide and move to the end. If you recall, our flashy opening title slide. But here we want something a little more sedated. But in the same thematic genre. I think this election will work as a nice ending, giving our audience a chance to ask any questions that they might have. Reviewing our work, we now have a unique presentation with a customized themematic look from cinematic opening slide to a variety of visual layouts with common colors and graphical elements to tie them together. We also added some extra punch when needed. And when I say we is both us as the creator and the PowerPoint Design Ideas as our inspiration muse. Along the way, we found that some Slides were just fine without Design Ideas. And other times we needed to build the base Design Ideas and then tweak the placement or alter the font characteristics to maximize our message. But in the end, we went from just okay presentation
19:17
to a spectacularly excellent slide deck. And do recall that we did the same formatting in just under three minutes at the beginning of this tutorial. My recommendation is to create your slide deck and then come back and use Design Ideas to make the presentation fabulous. what to watch next. Of course, you can never get enough SmartArt in PowerPoint. So dive in with my matching tutorial on SmartArt tutorials for PowerPoint getting started and subscribe to see all 12 of our SmartArt videos. Until next time, go power up