Jump Start Series: Saving and Opening PowerPoint Presentations: All You Need To Know


About this lesson

Should I Care About Saving My Presentations?

YES! If you don’t know about saving, how do you expect to find them in the future? You MUST know the SAVE and OPENING files inside and out!

Is there More to Know?

Lots!  This video tutorial goes into file renaming, save as a new format. Customizing where files are saved.  Plus even deeper into search, OneDrive, converting to PDFs, creating image files of your slides, and even an animated GIF of all slides.

Is this just for PowerPoint?

Nope. Learn it once and use your new skills in Word, Excel, Visio, and MS Project.

 

Topics

Intro: 00:00

Hands-On Demo: 1:24

How to Save PowerPoint: 1:58

Save in Recent Locations: 2:58

Where to Save Files: 3:51

Why Use Microsoft OneDrive: 4:05

How to Open RECENT Files & Folders: 4:59

SEARCH Feature: 6:05

Save & Open Shortcut Keys: 6:53

Save As / Save A Copy: 7:16

Save as PDF: 7:30

Save as JPEG or PNG: 8:40

Save as an animated GIF: 10:05

Implementing Versioning: 10:56

Renaming Presentation: 11:46

Advanced Option Changes: 12:54

Wrap Up: 14:38

Details

Subject Microsoft PowerPoint

Software Compatibility All versions from PowerPoint 2013 to current Office 365

Level Foundation

Course Completed Complete

PDF Files DOWNLOAD THE LESSON MATERIALS

TRAINING SERIES VIEW ALL

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Transcript

Rough Video Transcript of the Lesson

 

Hey! 

PowerPoint, it is useless if you can’t find the files that you’ve been working on. 

This training is going to show you the key to file saving and opening creating a file structure. 

Hi this is Les McCarter for Power Up Training where my decades of experience can become your expertise for free. 

In the next 14 minutes, we’re going to cover a variety of foundational concepts of how to file save and open within PowerPoint

This going to work with any other Microsoft software programs but we’ll focus on PowerPoint.

In addition to file opening and saying we’re going to take a look at things such as name changes, the concept of versioning files for varying important projects, and we’ll probably provide a variety of techniques of saveing PowerPoint to other types of program file types, such as PDFs and images and just for kicks, we’ll do animated gifs. 

 

There’ll be a few tricks and tips along the way. 

 

With that you’re going to find out all you need to know about saving and opening files in PowerPoint in this tutorial. 

 

So let’s Power Up. 

 

<SLIDE>

 

Let’s go. I’m going to use this PowerPoint presentation as our sample file to work on. 

 

Do you see there are many things that go beyond just that save and open? If you came just to learn how to save an open then stick around for the first three items. Everything else are cool and they may enhance your future use of PowerPoint. 

 

So, let’s go power up. The first piece is saving. It’s so easy. It’s just a matter of clicking the save icon. Let’s take a look. In our demo file, you can see a suggested matter we’re going up to the top left corner and clicking on the save just get happens easily in one reason is because this is an existing file that’s already been named. 

 

So what happens if you have to give it a new name as you would with a brand new presentation. Let’s try this out. I’m gonna switch back to our working presentation and actually, we now need to create a brand new presentation so we’ll go up the file and new and choose a blank presentation. 

 

I’m gonna give a name just so we have a placeholder for our title. I’m gonna call it our new presentation. Now, we’re gonna go up and we’ll see the top of the screen we have two ways to do this. The little disc is now a click away and we’ll be click on that is asking us for a name because we get to give the name previously when we click on it. 

 

You just saved it. I’m gonna cancel I’ll show you the second method you have to file and then you go to save and You’re saying. Saved you then have to choose a location of where things are to go. This can prove to be trickier than it looks because I have recent highlighted at the top on the right side of my screen are recent folders that I have used but I have other locations I could look at I could use my OneDrive or I could look at recent locations on my PC or go to the traditional method of choosing browse and go through the file system. 

 

I’m going to choose my recent folders PowerPoint saving. You can see here. I can then go into that folder and give it a brand new name and I should pay careful attention to the folder that I save it in. This point I just need to go up the top left corner and hit the little disk to have it saved the file as I continue to work on this project. 

 

Where to save the file goes a little beyond this specific video training session, but you need to think through your structure of how you want to organize your files to make it easier to find them in the future. If you’re using Office 365 for home or for business, I highly recommend that you use Microsoft OneDrive to store your files for multiple reasons. 

 

One when they’re stored on OneDrive, it will turn auto save on automatically. So you don’t even have to worry about saving your file. Also built into OneDrive is the automatically revisioning which means that you could conceivably go back and pull up an older version if you really messed up the file big time. 

 

And lastly, if you’re working from multiple computers say from home and from work you’re going to be able to pull those files up from any computer that you’re logged in under the same. Microsoft account. If you own it, you use it. Next learning how to open up specific files. 

 

When you click file and open you’ll see that you have the ability to see your most recent presentations which are specific files or you can look at your recently used folders. Okay let’s do it We’re going to file I’m going to choose open and you’re going to see that. 

 

I automatically have a list of all the files that I’ve been working on most recently. I could choose from that but it turns out that I don’t see the file. I want I go into folders and within folders. I can see the most recent folders. I’ve been working with often. 

 

I’ll have a project that might have several different versions of PowerPoint, but I could then go into the folder and locate my specific file. I want to use. Let’s go into this folder. I’ve got several choices and look at the multiple versions that I have on my bullet demonstration select one file and bingo off it goes. 

 

So using recent for both your presentations and your folders makes it relatively easy to locate files. But if it wasn’t recent and you don’t have a good file structure Microsoft offers a glimmer of hope but I’m often disappointed with the search feature, let’s take a look and see how it works so back from my workspace. 

 

I may go to file. I’m going to go ahead and choose open and within open I see that. I have the search box you do need to make sure that you’re in the right location, whether it’s your PC or your one drive this case. I’m working with my one drive. 

 

I can go ahead and type in part of the name and I’m unlocking this case this finding a lot of files. But if I’ve located my file in some bizarre location, it’s gonna be tricky or frustrating or just plain disappointing, hey, make sure you have a good file structure to be able to locate your save files. 

 

Okay, let’s move on to some fun things tricks a quick way to save is to control less if you’re saving on your local file, remember one drive will always be out of saving and the control old command will also automatically open let’s try it out. I just did control all the bingo. 

 

I’m automatically in the open file menu. In addition to the saving your file. PowerPoint gives you the ability to save as a variety of other types of file formats for use in different programs there isn’t possible to save as the template or a theme but you do need to take a look at our other YouTube video on how to use templates and themes let’s look at this under file say that as. 

 

You’re presented with dozens of different types of file extensions representing different file types. Will look to the list and use just some of these starting off with the most universal shared file type which is a PDF that is used by Adobe files, we chose the PDF that Zidoe was essay PDF. 

 

I’m going to add a little extension to it of PDF which you also see that by default it added the dot PDF for the file format and we’re going ahead and save it. Okay, let me quickly navigate through my file system to the same folder that the original file was saved in and there we’ll see a PDF. 

 

I’ll double click the file it’ll open up the associated program in my case. I used nitro pdf reader and you’ll see here the example of the file the zoom out a moment and see that I can actually look at these is individual pages in a single file and I can share with anyone and they don’t need to have PowerPoint installed to view the contents. 

 

Let’s take a look at another useful format to save your PowerPoint ads and that is as a picture meaning that we can take each one of our slides and say them as a common JPEG or what I prefer is the PNG which has better fidelity, let’s try this out. 

 

Depending on which version of PowerPoint you have the older version will you say as with the Office 365 will choose save a copy there, you’ll do the drop-down list as we mentioned before. I prefer to use a PNG file not JPGs do lose some of the fidelity of your photos and images we’re going to choose PNG once again, I’m going to add an extra word on it just so we know which is which I’ll choose save but then it asked where I want to save all the slides or just this one. 

 

I want just a slide I was on a single picture. I She was this one but I’m going to choose all slides which means it’s going to take the whole presentation and turn each and every slide into an individual file, that’s put into a subfolder. Let’s go ahead and take a look at that folder. 

 

As you see, it created a folder by the name of the files and then it put individual photos or this case PNGs title slide 1 through 15 as I click on them do the thumbnail preview of how they look. Our last one is going to be just for kits and that is taking all of our slides and saving them as an animated GIF or gift of any how you want to pronounce it meaning that when we save it, you will be a single file that will then do a display of rotating through every single slide. 

 

I move the same as before we’ll save a copy. In this case here, we’re going to save it as an animated GIF and I’ll give it a name called animated and then we’ll go ahead and say, Well navigate through our file system we’ll find the gif when I click on it, you’ll see that it opens up in a particular application and now without me touching anything if literally just rotating from slide to slide the slide which is what an animated GIF or GIF is. 

 

Let’s go to something a little more serious and that’s what I call versioning. This is not necessarily built into PowerPoint, although we’ll see that it is part of OneDrive. What is versioning? It’s saving the file under different name. You’ll do a file and save as or save a copy and then just add version one version two or version three at the end of each file. 

 

Why would you do this? If you’re working on a very important project that you can’t lose or invest it a huge amount of time into something and you do not want to have the file corrupted or mess it up. What you can do is contain to save it as a version. 

 

Undo does exist the same as a version before you do something new or before you lose a lot of work is great to have multiple files. Just make sure that you’re always working on your most recent version of the file. Name changes is literally just changing the name and keeping the same file. 

 

It’s very simple with Office 365 as all you need to do is go to the top of the screen and just to rename it let’s try it out. At the top middle I did the drop-down arrow and now I can go into the existing file name and change the mini way. 

 

I wish I’m going to add some new words to the beginning and note that it has the new name and this is the exact same file. Very simple to do. And there it is in my file manager window new name save me opening demonstration version 1 Bingo. If you’re not using Office 365 and you have an older version then you do need to go and do a save as Remember to go in and delete the old file. 

 

You can also go into file manager and rename the file but when you do. Remember that PowerPoint does not know about it. So if you look at most recent presentations, he will not show up and that may pull up the missing bile name Missing because you renamed it. Okay here’s our last couple of tips This is way to modify the way that PowerPoint shows your most recent files. 

 

You can customize PowerPoint by going into the file options and under options, you’ll need to take a look at the same command within the Save command, you’ll see our highlighted item number one to where you can change how often it saves for auto recover that is ability to be able to recover file if your computer is a crash the default is 10 minutes and if you’re paranoid go ahead and drop it down to five. 

 

The other thing you can change here is the default. Mile location so that you can automatically put the manual locations. The second item that you can change under file options is under advanced and there you can change the number of most recent presentations shown or recent folders. I’d like to have a longer list to be able to browse to what I most recently worked on. 

 

Let’s do a quick run through because it is a little confusing at times. We’ll click on file under file find options and when you were in options, you’re going to see that there are multiple categories that you work with and within each of the categories you then need to scroll up and down to the list. 

 

Let’s go to saving’s and we’ll see from there that this is where we can change the autosave and also the location of where our default files are saved and the other one is advanced and in advance you’ve got to scroll down through the list to be able to locate the Display section so that you can change the number of presentations and folders that are being displayed. 

 

And that’s the tutorial. Oh that was a lot to cover on the concept of what seeing simple enough saving and opening files, but you now know so much more. If you found this useful, please subscribe to our channel subscriptions help tremendously, and if you like this video give it a thumbs up you’d be surprised likes encourages me to make more free videos for you. 

 

If you have additional topics that you’d like for me to cover or a few questions about this video, leave them in the comments below. And if you want to become a PowerPoint power user do look for our master class playlists that covers the six topics from the creation of a presentation all the way to stand up on stage and giving your PowerPoint presentation proud successfully. 

 

Go power up.