Basics

If you are new to PowerPoint, you will find tons of tutorials online. From beginner to pro. For instance this one:

Slide master

The Slide Master is a template that applies to all slides. Instead of changing the fonts and colours by hand on each individual slide, you can quickly do it on the Master Slide. Enter View Ribbon > Slide Master, to apply modifications to all slides:

• Format text. Select the top slide in the bar on the left (the one numbered 1). Change the font and font size in this slide. You can choose standard combinations offered by PowerPoint under Fonts in the field Edit Theme. You can also make your own selection by clicking on the Home Ribbon and entering your selection under Font.
• Format colour: View Ribbon > Slide Master (under Master Views). Select the top slide the bar on the left (under (1)). In the field Edit Theme you can select a pre-formatted colour scheme under Colours.

Return to the standard screen via View Ribbon > Normal (under Presentation Views). Afterwards, when you select a shape, you will find the selected colour scheme under Drawing > Shape Fill, or under Font > Font Colour. Under hues you will see various gradations of saturation and brightness. For a monochromatic colour scheme, for example, you can select only colours from one hue. In this case, keep selecting the same colour.

Tip: use the Widescreen (16:9) slide size instead of Standard (4:3). Most screens these days have the widescreen dimensions. You can adjust this in the Slide Master view on the ribbon under Slide Size. If you use a template provided by your institute or university (which we usually advise against, since university templates add a lot of distracting elements to the slides), search for a ready-made 16:9 template. Changing the slide size will otherwise result in an oddly stretched design.

Models

It is quite easy to draw models in PowerPoint. In the Home Ribbon there is a Drawing button which offers all the options you need. You can draw a rectangle by selecting Rectangle and dragging the mouse over the slide. You can make an oval by doing the same with the Oval button. If you press Shift, you will obtain respectively a square or a circle. You can modify the shape by clicking it once and dragging the squares/circles. To rotate the shape, use the small green circle.

You can draw arrow/lines by selecting Arrow/Line and dragging your mouse over the slide. You will see an arrow/line with two small circles at the beginning and the end. You can use these circles to move the beginning or the end of the arrow/line. You can also link these points to fixed points for instance on a square. If you subsequently move the square, you will also move the connected part of the arrow/line. To change the characteristics of arrows/lines, you can use Shape Outline. Use Weight to change the thickness of your arrow/line. Use Dashes to create a dotted line and Arrows to select a type of arrow. Do you want more advanced settings? Click Shape Outline > Weight > More Lines.

You can add text to your models by using text boxes. To do so, select Text Box and draw a text box. This will allow you to move the text and text box separately. In this way, you will avoid a lot of frustration. If you include different shapes in your model, every shape will appear in its own layer. Every new shape will appear on top of the previous one. In order to change this, right-click the shape and then use Bring to Front or Send to Back to shift the selected shape all the way to the back or to the front. Click the arrow next to Bring to Front and then click Bring Forward; this will shift the shape one layer forward.

Text on photos

If you want to add text to them, there are a number of tricks for doing so. Large, contrasting letters are easy to read. The legibility can be further increased by adding some shading to the letters. Select the relevant text and click Text Shadow under Font. You can also make part of the photograph darker (if your text is white) or lighter (if your text is black). The simplest way of doing this is creating a white or black field between the photograph and the text and to make this field transparent. You can do this by clicking More Fill Colours… under Shape Fill and then by entering a value under Transparency or dragging the bar. You will see the result immediately.

Picture styles

A photograph that does not fill the frame can appear a bit boring. In order to make it more exciting, you can pretend that it is physical photograph. One way of doing this is by adding a style. Select the photograph and go to the Format Ribbon. Under Picture Styles click the first option. The photograph will now have a white edge and subtle shading. You can also now rotate the photograph. By doing this for a number of partially overlapping photographs, you will create the illusion of a selection of photographs.

Animations

You can let an object on your slide appear by selecting this object and clicking Appear in the Animations Ribbon. You let it disappear again by clicking Add Animation under Advanced Animation and then selecting Disappear. The same object now has two animations attached to it: click once and it appears, click twice and it disappears. You can see this in the two boxes with the numbers 1 and 2 which appear next to the object. If you want to change the order of the animations, use the Animation Pane which can be found under Advanced Animation. You change the order by dragging the bars. If you want two animations to run simultaneously (for instance let two fields disappear at once), select them both by clicking them while pressing Control. Right-click and select Start With Previous. You can delete animations by selecting them and pressing Delete.

Online design

If you present online you and your slides appear in the visual context of a video conferencing platform. In this environment you are reduced to a voice over and a thumbnail sized head. If you use slides with white background in the often darker environment of e.g. Zoom, Webex, or Caltura, this can be a bit blindening. They also add to the clutter of the platform (e.g. chat, different tool bars, the heads of participants, etc.).

A solution I found is to adapt the colour palette of your slides to that of the platform. I first make a screenshot of the environment I design slides for: I hit the PrtSc button on my keyboard, open PowerPoint and press Control + V. Then I use the Eyedropper tool to create a colour palette with the colours of the platform. I apply these colours to background, texts and highlights of the design. As you see in the screenshots below, this idea makes the slides blend in seamlessly. It looks like there is no slide. And, remember: good design is invisible. In this blog post I explain more about the invisible slide.