Create A PowerPoint Presentation

Let's run through the basics of creating a brand new PowerPoint presentation. Open up PowerPoint. You should be greeted with a selection of themes on which to base your new presentation, running along the top of the workspace, and a list of presentations you last worked on. The first 'theme' displayed is actually a blank presentation, and we're actually going to be using that, so click on Blank Presentation.

A brand new presentation will open for you to start work on. I would immediately press ctrl + s to save it, whereupon you'll be asked to name your presentation and navigate to a place to save it. Don't feel like you have to save it in the cloud, you can save it to your hard drive. The first slide is, by default, a title slide, which contains a text box for a title and a text box for a subtitle below it.

Type in a title and a subtitle if you want. We need a new slide. You can either click the New Slide button at the top to get the default Title and Content slide, or you can click on the bottom half of the button to see a selection of different slide types you can add.

Again, we add a title in the title box, but let's add a picture this time. Click on the Pictures button and navigate to an image on your hard drive.

When you've found an image, double click on it to insert it. We didn't have a picture of a monkey, but we did have one of a dog, which I believe is virtually the same thing. After inserting it, the image is still selected, and for that reason the Picture Format contextual tab is displayed at the top. We can use the Picture Format tools to adjust our image or add effects to it.

We're going to click on Artistic Effects (in the Adjust group) to see what effects we can add to our dog.

If you hover over each effect, you can see a preview of what the effect would look like, but without having to apply it first. So you could hover over one effect, before moving on to the next and compare what they look like. We're going to choose Pencil Grayscale, which will disguise our dog so that viewers will think it's a monkey.

There. That could easily be a monkey. Let's add another slide, but this time let's make it a Two Content slide. Remember, click the bottom of the slide button and select Two Content. Using this type of slide we can list all the attributes of monkeys on one side and then the attributes of dogs on the other, and discover what the differences are. Here is our completed slide.

I think we got everything. Save your presentation. Now it's time to educate our audience with our findings. We need to run our presentation, and there are a couple of ways to do this. We can either go to the Slide Show tab and in the Start Slide Show tab we can click From Beginning. Or we can simply press F5 on the keyboard. This will start the presentation. To advance to the next slide we can either press the spacebar or the enter key. To return to the previous slide we can press the backspace key. Keep advancing to the end, or you can stop the presentation at any time by pressing the escape key.