Are You a PowerPoint Rockstar? A Presentation Design How-To

If your answer to the title was no, fear not. For every frontman is only as good as the band that backs them up. Here, you're the rockstar. PowerPoint, your band.

Even if you don't play every instrument in the band, you have to know the basics of music and composition. In the real world, everyone glosses over the basics of PowerPoint, assuming everyone knows them because "how could you not?"

You don't know what you don't know but today we change all of that. Today, I'm going to arm you with the knowledge of the 5 tools everyone needs to know in PowerPoint.

#1 Grids

Grids are one of the hidden heroes of presentation software. Even a simple grid can help you keep basic alignment for all your slide elements like titles and text boxes and help you keep track of where your slide edges are when you have overlapping/off-edge elements.

So how do you use them?

Step one: open up your slide master.

Step two: right click to add your grid lines (unless you have the BrightCarbon plug-in which I highly recommend, you will have to do this one at a time).

Step three: adjust gridlines until they're placed where you want them to be.

You might be asking, why the slide master? Because placing them on the slide master ensures that they will show up on every layout you use so it's consistent from slide to slide. Anything you put on the master will show up on every slide layout nested underneath it.

#2 Colors

Changing colors in PowerPoint is easy once you know how and it will make a world of difference in your presentations. Changing your color master will ensure that everything is color consistently from slide to slide so you don't end up with weird or clashing color combinations.

Step one: go back to the slide master view.

Step two: select the colors panel in the top ribbon.

Step three: Drop in your color codes and you're good to go!

#3 Changing fonts

Changing your fonts is like changing your colors though it's a little more tricky and a bit less consistent.

To change these, go to the same place we changed our colors and select the fonts option next to it.

Change your body font and header font to be what you want them to be. Ta-da! Every new slide will have those fonts applied. Now for the tricky part. Often, a lot of people are importing slides from other presentations which don't always automatically conform to the new presentation. There is a "find font" option up in the ribbon that will tell you all the existing fonts in the presentation. Find the one you want to replace and replace it with the fonts in your file. Easy!

#4 Align tools

You might be surprised that this comes under color and fonts but those are for consistency. This is for those little finicky details like spacing that not everyone has time to worry about or focus on. But knowing that PowerPoint has these tools is still very worthwhile.

Step one: locate the tools underneath the arrange option in the ribbon.

Step two: select align.

Step three: align your objects how you wish.

Bonus tip: to add these to your ribbon (or in general customize the ribbon to show you your most used PowerPoint items) go to File -> Options -> Quick Access Toolbar.

This adds a little panel underneath your ribbon with icons for any tool within PowerPoint and any plug-ins you may have. Add those alignment tools there for faster access!

#5 Paste formatting tool

This is more of an advanced tool but it can be helpful when making animations happen. Sometimes tables and charts don't behave the way we want them to when we animate them. To get around that, there's a special paste option that will allow you to copy in the chart as an image and then ungroup it to turn it into shapes for easier individual editing or animation.

Step one: copy your chart or table.

Step two: go to the paste panel up in your ribbon. Select paste then paste special.

Step three: select picture (enhanced metafile).

Step four: select the new image and select ungroup. Check yes on the box that pops up.

Step five: ungroup again and now you have all of your chart elements as individual and editable objects.

And there you have it! While this isn't the full suite of tools that I use, this is what I think every person who uses PowerPoint should know how to use to make your presentations more consistent and visually pleasing. Hope this presentation design how-to helps you!

Happy designing!