Even though your slides may display different kinds of information—text, charts, tables, and pictures, for example—it’s usually best if they follow a consistent design that uses the same fonts, background graphics, color scheme, and so on. The design sets the overall tone for the presentation, so your choice of one that suits the topic and audience is critical.
Thankfully, Microsoft makes life easier for presentation newbies—and for anyone who’s not a trained graphic designer—by providing an assortment of prefab themes and layouts. They let you start building your slideshow without having to spend any time on the design elements or layouts. When project deadlines are looming and there are a million things that need to be done (including creating a presentation), you’ll welcome these timesaving features.
You can choose a theme in the Project Gallery’s Office Themes Category, but you’ll probably appreciate PowerPoint 2008’s new theme chooser in the Elements Gallery. Click the Slide Themes tab of the Elements Gallery bar to reveal the line up of colorful theme thumbnails, and use the arrow buttons at the right end of the gallery to scroll through the other theme options. If a theme looks like it might work, click it to display it in the slide pane.
You can continue clicking theme thumbnails and previewing them at full size until you find your ideal one. Don’t be disappointed, by the way, when your chosen theme doesn’t show the same colorful pictures as the thumbnail. Unlike the picture and text placeholders of Word’s Publishing Layout View, PowerPoint’s placeholders contain no dummy text or images—just the outlines set against the theme background, and the instruction to click to add text or insert objects.
PowerPoint opens a new theme using its first-page slide layout. Click the Slide Layouts tab in the Elements Gallery to show the collection of layouts that you can use with your chosen theme (see Figure 16-2). Click them as well, to see how they look at full size.
Tip
When choosing a theme, consider how you’re going to present the final product. All the included designs look terrific when projected from the Mac itself (using a portable projector, for example). On the other hand, if you plan to print the various slides (say, as handouts), avoid designs with solid colors in the background. Not only will they take forever to print on an inkjet (and consume a lot of ink or toner), but the blended background on some of these designs may not look as smooth as it did onscreen.
Although themes can save you hours of work, there’s a downside to using them, too. Since you’ll be choosing from the same repertoire as millions of other PowerPoint fans, your slideshow just may look just like someone else’s—maybe even the speaker who came before you. The only surefire way to guarantee a unique look is to design your presentation yourself. Fortunately, it’s not as hard as it sounds. To access a blank presentation from the Project Gallery, click the Blank Documents category and then double-click PowerPoint Presentation. Or, if you’re already in PowerPoint, click the blank “Office” theme—the leftmost thumbnail in the Themes gallery, or choose File → New Presentation (⌘-N).
Either way, you’re now facing a blank white slide in the slide pane. Click the Element Gallery’s Slide Layouts tab and choose a layout for your first slide (see page 666). Then you can use PowerPoint’s various text and drawing tools to build each slide from scratch. Although designing slides this way involves a lot more work than simply choosing a template, you’ll be rewarded with a presentation that doesn’t look like it came out of a can. Even if all you do is create a different slide background color, pattern, or image, you can have a completely unique look with minimal effort, since you can still use all of PowerPoint’s pre-designed layouts.
Add some of your own the text to your first slide by clicking where it says “Click to add title” and then start typing. Then add a new slide to the presentation in any of the following ways:
Click the New Slide button in the toolbar.
Choose Insert → New Slide.
Press ⌘-Shift-N.
Control-click (or right-click) in the Outline pane, and from the pop-up menu, choose New Slide.
Click the “Insert new slide” button at the left end of the Slide Layouts gallery and then click any of the layout thumbnails (which now sport large green plus signs).
PowerPoint creates the new slide, displays it on the slide pane, and adds its thumbnail to the outline pane directly beneath the selected slide.
Note
When PowerPoint creates a second slide in the show, it automatically uses the second slide layouts for the new slide—but any other time you create a new slide, PowerPoint creates it in the same style as the selected slide.
With the new slide selected in the outline pane, click the Slide Layouts tab to display them in the Elements Gallery. Click any of the layouts and the selected slide takes on this new appearance, ready for you to plug in text and images. If you don’t like its looks, click another to choose a different design.
Take a moment to create four or five slides from various layouts and add some text so you have some slides with which to experiment.
Unlike, say, home decorating, changing your presentation’s color scheme and other elements requires nothing more than a few quick mouse clicks. Just click the Slide Themes tab of the Elements Gallery to return to PowerPoint’s trove of themes. Click one to apply it to your presentation. If you don’t like the change, choose Edit → Undo Document Theme (⌘-Z) to revert, or just click another theme.
When you change themes, PowerPoint changes all the slides in your presentation to the new theme. If you’d like to change the theme for just part of your presentation, select two or more slides in the outline pane (by Shift-clicking or ⌘-clicking) and then click a new theme in the gallery. PowerPoint changes your selected slides to the new theme. You may find switching from one thing to another helpful to differentiate different segments of the presentation.
Each PowerPoint theme has a set of colors chosen to provide contrast between its various elements while maintaining a uniform color palette. If you don’t agree with any of these colors, choose Format → Theme Colors to display the Create Theme Colors window. Double-click any of the color swatches to change that color using the Color Picker (Fill Color: Standard palette). PowerPoint displays the results of your meddling in the small Preview diagram (see Figure 16-3). Click Apply to All to see your color change reflected throughout the presentation. Your new custom color collection is added to the Colors palette in the Formatting Palette’s Document Theme pane. You can also make a wholesale change to the theme colors by selecting a different collection from this pop-up menu. (Be sure to make note of the collection you start with so you can always return if you decide you’re making things worse.)
Figure 16-3. If you want to create your own color collection, choose Format → Theme Colors. In the resulting Create Theme Colors dialog box, you can choose new colors for the slide’s background, text, fills, accents, and links.
You can also change the slide background, choosing from a dozen variations for each theme. Open the Slide Background pane of the Formatting Palette and click any of the background thumbnails to apply that background to your theme. Many of the theme designs have background graphics as well—frames or images. Click Hide Background Graphics to remove them from the theme. (See Hiding slides for more on backgrounds.)