Summer 1999 Research Experience for Undergraduates

PowerPoint Tutorial
1. First, create a new presentation.
File > New > Blank Presentation, select Title Layout.
Type in your title, then your name, your institution/program (REU99) and date
underneath.
You can change the orientation of your slides by selecting File > Page setup
2. Then you can choose a background design.
Either select Format menu or Right-click mouse on slide then Apply Design, select
design (e.g. Whirpool.pot). Note that some backgrounds have preset animation.
You can make your own background as well. Right-click on the slide, or Format >
Background > Select the pull-out menu > Fill Effects.., and choose solid color or patterns.
You can also use your own image (JPEG, TIFF, or GIF) to create a custom background.
At Fill Effects, select Picture > Select Pictures...> find your image file. PowerPoint will
automatically fit your image to the slide size; however, you should make sure that the
image size is proportional to your slide to avoid distorted background.
The background color for a pre-set scheme can be changed: Right-click or Format >
Color Scheme > Custom> select Title text > Change Color > select color (e.g. light
yellow).
3. Now that you have a good background, go on to add new slides.
On the slide after which you want to add a new one, select Insert > New Slides, choose
appropriate layout (e.g. Bulleted List).
Type in appropriate text into fields.
To demote or promote a paragraph (increase or decrease indent in a bullet list), you can
either use the left and right arrows on your toolbar or use key shortcuts: Tab to demote,
Shift-Tab to promote.
4. There are four ways you can enter graphics into your presentation.
Clip Arts from PowerPoint: Insert > Picture > Clip Art.
Your own picture files (GIF, TIFF, JPEG, or BMP): Insert > Picture > From File.
Inserting Excel Graph: You can select the graph in Excel, copy it (Ctrl-C) and then paste
it in the PowerPoint slide (Ctrl-V) or Paste as Picture (Edit > Paste Special > Picture). It
is recommended (from experience) that you paste as a picture to avoid formatting
problems you may have later on.
You can add drawings on slide using the drawing tools on the bottom toolbar (See
attached tutorial on Drawing in PowerPoint).
To move the graphics, click on the image and drag to a new position. For finer
adjustments (not snapping on grid), you can hold down Alt key while moving the object.
You can also select the object (click on it), then move it using the arrow keys. The Alt
key can be used in this case as well. To move an object horizontally or vertically, hold
down the Shift key while moving to make sure it only moves in those directions.
To resize an object, first select the object, then click on one of the white squares that
appear along the side or corner of the image, then drag the square. To resize an image
proportionally, hold down the Shift key while re-sizing. To re-size about the center of the
image, hold down Ctrl key while re-sizing.

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To re-size text fields, first click on the field so that the box is highlighted. Next, click on
the frame surrounding the field to select the text field. Then, follow similar procedure to
resize the text box.
You can flip or rotate any PowerPoint generated drawing using the drawing toolbar on
the bottom. If the icon is missing, go to Draw > Rotate or Flip.
In order to use these commands on an image, you must first change the image into
Microsoft Office Drawing Object by un-grouping, then re-grouping the picture: Select
image > Right-click > Grouping > Ungroup/Regroup. Caution: this ungroup/regroup
method may cause you to loose some information within your image, so take
precaution on more complicated ones. It might be best to restrict this function to
simpler images (such as Clip Art).
5. For adding equation into slide: Insert > Object > Select Microsoft Equation. Click outside
equation to return to slide. You can change the color within the equation box by right-
clicking on the object > Format Object > then select Fill color or add a frame around the
equation by selecting the Line color.
6. There are two ways to change your font size and type.
highlight the text you want to change, and go to Format > Font on the upper toolbar
To change the font style on every slide at once, use the Slide Master. Go to View >
Master > Slide Master, and make any appropriate changes. You can go back to your
slides by going to View > Slides. Anything that you change here will be applied on
every slide except the title slide. To change the format of your title slide, go to View >
Master > Title Master.
7. The bullet style can be changed in a similar manner (from each slide or Slide Master) by
going to Format > Bullet
8. You can enter date, institution name and slide number on the bottom of all the slides: View >
Header and Footer
9. To Add some punch into your presentation, you can apply special effects.
To add animation effects into your text and/or objects (include graphics): Select object to
be animated, then right-click and select Custom Animation. You can make your bulleted
list appear one by one from different locations as you click on the screen during
presentation.
You can also use preset animation: select text or object > Slide Show > Preset Animation.
Be aware that most of these animations have been programmed with sound effects.
To apply slide transition effects: Slide Show > Slide Transition. These effects refer to the
way in which a new slide appears.
10. If you want to change slide order, use Slide Sorter view (View > Slide Sorter). In this view,
you can drag one more more slides to a new position by selecting them and dragging them, or
you can delete slide(s) by selecting and pressing Backspace.
11. There are two ways in which PowerPoint lets you practice the presentation.
Full Screen with no timing:Slide Show > View Show
Full Screen timed: Slide Show > Rehearse Timings
after practicing with timing, be sure to disable automatic advancing of slides (PowerPoint
can save timings from your practice and automatically advance slides at those timings).
Go to Slide Show > Set Up Show, and click on Advance slides, Manually.
12. To navigate your way through the slides during presentation:

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To go to next slide: Click on mouse, or press Right arrow, Down arrow, or Spacebar.
To go to previous slide: press Left arrow or Up arrow.
13. PowerPoint also allows you to turn your presentation into html format so that it can be
viewed on the web.
Go to File > Save as HTML >, and a window will appear. This window guides you
through the different settings you can choose for the file.
Choose a layout, image style, button style, and fill out some other information. When
you type in a folder and click on Finish, it will create a new folder containing everything
you need to publish your presentation on web. To put the presentation on the web, make
sure you up-load all files in the folder.
The presentation is saved so that each slide is an image. Because of this, some details
may be lost during the conversion between Microsoft Drawing or Text Object and the
graphic file.

PowerPoint Tips
If you are making your presenation on a computer that doesn't have a speaker, but presenting
on one that does, make sure you check all your sound settings
sometimes, an animation has been turned on with sound effect without your knowing
Special effects (animations, slide transition effects, and sound effects) can be very distracting
when used in excess.
be sure to not over-use these effects
transitions should all be the same (for all slides) to make the presentation look more
professional
Do not use unusual fonts in your presentation if you are presenting from a computer (it's
okay if you're printing onto a transparency).
if the computer that you made the slide on is different from the one you are presenting on,
the latter computer may not have the particular font set. If the computer cannot find the
appropriate font, it usually picks something else (seemingly at random) and displays it in
a different font.
stick to "standard" fonts to avoid having to deal with strange fonts (Times, Arial, Symbol,
etc).
Be aware of your presenation media and the colors.
if you are printing your presentation on a transparency using an ink-jet printer, you don't
want to have a dark-colored background since that will use up all the ink. In this case,
make the background white, and use colors in texts and figures to make the slides look
appealing.
if you are printing onto a transparency using a laser printer, you are further restricted to
black and white.
if you are presenting from a computer, then you can use any colors.
When printing slides (for notes), you can print 2, 3, or 6 slides per page to save some paper
and ink.
go to File > Print, and find the option "Print What." Choose Handouts with appropriate
number of slides per page.

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It is generally a good idea to make all changes to settings (fonts, background, color scheme)
before you start making slides.
once you manually change something (for example, highlighting a phrase and changing
the font), the changes made in Slide Master no longer applies to this particular object.
when switching from one color scheme to the other, the object colors often change
(especially if they were default colors), and it is better to not change color scheme after
the slide has already been made to prevent the object color from changing into something
strange.
Non-Serif fonts (such as Helvetica or Arial) are easier to read the Serif fonts (Times).
use Non-Serif fonts whenever possible (especially for small fonts, such as figure caption).
if you really need to use a small font to restrict space, try Bold-type to make the fonts
more visible.
If your bullet-list needs to be shrunk a bit (to save space), try varying the spacing between
lines.
go to Format > Line Spacing, and change Line Spacing.
this is a better approach than to shrink the font size.

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