PowerPoint Makeover 7: No Bullets Presentation

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by Geetesh Bajaj - published on this site on November 29th 2007

...continued from Page 3

Add Pictures
Work with the Titles and Slide

Add Pictures

This is both the most difficult and the easiest part of the makeover.

The difficult part is in finding and choosing appropriate photos. Remember, it is better not to use a photo than try to use one that's not relevant or suitable. In addition, never use two or more photos if you can get the message across with just one. You'll only end up confusing the viewer and crowding the slide.

The easy part is inserting the pictures. It takes a mere two clicks to do that!

Before I start showing how you can insert photos, a few words on copyright issues won't hurt.

Respecting Copyrights

This is not a topic that can be covered in its entirety here. In fact, there are books dedicated to only this subject. However, it does not take a master's degree in rocket science to understand how you can respect copyrights. These few guidelines will help:

• Start with exploring your own resources. Many times, you can use your own digital camera to click photographs for use in your presentations. Even then, there may be some copyright issues involved if you are shooting pictures of private property (or even shooting pictures while you are within private property).
  
  
• Most stock photo sites won't have problems with you using their photos in a presentation as long as you don't distribute those presentations without a proper license. Licenses can be of several types; always ask the stock photo site from which you bought the photo for details.
  
  
• Never copy photographs from a website unless you have requested and received permission.
  
  
• Whenever in doubt, it's best to ask.

If you are following the makeover step by step, continue using your saved presentation. If you just stepped in, you can use the nobullets_05.pptx presentation from the Makeover 07\Steps folder on the CD.

Follow these steps to insert your pictures:

1. Locate the pictures subfolder of the Makeover 07 folder on the CD, where you'll find several pictures all named with the slide number reference where they have to be inserted.
   
   Although you also can navigate to the folder on the CD when inserting the pictures, you might want to copy these pictures off the CD to your computer to make locating them easier.
   
   
2. With the first slide of the presentation open, click the Insert tab on the Ribbon, and choose Picture. The Insert Picture dialog box opens, as shown in Figure 8.11.
   
   
   Figure 8.11 Insert pictures into slides.
   
   
3. Select the first picture (slide01.png), and click the Insert button. PowerPoint places the picture on the first slide. Drag the corners of the picture and reposition it so that it doesn't cover the slide title (see Figure 8.12).
   
   
   Figure 8.12 Resize and position the picture so it doesn't cover the slide title.
   
   
4. Repeat this process for the remaining slides. Some slides don't have any pictures. That's okay; just leave them for now.
   
   
5. Save the presentation.

Work with the Titles and Slide

1. Remove titles where they are not required. For example, remove them from slides that have visuals. A cup of coffee is so recognizable that you don't need to add a title that says "coffee"!
   
   
2. Format and position the titles. This comprises making some words bold and maybe moving the location of the title to a different part of the slide. Because there's no single fixed position for the title in these slides, we need not work with any of the Slide Layouts within the Slide Master.
   
   NOTE
   
   Working with Slide Layouts and the Slide Master are covered fully in Chapter 6, "Makeover 5: Halloween Scrapbook."

1. Click the View tab on the Ribbon, and select Slide Sorter to view the slides in Slide Sorter view.
   
   
2. Press Ctrl and click all the slides that have no pictures, to select them.
   
   
3. Now click the Design tab on the Ribbon, and click Background Styles to see the Background Styles gallery. Right-click the black thumbnail on the top row, and in the resulting menu, click the Apply to Selected Slides option (see Figure 8.13).
   
   
   Figure 8.13 Change the background style of slides.
   
   Not only does this cause all the backgrounds within the selected slides to turn black, but also it changes the title text on all these slides to white.
   
   
4. Now click the View tab on the Ribbon, and click Normal. Go to Slide 1, and select Henry in the title. This should bring up the mini toolbar that contains almost all the text formatting options you might need (see Figure 8.14). If the mini toolbar does not pop up, you can right-click the selected text to summon it. Click the Bold option in the mini toolbar to make the selected text bold. Now you have a title that's partially bold.
   
   
   Figure 8.14 Do your text formatting with the mini toolbar.
   
   How do you decide which part of the title needs to be bold? Most of the time, this would be the more important word in the title. We think Henry is more important in this title than Meet, and thus chose to make that bold. Of course, this is really open to your creative freedom.
   
   
5. Reposition the title "meet henry" anywhere that you find appropriate on the slide (see Figure 8.15).
   
   
   Figure 8.15 Playing with the slide titles feels like breaking rules, but it can be fun!
   
   Normally I would not suggest that you move around your slide titles this way (after all, that's akin to behaving as if there's no Slide Master or Slide Layout in PowerPoint). So why do it now? Because you need some creative freedom at times, and rules certainly can be broken as long as you are aware of what they are in the first place. And remember, this is an advertising presentation, not something intended for a board meeting—that itself allows for more freedom.
   
   
6. Using the suggestions in the previous steps, go ahead and alter the remaining slides to your liking. Here is a list of some other stuff that I did to our sample makeover:
   
   
   • Removed the titles for slides that don't need them; these include the slides that have a picture of a car, coffee, or Seattle.
     
     
   • Added ellipses to the end of some phrases to provide a sense of continuation between text and picture slides. So if the text in one slide was "Henry lives in...," the second slide had a picture of Seattle to complete the thought.
     
   • Moved the titles to various positions, including at the bottom of the slide, so that the title in some slides was placed away from the pictures. Really, this sort of decision is based more on the picture within a slide and how it copes visually with the accompanying title. Indeed, there's a method to this madness, but it's also a combination of several things that might require an entire book to explain. We suggest you look at billboards, television ads, movie posters, and so on, and observe how they place the text in relation to the visuals (or even on an empty expanse), and try to replicate that. Practice makes perfect!
     
   • Moved the location of pictures, too. This again followed no rules. Every slide is different, and every picture is distinctive—you need to see what works best in a given scenario. For example, if the picture is of a boy looking toward the left, we'll move him to the right side of the slide so that he can look inside the slide area rather than outside. Many of these ideas are inspired by photography techniques—look up concepts such as the "rule of thirds" in a photography composition book to learn more. You also can learn much by just observing more slides and photographs.
     
     
   Your presentation doesn't have to look exactly like mine, but you can take a look at the nobullets_07.pptx presentation from the Makeover 07\Steps folder on the CD to get an idea of what I did.
   
   
7. Save your presentation.