Layouts provide a framework for your slides so that they are all consistent:

Let PowerPoint’s layouts do the heavy [...]]]> I see lots of bad slides! One thing that I notice is that people ignore PowerPoint’s layouts. Please don’t!

Layouts provide a framework for your slides so that they are all consistent:

• Fonts
• Font sizes
• Colors
• Title placement
• Image and text placement

How do I choose a layout?

Let PowerPoint’s layouts do the heavy lifting for you. When you’re ready to create a slide, first choose a layout. In all versions of PowerPoint, you can do this by right-clicking in an empty area of the slide and choosing Layout or Slide Layout. In PowerPoint 2003, the Slide Layout task pane will open. In PowerPoint 2007 and 2010, you’ll see the options at the cursor, as you see here.

The less designing skill you have, the more you need layouts. Good designers can work with a blank slide (the Blank layout) and make it look coherent. Most others can’t.

I recommend that you consciously choose the layout for every slide in your presentation.

My favorite layout is the Title Only layout. Why?

It gives me consistency plus flexibility–the best of 2 worlds. I like using a slide title and filling the rest of the slide with an image and the Title Only layout lets me do that.

What if there isn’t a layout that I like?

In PowerPoint 2007 and 2010, you can create custom layouts. This is a great feature, so see my tip, “Create a custom layout” for details. Another tip, “Create a product catalog with custom layouts,” provides an example of creating a custom layout for a specific purpose.

How would you use the Title Only layout? How do you use layouts in general? Leave a comment to share with other readers!

The presentation is a short take on how people who feel “artistically challenged” can nevertheless design clear and professional-looking slides.

In the presentation, I tell the [...]]]> I’m pleased to report that my presentation, partnered with PresentationXpert, has been published on SlideRocket, in their Presentations and Webinars Showcase. It’s the top-left presentation on the page.

The presentation is a short take on how people who feel “artistically challenged” can nevertheless design clear and professional-looking slides.

In the presentation, I tell the story of my embarrassment over a slide that I created and what I did to learn how to design slides.

And yes, I did draw that stick figure!

If “artistically challenged” describes you, please take a look and them come back and let me know what you think, by commenting on this post.

From the point of view of the Sales Manager, PowerPoint product catalogs ensure that the catalog always looks [...]]]> Sales reps can use PowerPoint to create a product catalog that they bring to potential customers. This catalog is easy to modify, even at the last minute. You can change photos, prices, descriptions, and so on.

From the point of view of the Sales Manager, PowerPoint product catalogs ensure that the catalog always looks professionally laid out and the content is always up to date. You accomplish this with a custom layout.

A custom layout creates a framework to the slide’s layout. You can then insert text in a text placeholder, a photo in an image placeholder, and it will always be formatted nicely and fit properly.

(There’s a link at the end for a similar tip that includes a workaround for creating a custom layout in PowerPoint 2003.)

Create a custom layout in PowerPoint 2007 and 2010

1. Click the View tab, then click the Slide Master button in the Presentation Views group. The slide master appears. Or simply click the Slide Master button at the lower-right corner of the screen.
2. You see all the layouts in the left pane. Scroll down and right-click the layout that is closest to the one you want. Choose Duplicate Layout.
3. Right-click the duplicate and choose Rename Layout. Give the layout a name that’s meaningful to you. Here you see my example.

A renamed custom layout in PowerPoint's Slide Master view

1. To delete placeholders that you don’t want, select them and press the Del key.
2. To insert a new placeholder, on the Slide Master tab, in the Master Layout group, click the Insert Placeholder button’s down arrow and choose one of the 8 placeholder types:

Content: Lets you insert any type of content, that is, any of the types listed below

Text

Picture

Chart

Table

SmartArt

Media

ClipArt

1. Drag to size and place the placeholder on the slide.
2. Place more placeholders, laying them out as needed.
3. Did you know that you can change the prompt text in a placeholder? For example, you can change “Picture” to “Insert a photo of a product here.”

A custom layout for a product catalog

1. The presentation now contains the new layout and you can choose it the same way you’d choose any of the standard layouts for any slide.

Choosing the custom layout

A slide based on a custom layout

Related tips

Create a custom layout

Resetting a slide: A quick fix for awful slides

Often, the first thing I [...]]]> Do you have to fix up slides that other people made a mess of? I do. For some reason, I get a lot of slides on which people ignored the Layout feature of PowerPoint; instead, they inserted text boxes anywhere on the slide—in a different location on each slide!

Often, the first thing I do is to check the layout of each slide, change it if necessary, and reset the slide. Why is resetting so valuable?

When you make changes on individual slides, PowerPoint remembers them. As a result, even if you change the layout, the changes remain. Often the best way to get such a presentation into shape is to reset the layouts. When you do so, PowerPoint moves the placeholders into the position specified by the slide master.

On this slide, the title placeholder was probably in the original location, but the text placeholder that contains the bulleted text was centered. The slide has no alignment, so the eye has to move in a disjointed fashion. Talk about stress on the brain!

Original slide

In short, it’s a mess. By resetting your slides, you can start with a consistent layout, and work from there.

To reset in a slide, follow these steps:

1. Right-click the slide and choose (Slide) Layout, then choose the Layout you want.  (Tip: Select as many slides as you want in the left pane, right-click any of the slides and do the same, to change the layout for all those slides. No need to go slide by slide!)
2. Right-click the slide and choose Reset Slide. (In PowerPoint 2003, click the selected layout in the Slide Layout task pane, click the down arrow, and choose Reapply Layout. (Again, you can select several slides at once.)

Here you see the result after resetting the slide and left-justifying the title.

Of course, now I can make other changes. In this situation, I ended up replacing the text with a SmartArt diagram, but at least I had a presentation full of slides that were consistent! Here’s my final slide.

(I want to mention that this presentation was about research done on children with ADHD and the effects of teaching them the Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique. If this presentation had been created for the purpose of presenting the research at a scientific conference, I would not have made the last slide; I probably would have left the slide with the bulleted text. But this presentation was made to show parents of children with ADHD the research on the TM technique. For a non-technical audience, the last slide was more appropriate.)

So, when you need to quickly whip a presentation into shape, reset the slides!

Related tips:

• Create a better PowerPoint template
• Export all presentation text (for when you really need to start from scratch!)

I find that many presenters who create their own slides struggle with slide design. Not being artists, their efforts are clunky. They usually [...]]]> In my “Create an Outstanding Presentation” workshops and self-study course, I teach four layouts that always look good. I taught them again recently in a presentation skills class for college students.

I find that many presenters who create their own slides struggle with slide design. Not being artists, their efforts are clunky. They usually know this, but don’t know what to do about it.

In March, I’ll be giving a training webinar, Slide Design for Non-Designers, that will provide many more solutions that anyone, even the artistically challenged (like me!), can use.

But until then, I thought I’d give you two layouts that always look good. They’re easy to create, too.

Many people use this layout, which I call “everything centered on top of everything else.” The default template seems to encourage centering everything. It’s certainly not horrible, but I think you’ll see that it can be improved.

Here’s an alternative. The heading is on the left, which I recommend for a couple of reasons. (See the Related Tips section below.) The image covers the slide from left to right. Part of the reason this slide looks better is that the image is larger. But it’s more than that; there’s a more pleasing balance. Your eye starts at the upper left and travels diagonally.

Garr Reynolds calls this an “asymmetrical design” in his book Presentationzen. He says, “symmetrical designs are more static than asymmetrical designs and evoke feelings of formality or stability.” If you have his book, look on p. 149 for an example of both types of designs.

A second look is what I call the vertical split. If you have Photoshop skills, you could make the transition more gradual with a transparency gradient, but this isn’t necessary.

Usually, I make the split even, but here the image takes up about 60% of the slide’s width.

You can watch me makeover a text slide into 4 slides in this YouTube video, One Point on a Slide. You’ll see how I create these two layouts.

Take some time to try out layout variations and I believe that you’ll see a vast improvement in the way your slides look and feel.

Related Tips

Create a better PowerPoint template

Put one point on a slide

Slide numbers can be [...]]]> Slide numbers are like page numbers. They show the number of the current slide. Slide numbers are easy to add, but they can be frustrating, as well. Sometimes they just don’t appear! In this tip, I’ll show you how to insert page numbers and also give you some troubleshooting techniques.

Slide numbers can be helpful for several reasons:

• They’re great during the authoring process, especially if you’re collaborating with others. (“On Slide 4, I think we should mention costs.”)
• They help you when you deliver, if you need to navigate back and forth in your presentation. To do so, just enter the slide number and press Enter. Create a slide list for this purpose. When you get to the slide, the slide number confirms that you got to the right place.
• Slide numbers are also helpful when you’re working from a script that tells you when to go to the next slide, (“Display Slide 4) again confirming that you’re on the right slide.

To insert slide numbers, choose Insert> Slide Number. In the Header and Footer dialog box, check the Slide Number check box, and click Apply to All.

This should put slide numbers on every slide, but in a sample presentation that I used, the slide number appeared on only one slide!

This isn’t an example of good presentation design, mind you, but it’s great for illustrating the point.

I found 3 reasons that page numbers might not appear:

1. The slide master doesn’t have a slide number box. In this situation, no slide number will appear.

To add a slide number box, go into the slide master, and choose Format> Master Layout.

Check the Slide Number check box and click OK. Now, slides using that slide master will display slide numbers.

2. An image or other object covers the slide number.

Here are some possible solutions for this situation:

1. My solution for this  photo was to make the background transparent. To do this, select the image. On the Picture toolbar, choose Set Transparent Color and click the background. (In 2007, choose Format tab> Adjust group> Recolor> Set Transparent Color.)
2. You could make the image smaller so that it doesn’t cover the lower-right corner of the slide. But this wouldn’t look as good.
3. Another option would be to put the image on the left and the text on the right. (The slide number is usually on the right.)
4. Finally, you could move the image to the back. Right-click it and choose (Order)/Send to Back.

3. The slide number is not visible due to lack of contrast with the background.

 The slide number is there, but the background is light and its slide master uses white text for the slide number. In this case, the slide’s master has a dark background, but I had changed the background for the individual slide. (Right-click the background and choose Format Background.)

This result illustrates why changing the background of an individual slide can cause unexpected problems. If you want to keep the background, you could change it. For example, here I simply switched the gradient so that the darker section was at the bottom. This allowed the white slide number to be visible.

If you’re having trouble with slide numbers, one of these techniques should solve your problem.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about going beyond “beyond bullets,” to beyond words. Some [...]]]> About a year ago, I wrote an article for “Presentations” magazine titled “A PowerPoint world without bullets is possible, and beautiful as well” The point of the article was to discuss how you can present ideas graphically, without using bulleted text.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about going beyond “beyond bullets,” to beyond words. Some of the slides I used in that article had only a title and the rest was conveyed with a graphic. Can we go further?

I recently read Cliff Atkinson’s blog entry, “Zen and the Art of PowerPoint,” which suggests this concept using an example of a slide showing nothing but a motorcycle driving across the slide. This got me thinking.

The point is that when you are at the front of a room speaking to an audience (of one or many), you don’t want your PowerPoint presentation to get between you and the audience. Yet that’s exactly what usually happens. In another tip of mine, “3 Components of an Effective Presentation,” I wrote, “Two’s a party; three’s a crowd, they say. If you just read your slides, you’re putting PowerPoint between you and the audience and they’ll resent it.” PowerPoint can become like the third person in a relationship — and no one likes that.

When you give a typical presentation with bulleted text, think about what you’re asking the audience to do. You’re asking them to listen to you, but read the slide at the same time.

A few years ago, Dr. Marcel Just, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, published a study that was widely used to justify laws banning people from using cells phones while driving. This was the first study using magnetic resonance images of brain activity to compare what happens in people’s heads when they try to do two tasks at a time. The study revealed that brain activity does not double. Instead, the brain activity devoted to each task decreases. People performing two tasks simultaneously do neither one as well as they do each one alone. Performance always suffers.

The two tasks used in the study were chosen because they use different parts of the brain. Interestingly, the tasks were the following:

• They listened to complex sentences like “the pyramids were burial places and they are one of the seven wonders of the ancient world,” and had to judge them true or false.
• They were shown pairs of three dimensional figures and asked to rotate them mentally to decide whether they were the same.

Does that sound familiar? In a presentation, you are asking your audience to listen to your (probably complex) sentences and judge whether what you’re saying makes sense. At the same time, you’re asking them to look at a slide, a much more visual task.

Don’t divide your listeners’ minds by making them attend first to you, and the slide, both at the same time, or back and forth constantly. What a headache!

So what do you do, short of giving up all visuals altogether? After all, haven’t visuals been shown to increase understanding and remembrance of the presentation?

It depends on what your presentation is about, what information you need to get across. But I suggest that you think about reducing the load on the PowerPoint side. Use fewer words — many fewer words. Dare I say no words? Perhaps you can simply display a few evocative images that the audience can glance at momentarily to get a basic concept.

If you need to present complex data, use a chart or print up handouts. You can run through the data, but don’t expect them to be paying much attention to you. Let them look at the handouts and just guide the audience through them.

But when you get to your main points, your conclusions, turn the audience to you. Let the PowerPoint presentation fade into the background and be much less word heavy.

For example, after you’ve slogged through the quarterly sales earnings, you want to conclude with one number, the percent increase (hopefully). The goal for the next quarter is another number. Put that on a separate slide. These points don’t need any text. Just a number. Then it’s up to you to inspire them.

no need for more texts

Or maybe the presentation’s titles used several different fonts or font sizes. Looked chaotic, yes?

When [...]]]>