PowerPoint Tips Blog

Resetting a slide: A quick fix for awful slides

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 [...]

Improve your slide design by trying layout variations

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 [...]

Reapply the Slide Layout

Have you ever seen a presentation in which the text was jumping around from slide to slide? On each slide, the title and text were in a slightly different location. It made your eyes hurt, didn’t it?

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

When [...]

Create a custom layout

Layouts help you lay out the components of your slide and PowerPoint comes with many of them. Here’s a sample.

slide components

Unfortunately, PowerPoint versions before 2007 don’t have a feature to let you create custom layouts that appear in the Layout taskpane. However, you can work around this limitation by designing [...]

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You'll find free tips, techniques, articles, and tutorials here, all designed to help you succeed when you present. This blog gives you knowledge. I'm passionate about turning Death by PowerPoint into Life by PowerPoint. Discover books and courses to help you become an outstanding presenter. Find out more about training, consulting, webinars and coaching on presentation skills and PowerPoint.

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