PowerPoint Design Course Online March 21, 2025

Understanding the creative thinking process for PowerPoint slide design

• Starting your project before using PowerPoint
• Organizing your thoughts with a mind map
• Establishing your goal: what will the deck be great at?
• Designing a powerful PowerPoint deck
• Mapping the flow of your deck
• Using creative thinking skills to build content.
• Verifying your story

Building information architecture for your PowerPoint design

• Information Hierarchy: Focusing on the key message
• Determine critical content
• Structure and edit content using easy, low-tech options
• Testing the structure of your PowerPoint content and design

Learning the PowerPoint workspace for design

• Taking advantage of alternate views
• Locating features you need for PowerPoint design

Using outline mode to build your story

• Working in outline mode to fine-tune text
• Rehearsing presentations
• Converting to navigation mode

Critical Powerpoint features

• Cloning slides and content
• Using rulers and positioning
• Using guides
• Changing the arrangement of your elements
• Playing a PowerPoint deck
• Naming and saving your deck
• Changing PowerPoint slide sizes
• Design solutions for text running long

Essential principles of Presentation design

• Understanding space and proportion in slide design
• Mathematical tricks for designing PowerPoint slides
• Tips for building better visual design
• Understanding and using asymmetric layouts in PowerPoint
• Utilizing the grid and understanding its importance in a design

Typography for PowerPoint slide design

• Understanding type hierarchy
• Adjusting font styles and sizes
• Updating styles within a PowerPoint Design
• Using master slides to change all text
• Putting text on top of images and videos

Taking advantage of master slides when designing in PowerPoint

• Building and editing layouts
• Establishing text styles for your PowerPoint deck
• Inserting text and image placeholders
• Understanding the underlying slide structure
• Determining and saving branded colors in your theme
• Sharing your PowerPoint theme with others

Using images in PowerPoint slide designs

• Cropping images in PowerPoint
• Enhancing images used in slide designs
• Removing backgrounds from images
• Rotating and sizing images within PowerPoint
• Preferences and settings that affect imagery
• Creating animations
• Resources for locating high-quality images

Animations, build-ins, actions, and build-outs

• Effectively using animation and transitions in PowerPoint
• Using the Animation pane
• Changing order and timing transitions

Creating, editing, and designing PowerPoint charts and graphs

• PowerPoint Data visualization options
• Creating a standard chart
• Editing chart data
• Changing the Chart (colors, fonts, and more)
• Changing the value slide’s style
• Creating and editing Interactive charts
• Saving your chart style for future use

Creating and editing tables in PowerPoint

• Building a readable table
• Changing text format and cell styles
• Changing colors and borders in cells
• Using table styles for consistent design within PowerPoint

Adding video and audio to PowerPoint presentations

• Inserting video into your presentation
• Accepted formats for interactive content
• Overlaying text on your video
• Adding audio to a slide
• Looping

Importing and exporting a PowerPoint deck

• Saving your file
• Saving your PowerPoint deck as a PDF

The course topics serve as an outline for the course. Instructors may adjust content based on the specific needs of each class, such as to answer your  PowerPoint Design questions.