Lesson 2: How to Create the Core of Your Presentation
How to Add Text and Lists
The text of your presentation plays an important role in keeping your audience interested. Not only do you need to think about the formatting of the text, which we’ll discuss in Lesson 4, but the amount of text and its placement on each slide.
PowerPoint is a powerful program, but if you fill each slide with too much text or text that is too small, you will not provide an effective presentation. The key is to have concise text that is easy to read. Therefore, many times presentations contain numbered and bulleted lists. The text in these lists are “snippets” upon which you can further expand in your speech.
Before we continue discussing the “readability” of your presentation text, let’s learn how to add text to your presentation. Open a presentation and make sure that you are in the “normal view”. Remember the “normal view” is the most commonly used view. It contains the outline, slide, and notes pane.
Verify that a “title slide” is selected and active. By “active” I mean that the slide is in the slide pane and ready to work with. If for some reason your presentation does not have a “title slide” in it, you can insert one by selecting “New Slide” from the “Insert” menu. Select the slide in the upper left corner called the “Title Slide” and click OK.
Preformatted PowerPoint Text Boxes
PowerPoint provides text boxes for you in which you can add text. The text boxes have dotted edges and contain the text “Click to Add Title” or “Click to Add Text”. Mouse click once on the text box and the edges of the text box will become diagonal slashes with smaller boxes around the perimeter. The “Click to Add Title” text will disappear. The text box is now active and all you need to do is type in your desired text.
Type “My First Presentation”. You can think of the small text box as a mini-word pad in which you can add text as you normally would in programs such as Microsoft Word. Now click your mouse once on the area outside of the text box. The diagonal slashes and text box perimeter will disappear. If you wish to modify your text you can always make the text box active again by mouse clicking once on the text. Try it.
You may have also noticed that the text you just entered now appears in the outline pane as well. This demonstrates the function of the outline pane. The outline pane will always show just the text on each slide. You can modify your text in the outline pane. Just mouse click once on the text in the outline pane and insert the cursor after “First”. Type in the words “PowerPoint”. You will notice that not only is the text in the outline pane updated, but text on your slide is simultaneously updated as well. This feature comes in handy when you are editing your PowerPoint presentation.
Creating your own text box from scratch
PowerPoint provides you with preformatted text boxes on each slide, but let’s say you don’t like the placement of the text boxes or you want to create your own from scratch.
To create your own text box just select “Text box” from the “Insert” menu. Then left mouse click once on the spot you want to put your text box. Drag open the desired size of your text box by holding down your left mouse button.
Note: This procedure takes practice.
How to Create Numbered and Bulleted Lists
It is important to convey your information and intended message to your audience in a clear, concise manner. You will lose your audience if you have long paragraphs of text. An effective and common way to present text is to use numbered and bulleted lists. You may have used these lists before in programs such as Microsoft Word.
When composing these lists, find the topic sentences and/or key thoughts in your speech. The list provides the topic upon which you can verbally elaborate. Often you will find that as you work on your presentation you will change the sentences in these lists many times. PowerPoint is easy to work with and modify, so don’t worry if your first lists are just keywords or phrases that need to be changed later.
Now let’s learn how to create a numbered list and a bulleted list. (Step by Step Pg. 85)
Numbered List
PowerPoint has a default setting that creates lists using bullets instead of numbers. To see this, select “New Slide” from the “Insert” menu. The second slide choice is the “Bulleted List”. Plus, most of the other slides that have text boxes contain bulleted lists. Select the “Bulleted List” slide.
When would you use a numbered list instead of a bulleted list?
You would use a numbered list when you would like to list a set of sequential steps instead of just bullet points. For example, you might be giving a staff emergency evacuation plan presentation and you would like to inform your staff on the specific order in which they should accomplish certain tasks. If you presented this information in bullet form, it may not always be clear as to what task they should complete first.
Let’s look at the bulleted slide. The main text box says, “Click to add text” with a bullet in front of the text. Click on the text box and type the word “Stop” and hit the return key. Your cursor will go to the line below and a new bullet will appear. Type the word “Drop” and hit the return key. Lastly, type the word “Roll” and this time do not hit the return key.
Note: If you hit the return key by accident and a new bullet appeared, you can erase the extra bullet by hitting the backspace key.
You have just typed in the condensed version of what to do when you are on fire. (Nice example, huh? It is a good, quick example of when to use a numbered list.) These steps need to be done in this specific order, so let’s format the list to be a numbered list.
To do this, do the following steps:
1.) Highlight the entire list by left mouse clicking and dragging your cursor over the list.
2.) Open the “Format” menu.
3.) Select “Bullets and Numbering”.
4.) Click on the “Numbered” tab. You will have several choices of various number formats. Select a format you find appealing. I like to use “1., 2., 3.”. At the bottom of the Numbered tab you can also change the size of text, color, and number that the list begins with. You can play around with these features, but for now just leave the defaults and click “OK”.
Your list should now be in numbered format. You can change the formatting of the numbers or go back to bullets at anytime through the “Format” menu.
Bulleted List
Guess what? You already know how to create a bulleted list. Refer to the previous section.
