Creating Effective Presentations with PowerPoint

Created for the Teaching Skills Workshop series
UNL Cooperative Extension, Spring 2004

Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentations software program. It is designed to create presentation materials such as on-screen shows, 35mm slides, or transparencies. It can also be used to create large format posters often presented at scientific meetings. It is NOT designed to be used to create newsletters, brochures, reports, term papers, or such things that would be better created in a word processing or desktop publishing program.

These lessons will guide you through some basic and advanced features of PowerPoint. We will cover many features found in the PC versions of PowerPoint 97, 2000, and 2002/XP (changes that occurred in the 2002/XP version will be noted). If you have another version or work on a Mac, these lessons are still applicable; however, some of the commands may be different or appear in different places in your program.

Lesson 1: Templates, page layout, setup, toolbars, views, guides, rulers, zoom, undo

Lesson 2: Adding pages, adding text, editing text, changing text attributes, line spacing

Lesson 3: Saving and printing your presentation.

Lesson 4: Creating and editing bulleted lists, bullet designs, indents and tabs

Lesson 5: Drawing toolbar commands, changing shape attributes, drop shadows, using the 3D objects, object styles

Lesson 6: Running a screen show.

Lesson 7: Adding and editing clipart and images.

Lesson 8: More tools for working with art, AutoShapes, and drawn lines

Lesson 9: Animations and Transitions
Version 2002 is quite different so each lesson is a "stand-alone" version for this topic.
versions 97/2000 | version 2002

Lesson 10: Basic charts, graphs and diagrams.
Original class offering used lessons found on the Land Grant Training Alliance website, which is no longer active.
Please use these 2002 tutorials from LTS Documentation, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire: PowerPoint Diagrams and Charting Information (version 2000 is very similar to 2002)

Lesson 11: Changing color schemes, background effects and Master pages

Lesson 12: Adding sounds and movies

Lesson 13: Using hyperlinks within your show

Lesson 14: Creating a poster in PowerPoint

Lesson 15: Additional tips and resources