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Creating a New Presentation Based on a Template
If you're starting a new presentation, you have the following choices:
Use the AutoContent Wizard. Pros: Sample content based on a topic you select helps you to avoid mental blocks and gets you off to the right start. Cons: A design template comes with the sample content, but you don't get to preview it before making your selection. Therefore, you will probably end up changing the design template after the initial creation.
Base it on an existing presentation or template file. Pros: Same benefit of sample content as with AutoContent Wizard, but faster. Cons: Unlike AutoContent Wizard, no opportunity to select slide dimensions or input title text. (You can do these things later though.)
Create a new presentation based on a design template. Pros: It's easy to pick a template visually, so you don't have to fumble around trying lots of different ones. Cons: There's no sample content, so you must create all the slides except the first one on your own. (It starts you off with a title slide.)
Create a plain blank presentation. Pros: Since there's no design to get in your way, you can focus on pure content. You can worry about the design later. Cons: The results are not very attractive. You will probably want to apply a design template later.
The following sections detail each of these options.
Starting a New Presentation with the AutoContent Wizard
Use the AutoContent Wizard whenever you need some help with the content of the presentation. The makers of PowerPoint recognize that not everyone is a whiz at business protocol, and lots of times people are thrown into the awkward position of having to make a presentation that they don't know how to make. For example, suppose your boss tells you to prepare a presentation that will explain your company's products and services to potential clients. Where do you start? What slides should you include? How long should it be? Using the AutoContent Wizard creates a sample that you can use as a starting point.
To use the AutoContent Wizard, perform the following steps:
Choose File⇨New. The New Presentation task pane appears.
Click From AutoContent Wizard. The AutoContent Wizard runs. Click Next to begin it.
Choose a presentation topic. There are categories to choose from, or you can choose the All category to see the entire list at once, as shown in Figure 2-3. Make your selection and click Next.
Choose the type of output you will use (for example, on-screen presentation or 35 mm slides). Then click Next.
Type a title for the presentation in the Presentation Title box.
If you want a repeated footer on every slide, type it in the Footer box.
By default, the date and slide number will appear at the bottom of every slide; clear the checkboxes for those features if you don't want that. Then, click Next.
Click Finish. The presentation opens, including sample content, as shown in Chapter 4 for more tips for working with text.
Figure 2-3: Select a presentation template by topic-not by design-through the AutoContent Wizard.
Figure 2-4: A products and services presentation created with the AutoContent Wizard.
| Note | Notice in Figure 2-4 that there's a placeholder on the first slide that says "Your Logo Here." Not all presentation templates have that placeholder. (In fact, this one I happened to choose for Figure 2-4 is one of the few that does.) This is a text box, but you can replace it with a graphic, if desired. See Chapters 7 through 9 for information about graphics. |
Notice also that the wizard puts your name in the subtitle box on the title slide (the first slide). It pulls your name from its information about the registered user of this copy of PowerPoint. If you want some other name to appear from now on in new presentations you create using the wizard, choose Tools⇨Options and enter a different name on the General tab.
You might have noticed in Figure 2-3 that there's an Add button below the list of templates. This enables you to create your own presentation templates with sample content and add them to the AutoContent Wizard. I'll explain the process toward the end of this chapter, when I'm talking about creating your own templates.
Adding a Template to the AutoContent Wizard
The AutoContent Wizard will work with any template, not just the elite set that it comes with. To add a template to the AutoContent Wizard, follow these steps:
Start the AutoContent Wizard as usual.
On the screen where you select the desired template, make sure the category is displayed in which you want to place the template, and then click Add (see Figure 2-5).
The Select Presentation Template dialog box appears, with the default location of your user templates displayed. Select the desired template and click OK. The template is added to the chosen category in the AutoContent Wizard, and is available from that point forward for use there.
Figure 2-5: Select an AutoContent Wizard category in which to insert the template.
| Tip | You might notice that all the other template names in the AutoContent Wizard are nicely capitalized with spaces. That's because their file names are actually written that way. (Check it out for yourself; look in the 1033 folder.) You can rename your own templates using that same convention to make them blend better with the others. |
Basing a New Presentation on a Content Template
If you want to start a new presentation based on a content template's sample content but you find the AutoContent Wizard too time-consuming, consider this method instead.
You can base a new presentation on any existing presentation or template. This basically does the same thing as the AutoContent Wizard except it doesn't ask for the title and it doesn't prompt you for the slide size. To do this, follow these steps:
Choose File⇨New to display the New Presentation task pane.
Click From Existing Presentation.
Change the location to the folder containing the template on which you want to base the new one. The ones that the AutoContent Wizard uses, for example, are stored in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates\1033.
Select the desired template and click Create New. A new presentation opens with the same sample content as in that template.
This procedure works equally well for basing a new presentation on a template or on another presentation. Some people avoid using template (POT) files altogether and simply maintain a generic presentation with boilerplate text and base each new presentation upon it.
Starting a New Presentation From a Design Template
Don't need any help deciding what to say? Then starting with a design template is a good choice, as follows:
Choose File⇨New. The New Presentation task pane appears.
Click From Design Template. A new blank presentation appears, and the Slide Design task pane opens.
Click the desired design from the task pane, as shown in Figure 2-6; then close the task pane if desired to give yourself more room or leave it open if you want to experiment with some others. (You can always click the Design button on the Formatting toolbar to redisplay the task pane later.)
Figure 2-6: A template applied to a new blank presentation.
| Tip | If you almost always start a new presentation with a certain template, select it on the template list, open its menu (click the down arrow next to it or right-click it) and choose Use for All Presentations. This moves it up near the top of the list of templates and sets new presentations to be based upon it. To go back to how things were before, select the blank template (Default Design) and choose Use for All Presentations. |
When you start with a design template, you get a single slide that uses the Title layout. Your name is not filled in automatically anywhere; you must manually click in the placeholder boxes and type the text you want.
You'll need to add some more slides, of course. To do so, you can click the New Slide button on the Formatting toolbar (or press Ctrl+M), or you can display the Outline pane and type text in the outline.
| XREF | For a detailed discussion of the outlining tools, turn to Chapter 4. |
Starting a Blank Presentation
A blank presentation is just like one that uses a design template except that the template it happens to employ is a totally plain one with no background or text colors (just black and white), no background, and a very plain font (Arial).
There are several ways to create a new blank presentation. One is to use the steps in the preceding section to start one based on a design template, and then pick Default Design as the template of choice.
Another method is to click the New button on the Standard toolbar. (This is the easier way, obviously.) When you do it this way, the Slide Layout task pane appears instead of the Slide Design task pane, so you can insert more slides and choose their layouts.
Yet another method is to open the New Presentation task pane (choose File⇨New) and select Blank Presentation from the task pane.
