CBT Bazar

PowerPoint has become such as staple of business and educational presentations that many people have replaced the generic term electronic slides with the term PowerPoints. If you use PowerPoint presentations on a regular basis, you know it is sometimes difficult to know how much time your overall presentation will take. This is especially important when you have a finite amount of time to deliver your message to an audience.

Using PowerPoint’s built-in Rehearse Timings function you can not only keep track of how long you spend on each slide and the entire presentation, you can save those timings and make PowerPoint flip your slides automatically. This can be a real time saver and keep you on track during your presentation.

Why Rehearse Timings in PowerPoint?

One of the most difficult parts of giving a presentation is keeping to the time allotted to you. While the PowerPoint presentation itself helps keep you on topic and ensures that you cover all of the important points in your presentation, timed rehearsals can help you identify those areas where you are spending too much or too little time.

The automatic flipping of slides by PowerPoint can help you avoid those awkward pauses in a presentation where you need to stop and flip the slides manually. By having PowerPoint do the work for you, your presentation will go much more smoothly and your audience will perceive you as a more competent public speaker.

How to Use the Rehearse Timings Feature in PowerPoint

Once you have your competed presentation made in PowerPoint, save your work and then click on the Slide Show tab on the Ribbon. Then, locate the section of the Ribbon titled Set Up. There are a number of buttons in this section but look for and click on the button titled Rehearse Timings.

Immediately after you press the Rehearse Timings button, PowerPoint will change to Slide Show view and begin recording the time you spend on each slide with the Rehearse Timings Control window.

This window is a very small control box from which you can control the Rehearse Timings options. Notice that you can use the buttons in this control window to switch to the next slide, pause the recording, or repeat the timing for the current slide. That last option is useful if you make a mistake with the current slide or get interrupted and don’t want to restart the recording for the entire presentation.

There are two clocks on the Rehearse Timings control box that keep track of two times. The clock in the center of the window in the white area keeps track of the time spent on the current slide. The clock on the right in the blue area keeps track of the total time spent on the presentations. Essentially, the total time is the summation of all the times spent on the individual slides.

When you reach the last slide, the Rehearse Timing function will stop and tell you the total time you spent on the presentation. In the same window, PowerPoint asks whether you want to keep the new slide timings to use when you view the slide show.

If you click the No button, PowerPoint will end the Rehearse Timings function and you can continue to edit or save your presentation. If you click the Yes button, PowerPoint will remember the timings you recorded and use them to automatically flip your slides for you the next time you run the presentation.

Recording your Rehearsed Timings is useful for two reasons. First, you can see if you are going over the time allotted for your presentation and also estimate how long your presentation will take before you go live at your next meeting. If you save the Rehearsed Timings, you can make PowerPoint flip your slides automatically. Doing this, you can ensure that you stay within the time allotted for you presentation and avoid going off on tangents that don’t help you deliver your message to your audience.

In a recent article, we discussed how to insert action buttons into a PowerPoint presentation. Strangely, these actions buttons are found on the Shapes menu. In this article, we will look at adding and editing shapes in a PowerPoint presentation. As it turns out, you can manipulate the shapes on a PowerPoint slide to look just like you want them to look.

Adding Shapes to a PowerPoint Slide

To add a shape to a PowerPoint slide, begin by clicking on the Insert tab on the Ribbon and locating a section of the Ribbon titled Illustrations. Click on the button labeled Shapes and a large menu will appear showing all of the shapes you can add to a PowerPoint slide. In total, there are over 100 shapes available.

Suppose you want to add a circle shape to the current PowerPoint slide. Click on the Oval button on the Shapes menu located under Basic Shapes. Then, hold down the left mouse button and drag the mouse across the slide. When the oval is the approximate size you want, let go of the left mouse button. Don’t worry if the circle isn’t exactly the size you wanted or in the right place. You can edit the circle’s size, color, position, etc. after it is already on the slide.

While dragging the oval on the screen, you may have noticed that it was difficult to create an exact circle. If you hold down the CTRL key on your keyboard while you drag the mouse, you can lock the horizontal and vertical aspect of the shape to create a uniform shape. In other words, the length and width of the shape will remain constant so you can create a perfect circle with the oval tool.

You can change the border color, border size, and fill color of the shape by right clicking on the circle and selecting Format Shape from the menu. The Format Shape window will open allowing you to edit many aspects of the shape.

Unlike other shapes in PowerPoint, you cannot drastically change the appearance of an oval or circle. However, you can edit other shapes to create some customized elements for your presentation.

Editing Shapes in PowerPoint

Using the same technique described above, add a Right Arrow to your slide. The Right Arrow shape is found on the Shapes menu under the section labeled Block Arrows. The arrow you just added to your slide is your standard right-pointing arrow. However, notice that there are two yellow diamonds on the shape. These two diamonds let you know that there are two aspects to this shape’s appearance that you can edit.

Click and hold the yellow diamond on the left of the Right Arrow shape and drag it downward a bit. Notice that this allows you to control the width of the arrow’s stem. Click and hold the yellow diamond at the top of the Right Arrow and drag it the right a bit. Notice that this allows you to control the size of the arrow’s pointer. By manipulating the yellow diamonds, you can dramatically change how the arrow is displayed on the slide.

Although you cannot edit all of the shapes in PowerPoint this way, a number of shapes can be changed to suit your needs. In this way, you are not stuck trying to make your presentation fit the shapes; you can edit the shapes to fit your presentation. Take a look at the before and after examples below:

With a little bit of practice, you can make many of the shapes in PowerPoint look exactly like you want. In fact, you can even make your presentation stand out among the others that simply use the shapes as they are displayed on the screen by default. Experiment with editing shapes in PowerPoint to make your presentation’s message clearer and more visually appealing to your audience.

In educational and business settings, PowerPoint reigns supreme as the number one electronic slide presentation application. In fact, the application from Microsoft’s Office suite is used so frequently by instructors, students, and business people that it is common to see the same layouts repeatedly from presentation to presentation. Luckily, you can easily change the layout of any slide in a PowerPoint presentation with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Change the Layout of a PowerPoint Slide

Suppose you have a PowerPoint slide that looks like the one below. Notice that no theme has yet been applied to the presentation and the slide contains nothing but a title and subtitle.

Suppose that you want to edit the slide to have a different layout but you don’t want to manually move the objects around on the page. Doing so can take a long time to get the objects lined up just right. Click on the Home tab on the Ribbon and locate the section of the Ribbon titled Slides. Finally, click on the button labeled Layout.

Notice that since this is the first slide in the presentation, the Title layout is being used automatically by PowerPoint. To change the layout of the slide, click on the layout labeled Title and Content.

You should notice two things when changing the layout of a PowerPoint slide from Title to Title and Content. First, the subtitle present in the Title layout is downgraded to Content in the Title and Content layout.

Since there is no subtitle in the latter layout, PowerPoint changes its designation to the closest type available in the current layout. This is an important consideration because it shows that PowerPoint does not delete any content of a slide simply because you change the layout. It may, however, change content designations.

If you want to, go back to the Layout menu and play around with changing the layout to different types. Since PowerPoint gives you a visual representation of the layout in the menu, you always have a general idea of what the slide will look like.

PowerPoint Layouts and Themes

The example above showed you how to instantly change the layout of a slide without having to move the objects around yourself. However, layout changes really shine in PowerPoint when you have first applied a theme. Click on the Design tab on the Ribbon and locate the section of the Ribbon titled Themes. Just for our purposes here, let’s choose the theme labeled Civic.

Notice that PowerPoint instantly changes the theme of the current slide. Now, click on the Layout button back on the Home tab and this time select the layout titled Content with Caption. Notice that the Civic theme of the slide is automatically incorporated into the layout. The colors and basic features of the theme are all present in the slide even though you changed the layout.

The same holds try no matter what layout you choose. The theme will always stay true no matter which layout you want to use for the current slide. Using a theme and different layouts, you can make your presentation in less time and make it look more visually appealing.

Sometimes, moving objects around in PowerPoint presentation can be tedious, especially when you are trying to line everything up to make it look professional. Rather than struggle with the slides in your presentation, select a theme and then use PowerPoint’s built-in layouts to create a professional looking presentation.

In fact, by using the built-in layouts, you will find that creating a presentation is quicker and lets you spend more time on the content of a slide and less time making it look right.