Strategies and Tips for Professional Formatting in PowerPoint

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1 Strategies and Tips for Professional Formatting in PowerPoint I encourage everyone to treat this not as a how-to manual of how things should be done, but as one professional sharing their techniques with another. Some of it may be applicable to your workflow and some may not. One of my personal keys to success has been the environment I work in. By spending the past number of years developing and running the PowerPoint high level presentations for large corporate events I have had the opportunity to work with many incredibly talented designers more than the typical designer ever has opportunity to interact with. By discussing limitations of the application, approaches to formatting and receiving feedback from others - the insights and ideas have meshed into a series of best practices that guide us at TLC Creative Services in developing professional presentations. This tutorial is a compilation of many of these best practices that I hope is a help. First thing I do when opening a presentation is CTRL+G. Turn off SNAP OBJECTS TO GRID and SNAP OBJECTS TO OTHER OBJECTS. This permits better control over fine tuning object positions. Turn off GUIDES when they become an issue with objects auto snapping to them.

2 Check the master template and/or project specifications for what fonts are permitted. Then go to REPLACE FONTS and make sure only the permitted fonts are being used (this often makes some pages a disaster, but it is better to format with the proper fonts than work on it and then discover it does not meet the project guidelines). Using the SLIDE LAYOUT and the APPLY TO SELECTED SLIDE and sometimes even more powerful is the REAPPLY LAYOUT tools. For each slide this is the first step, to see what text is on the master, to put it in place, and give it the master slide formatting.

3 Here the title is not on the master slide. Copy and Paste out of original text box, then delete text box, and paste into master slide text box. Then go to the SLIDE LAYOUT and REAPPLY FORMAT. This text is to close to the edge / not projection safe. Adjust position, size of text, or split into 2 lines of centered text. Fine tune text by using the LINE SPACING dialog to adjust space between hard returns (I prefer to use the BEFORE PARAGRAPH adjustment) and adjust overall line spacing. Note: decreasing the Line Spacing to much will cut off the tops of letters see the second line in the above example where it is noticeable that the D11 has been cut off.

4 When things do line up perfectly or have awkward spacing between them, even by a few pixels, the human eye notes it and suddenly the slide is perceived as less professional. PowerPoint has a powerful set of tools to eliminate these problems. Select multiple objects or text boxes and use the ALIGN AND DISTRIBUTE tools. In the example above use the ALIGN LEFT to assure they are in a straight line with one another. Then use the DISTRIBUTE VERTICALLY.

5 Use the DISTRIBUTE tool to equally distance objects from one another. In the example above use the DISTRIBUTE VERTICALLY to give equal spacing between each. Then adjust the text boxes to right to match the new position of each triangle. Here is an add-in that is invaluable here at TLC Creative Services. This PPTXtreme 1 Pickup Position tool is used to assure non-master slide text boxes or objects are consistently positioned from within a slide or slide-to-slide. Also working on the consistency to things within a slide or slide-to-slide we heavily use the Pickup Position and format tool (found in the same PPTXtreme 1 tool set). This not only allows us to consistently position text and object, but also format text boxes AND autoshapes from slide to slide.

6 As example: If a presentation contains reference footnotes, we establish a text sizefont-color-attribute and position guideline. Then we use the Pickup Position and format tool on the master reference footnote and go through the entire presentation applying the same formatting to ALL of the reference footnotes. If it is a series of presentations or a slide library consistent formatting can easily be carried out across all presentations. Consistent layout among objects on the same slide is visually important. But if things do not align from slide-to-slide in presentation mode and they jump from one position to another the illusion of a seamless display of data is lost. Take note of slides where content is built over a series of slides and the slide transition becomes the animation. It is critical that all elements line up during show mode for a presentation to be received as professional by the audience. For the professional touch, replace standard text icons (left example) with theme appropriate icons developed in PhotoShop or PowerPoint WordArt icons (right example).

7 Unless specified, we virtually never use a placed rectangular photo. To give it a professional touch, we add a drop shadow, rounded corners and possibly a bevel in PhotoShop then insert into the presentation. Note: to save an image out of PPT to be optimized in PhotoShop; right-click the object and choose.png as the format. This guarantees a 24bit color object,because a.jpg or other format may default to 16 bit color. You can also save out autoshapes and text as graphics (to optimize in PhotoShop and then re-import). While this is in no way comprehensive, it does cover items that are addressed in virtually every presentation we work on here at TLC Creative Services, Inc. I encourage you to send any feedback or some of your best practices. I think the final recommendation is to use the PowerPoint Users newsgroup 2 and the PPTFAQ 3 website as your primary resources for getting your presentation development questions answered and getting new ideas. 1 PPTXtreme s Edit tool set, 2 Microsoft PowerPoint User s newsgroup, see weblinks on TLC Creative Services website for links 3 PPTFAQ,

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