PowerPoint Tutorials - How to Plan your PowerPoint Presentations

Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

For this presentation, we're going to be creating an introduction to setting up a wireless internet connection. When you're creating a presentation from scratch, quite often all you'll have is a lot of notes and information to work with. The job of turning all this information into an effective presentation can be an arduous task. Learning what to leave out and what to include does take experience. But the task can be made easier with some effective notes.

Take a look at our article on the basics of going wireless:

View the Article

The article itself isn't very long. But we need to turn this article into a PowerPoint presentation. To do that, we created a PowerPoint outline. The outline is a list of things we're going to do for each slide. You can see it here (PDF file, 21 kilobytes):

Outline for the Presentation

But here's our Outline for the first two slide:

PowerPoint Outline

What we've done here is to break the presentation down in manageable chucks, and say what will be happening on each slide. If you do this even before opening PowerPoint, it can save you a lot of time and effort.

So our slide one, then, has just a title on it. This is fairly easy to do.

With your title slide still open from the previous section, click inside of the title text box at the top. The default text will disappear:

Delete the default text

As you can see from the Outline above, our title should say "How Setup a Wireless Internet Connection". So type that text into the text box. Click anywhere outside the text box to see what it looks like:

Add the tTtle

We don't need a subtitle, so click anywhere on the edges of this box to select it:

Delete the Subtitle text box

When you can see the white squares or circles (sizing handles), press the delete key on your keyboard to get rid of the text box. Your slide one should now look like this:

Your first slide

Notice the Outline View on the left, and that it has the same title as on the main stage.

In the next part, you'll see how to add a bulleted list to a PowerPoint slide.