Guide to Making Great Presentations

The Steps to Create a PowerPoint Presentation for Beginners. Walk through the key steps for a complete PowerPoint beginner.

How to Power up PowerPoint. Learn the secret to skipping ahead in building a presentation using templates that have most of the work already finished.

PowerPoint Tools to Learn (For Presenters). Not only is PowerPoint useful for building presentations, but also for presenting thanks to Presenter View. You'll learn more in this tutorial.

Tips and Tricks for a Successful PowerPoint Presentation. Learn some shortcuts for how to use PowerPoint quickly and efficiently.

More Beginner PowerPoint Tutorials (Free to Learn Online). Explore other tutorials that help you continue learning PowerPoint for free. 

Microsoft PowerPoint Premium Online Courses. Watch complete screencasts of courses that guide you through building your presentation from beginning to finish.

How to Learn PowerPoint Quickly (Beginner Tutorial With Tips Video)
Are you ready to start learning PowerPoint? Watch this quick screencast to learn all about what PowerPoint is and how to use it.

Or, study the complete written tutorial below.
What Is PowerPoint?
Microsoft PowerPoint is undoubtedly the most popular app used to give presentations. You're likely to see PowerPoint presentations being used for everything from presentations at the world's largest companies to grade schoolteachers sharing lessons.
PowerPoint is often the butt of the joke. Many decry PowerPoint as boring and a crutch for poorly prepared speakers.
Only a bad carpenter blames the tools. And like any tool, PowerPoint is incredibly useful when used properly. Use it as an aid on your speaking engagements to build comfort and drive points visually with your audience.
.Once you learn how to use PowerPoint you can apply an easy-to-edit theme like the Simplicity for PowerPoint.
In this tutorial, we're going to focus on working inside of PowerPoint to build a presentation. This PowerPoint guide has everything you need to get comfortable in the app. To master the app, we'll talk about and cover the most common steps a rookie PowerPoint user needs to know.
Here are the key actions you'll need to take to build a PowerPoint presentation:

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  You'll need to add slides, the individual pages in the presentation.
  
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  You'll add content to the slides, such as text boxes, images, charts and graphs.
  
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  Change themes and styles to make your presentation look professional and fit the occasion at hand.
  
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  Prepare presentation aids like Speaker Notes and Presenter View to help you feel comfortable with presenting.
  

We'll cover each of these in this PowerPoint tutorial so that you can get up and running quickly. 
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How to Use PowerPoint's Ribbon
To get up to speed with PowerPoint, it helps to understand the layout of the app. Let's walk through the key menu options so that you can learn PowerPoint quickly. If you understand the way that the app is laid out, you're likely to find any feature you need quickly.
This part of the PowerPoint guide will focus on the interface:
1. The Ribbon
The ribbon menu is found across many of Microsoft's apps, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It lives above the main area of the application.
The PowerPoint ribbon lets you switch between various tabs.
The ribbon contains a series of tabs that you can switch between. Each of these have a unique set of tools to work with your presentation differently. When you switch tabs on the ribbon, you'll see new buttons and options to change your presentation:

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