Creating a new presentation

- In this chapter we'll take a look at how to create a presentation from scratch. I'm here in the presentation gallery again and I want to start with a completely blank presentation, meaning something with no preset graphics, images, or backgrounds. So I'll double-click Blank Presentation. And now we're looking at a new presentation with the default first slide containing text boxes where we can customize the title and subtitle. These are called placeholders. I'll click where it says Click to add title and that placeholder text immediately disappears and now I just have a flashing cursor and that means I can start typing. Now throughout this course I'll be working on a presentation for a fictitious chain of hotels called Landon Hotels.

Now if I press return or enter that takes me to the next line, I don't want two lines of text in my title in this case though, so I'll press the backspace button to undo that. To move to the next placeholder I'll instead just click in it. Again, the text disappears and I can type in my own. I'll click outside that text box to see how my slide looks so far. As soon as you type in a placeholder box clicking outside of it hides the borders of the box, so you can check out how the slide really looks. To continue working on or editing text just click back inside the box again. Maybe I'll go down to the next line and call this version 2.

Also note that you don't have to use all the placeholders on a slide. I'm going to hit command Z a couple of times until I get back to the original subtitle placeholder. Now if I click outside that box I still see the placeholder, but if I show this in slideshow mode, which again, is the viewing mode for presenting notice we don't see that placeholder text. I'll press escape to leave the slideshow view. So you don't have to delete placeholders if you're not using them. You can delete them though by clicking on the border and then pressing delete on your keyboard. You might want to do that if you're sure you're not going to use a particular placeholder and you find it distracting to have it there on the slide.

I'm going to undo with command Z again. And I'll just type the original subtitle again. Alright, so there's my title slide. Let's add another slide to my presentation. Up here in the Home tab of the ribbon you can either click the New Slide button, which immediately adds a new slide, in this case with a title placeholder and a bulleted list placeholder, let's undo that. Or you can click the arrow next to the button to choose a different layout. This lets you choose a layout that's closest to what you have in mind for the information you want to present. So for example if you want to have two columns of text you might choose the one called Two Content.

Let's undo that again. Or you might want a Picture with a Caption. We'll undo that again. But arguably one of the most common and useful slides is the default one you get by just clicking New Slide the first time, which gives you the layout called Title and Content. And again, that has placeholders for a title and a bulleted list. So now this new slide's thumbnail has appeared over here on the left. And I can click inside the title area to add some text. Now in the content area I can also click to add text, but notice these icons in the center of the placeholder.

These are actually buttons, which allow you to quickly add different types of content. So I could click to add a table, or a chart, or a video. But in this case I just want to add some text. And I'm just pressing return after each item to move to the next bullet point. Now even with content in the placeholders I can still change the layout of the slide by coming up here to the Layout menu and here I can chose different layouts. The content gets shifted around and I can determine if I like any of these better than the layout I started with.

I'll just switch back to the original layout. So now I have two slides in my presentation and I can switch between them by clicking their thumbnails over here. Anytime I need to work on one I just click its thumbnail and I can start editing it. Alright, so now I should probably save this presentation, so I don't lose any work. You can either choose File, Save, press command S, or just click the Save button here at the top of the window in the quick access bar. I'll call this Directors presentation. And for this example I want to save this to my Desktop. PowerPoint currently has my OneDrive account selected, which would allow me to save this to the cloud, but I want to save this On my Mac.

And I'll just choose to save this on my Desktop for now. This is also where you can choose the format you want to save the presentation in. In most cases you'll just want to go with the default .pptx format. If you need to save your presentation so people with older versions of PowerPoint can open it you'll want to choose PPT. And there are also some specialty formats here for specific situations, but you'll most likely not need to use them. So I'll click Save to save that. Alright, so I've got a good start on building my presentation, it's now saved, and I'm ready to keep working on it.