Creating a presentation from a template or theme

- In the last video, we created a few slides on a blank presentation. Right now, we left it looking like a really plain, boring presentation. Now we will end up with incredibly jazzed up slides with pictures, backgrounds, and fancy texts, however sometimes to start with that blank canvas can be very overwhelming. It's not so easy to be a graphical mastermind, especially if you aren't a graphic designer. However PowerPoint gives us some themes. These are ready made presentation designs with pre-built graphics, borders, and fonts and color schemes.

There's no pre-built content, but the placeholders are all there. PowerPoint 2016 for Mac gives us about 23 themes to choose from. There's enough variance in the designs that you should be able to find one of them to give you enough of a push to get started, and I will show you how you can customize these that are already started. We need to remember while we're building our presentations, that content is king. You need to be working on the content of your presentation. You shouldn't have to stress over the design.

The content of what your presentation is about should take full priority. So let's start with a theme. I'm going to click this Retrospect theme. I like it because it's simple enough, there's a nice white background, however that bar at the bottom will give us just enough color to make our presentation interesting. I can double-click on that theme and it's going to create it for me. Now that we've got these themes, I can click and add my title again.

I can add my subtitle. You'll notice this font is all in capital letters. These presentations have all the placeholders and text ready to go. Let's create a new slide and see what it looks like. I'm going to click the down arrow next to New Slide. Here I can see my slide layouts, although you'll notice that they're all different to go along with that theme. For example, if I choose Content with Caption, it looks a little different on the left hand side.

I can add my title, and I can click inside the placeholder on the right hand side to put in my text. So right away, our presentation looks a little bit punchier than it did in the last one. We will be working on the last one, but this gives us a good start. I want to show you one more thing. I'm going to select File, New from Template, and I'll be brought back to that main screen where we can create a new presentation. There's one more thing I want to show you.

I've showed you how to create a blank presentation, and I've shown you how to start with one from an existing theme, but you can also search Microsoft online for their templates. A template is a pre-made design. The only difference is this time, the content is already there. These were just design placeholders, however when you search for a template, there's already text inside that you can change. I'm going to click inside the Search All Templates box on the top right hand side.

I'm going to type in a keyword. I don't even have to hit the enter key. The search results will automatically start populating and I can look for one that fits what I'm trying to give the award for. Here's an employee performance award. This looks like a good one. I've chosen a design I like, so I'll double-click. The template will download from the Microsoft site, and here's the award. This is handled a little bit differently, which is why I want to show it to you. You'll notice that the placeholder already has text in it.

The content's there. So for you to fill in the area where they have their existing placeholders, you need to click and drag with your mouse, and then start typing. Again I can come down into more placeholders. I can also delete the text if I want and start typing. From here, I can put in the presenter's name, and now I have a beautiful certificate that I can give to my employees. From here, I can click File, Save As, save it on my computer.

I'll call this one Employee Award. And now at any time, I can select File, Open, click On My Mac, choose my Employee Award, click Open again, and simply change the name and what they're being awarded for. Templates are really powerful, and in a later video, I'll show you how you can create your own presentations and save them as templates yourself.