1. Introduction

1.1 Introduction

When you've created the next big idea for a company, it might be time to ask for investment, or for a key team member to join up with you. But how do you do that so that you increase your chances of helping get your company off the ground? Hi, I'm Andrew Childress for Envato Tuts+. And that's exactly what we're going to cover in this course, as we learn how to build pitch decks in Microsoft PowerPoint. Well, what is a pitch deck? Basically, one of the key things about the pitch deck format is that it usually leads to asking for something from the members of the audience. That might be investment from an early stage investor, or maybe even for a key team member to join as a new hire. Pitch decks are really an important format these days as more and more companies try to get off the ground. But how can you build one in less time? The answer is that we're going to use pre-built templates that have all of the elements that you need in them, from Envato elements. These formats are really the best way to skip ahead in the process of building a pitch deck and inspire confidence in your message. Ultimately, the outcome that I want you to have is confidence in what you give as a pitch deck to an audience. In this course, we're going to build that together. So let's go ahead and jump in.

1.2 Choosing a PowerPoint Theme

So as I mentioned in the opening video for this course, one thing we can take advantage of are premade templates for Microsoft PowerPoint. When you're preparing for a presentation and need to give a great pitch, I bet you're likely on a time crunch that will leave you working quickly to build your slides. The solution is to get a head start with pre-built slide designs. Let's jump over to Envato Elements. This is an all you can download service, that many creatives use, that includes unlimited access to all kinds of assets. If you're building a presentation, a subscription to elements is sure to have everything you need to get the presentation right. One example of this are presentation templates. Let's take a look at them here. I'm going to go up to the browse option and choose Presentation Templates and then filter down to show only the PowerPoint templates that elements offers. You can see here that there are plenty of templates for Apple's keynote presentation software in case you prefer it instead. And many of the same principles will apply in this course. I'll go ahead and search for pitch deck here as well to take a look at the options that elements features for showcasing a new business. Any of these presentation templates are going to be a big head start versus designing slides from scratch. All of them are higher quality and more visually appealing than Microsoft's built in PowerPoint themes. And as you'll see in this course, they're loaded with many prebuilt slide template designs so that you can just add your own content and skip the time and hard work of starting with a blank slate. Let's go ahead and take a look at the template that I'll use in this course, called Pitch Werk. Pitch Werk is an ideal choice for pitching your company, thanks to its slide designs and ease of use. We'll work with it in this course to build a pitch stack that can help us achieve our goal of getting investment or support from an audience. Let's go ahead and click on download. So, before I download that presentation template, I'll need to enter a license for this file. Elements helps you keep track of how you're using files from the service. Even though Element is a subscription based service one great thing is that you retain the right to use the file even if you stop subscribing if you've entered a license purpose here. After we enter the license, we can go ahead and download the file, which comes packaged as a zip file. Let's go ahead and open that zip file up. Before we open the PowerPoint templates up, we actually need to install a couple of fonts that will really bring the template to life. Most of the templates on elements have great documentation that comes with them and it's always worth checking that out before you start using the files. In the documentation, you can see that we need to install two font files. Montserrat and Source Sans to get the most from the template. Now, the way that you'll do this between Windows and Mac will vary. So I definitely recommend just following the guides on these links below. On Mac, you can just drag and drop the font files to the font book application. While Windows looks to files in the fonts folder, so make sure to put them there. Either way, check the links below this tutorial to see more detail. When you've installed those two font files, you're ready to open up the PowerPoint template. In the download folder, let's go ahead and open up the PBTX folder where the PowerPoint templates for Pitch Werk are stored. As you can see here, there are actually a few different variants of the theme that are included with the template and any of these are a great choice. They all typically have the same content, but have different color schemes that can bring variety to your pitch decks. Go ahead and open one of these up to get started. I'm going to use the blue_purple version for the purpose of this tutorial. I've got it open here and everything is ready to go for the rest of this course. That's it, we selected a presentation template, downloaded, and got it ready to use in Microsoft PowerPoint. In the next lesson, we'll start customizing slides to use in our own pitch deck.