2.3 Building Key Slides: History & Meet The Team

Let's keep working on our presentation. Let's get started by building a history slide to walk our audience through the history of our company. Building a slide like this can help an audience connect past to present. Let's find a slide that would work well for this. Yet again, the X Note has a really nice timeline option I can use. I'll go ahead and select this timeline slide, and move it up into the sequence at the top. Now notice that this has the placeholder logo as well, so we'll need to switch to Slide Master. This is a different Slide Master than the one we already changed. Let's go back to View > Slide Master. I'll scroll up to the logo on the Slide Master we added earlier, and copy it to the clipboard. Then we'll come back to Slide Master 4 and delete the placeholder, and paste it in. Pasting it like this ensures that it's in exactly the same place on both slides for continuity. These Slide Masters are like the overall designs for the presentation, and adding the logo to this one will update multiple slides at the same time. We also need to change out the footer again here. There can be multiple Slide Masters, so sometimes you need to update a few, but it's still far easier than changing each individual slide. Let's jump back to Normal View now. I'll start off by changing the basic text for the slide near the header. Now I'll go through and change out the dates here to make them relevant to my own presentation. Simply click on the boxes and type your own year in. Also I'm not a big fan of this icon on the far right, so I'll simply click on it and delete both it and the year. Next up, let's add images to our slide in these placeholder boxes. For my own presentation, I've gone ahead and downloaded several images from Elements that I'll substitute in. I'll click in the box and choose Picture fill, and just point it to the images I've downloaded. I'll repeat this process for each of the four image placeholders to customize my presentation. Next up let's tweak the color scheme for the bars here. You can't change it all at once, so I'll go ahead and ungroup it and change the individual elements that make it up. I'll right-click on the line object, and then choose Group > Ungroup. Now I can click on the individual bars and recolor them as well. Select each of the different bars and just change the color from the options as we've done with some examples earlier. I'll update all of these. Let's move on to our next slide, a slide to showcase our team. I'll scroll down and find one that I have in mind for this purpose, and again I'll drag it up into the selection of slides that I'm using. Notice that the logo is already updated, because we updated the controlling slide master. This is a team slide, so let's start by replacing the title for the slide, and the subtitle with something relevant to our team. Next up I'll go ahead and swap out all of the employee names, and titles for them. If we need to expand the box, we can do that by just pulling out the edges of the box. And now I'll replace the employee descriptions, I'll type up something short for each one of my employees. Building a team slide like this can help an audience connect, and think of you when they wanna hire someone in the future. Let's change out the color scheme now. For the boxes with titles, I'm going to hold Ctrl on my keyboard to select all of them at the same time, I'll click on each one. Let's change the text color by choosing the font option, and then change the color. Now let's go to the drawing tools Format option, and change the Shape Outline to a new color. I'll click on a new color thumbnail to change it. When I click off, I've got these objects recolored now. The last thing to do is change out the colors for these circles. This is actually a series of circles stacked on top of each other, and we need to grab the one in the back to change it. I'll right-click and choose Ungroup, and then click this outermost circle. You can see here on the side that it's set to a Gradient stop. I'll change this over to a Solid fill for something cleaner, and set the color for that box. It was a little tricky to get this selected, so what I'm going to do is just highlight the circles to the right and delete them both. Now I'll click and select this stack of first circles, and copy and paste it twice. I'll move them over into place. Instead of changing each one, I just change one and then copied and pasted it into place several times. Now right-click on the innermost circle and choose Format Shape. I'll choose Picture fill, and then browse to the employee pictures, and replace them in the circles. I'll go ahead and repeat this process for all of them. And now the team slide is good to go, with a quick feature on each one of our employees on the team. Stay tuned as we round our presentation in the next lesson.