2.2 Building Key Slides: Intro & What We Do

We've got a pretty idea about the content at this point. So it's time that we jump into building the presentation using The X Note theme. First, I wanna give you a tip on how I generally approach building a presentation. The X Note has more than 40 designs for our presentation and we're obviously not going to use all them for each and every presentation. Since we imported our outline into this presentation, I like to put all of the imported slides up at the top of the presentation. This helps me remember that I'll need slides for each of these key points in the outline. Now, let's start by going and finding a slide design to use for our introduction slide. I'm going to start going through The X Note presentation and find something that I think would work. It doesn't take very long to find a slide that would work great for an intro. This introduction slide is pretty much ready made. I'll drag and drop it up below the intro slide placeholder. Let's go ahead and delete the logo that's on our slide. I'm going to use a logo that I sourced from elements for my fictitious company. And I'll actually just go to Insert and grab the image. Now I'll click and drag to position it and resize it slightly to make it work. Next up, I'll simply replace the text that was on the slide to begin with. I'll just type up my own introduction text here to customize it. I also think I wanna change the color of the text slightly. So I'll just click on the text box, and come up and customize the color to be white. And now, I'll change the name below and title, and customize it as well, as you're seeing me do here. I also think that it would be great to grab a background image for this slide. There's a placeholder here that you can see that says, drag picture here, which is easy to add. Let's jump back to Elements and find a simple image that would work great as a slide backdrop. I'll use this image that I went ahead and found. And I'll go ahead and download it, making sure that I enter the license information. Now I'll jump back to PowerPoint. Let's go ahead and right-click on the image placeholder and choose Format Picture. Let's click on the paint bucket option here, and then let's choose picture or texture fill. Now, I'll browse to the images that I downloaded and open it. You'll see that PowerPoint will make that image the backdrop for my slide, but it's too bright for now. So I'm going to just take the transparency slider and pull it up. We want to just fade that image into the background, so it's subtle and has a nice effect. I think that looks great now. This is the core of how you can use pre-built templates. Just like that, we've taken one of the X Note's built-in slides and customized it for our own presentation. It's better than anything I could create on my own but took less time than even a basic slide design. Now I'll go ahead and just delete that placeholder slide for the intro, since we have a real intro built out. The outline slides are just there to keep us on track and help us remember to build each of the slides we need. Let's take on another slide. We're going to talk to the audience about what we do at our company. Again, I'll go ahead and scroll through. And I'd like this slide to show the different things that my web design company does. These overlapping bars could describe the time we spend on different tasks. Again, I'll drag and drop it up into position. The first thing that we need to do is swap out the logo here on the top. Notice that when I click on the logo, I can't actually seem to select it. That's because this logo is on the slide master, the underlying slide design that applies to several slides. Let's go to the View tab and then change to slide master. I'm going to select the slide master. The nice thing here is that when we swap our the logo on this slide, it will take effect on all of the slides that use the same master. That means we won't have to add the logo to each and every slide. I'll add the TechBox logo to this slide. Again, we can resize and reposition it to get it right. Before we leave the slide master, let's also change out the footer text which currently says, presentation name goes here. Again, changing it on this slide will have it take effect on all the slides that use the same master. And then go back to View > Normal, and you'll see that the logo is on the slide itself. Now, I'll start adding some basic content, as you're seeing me do here. I'll change up all of the starter content with things that are relevant to my business, and I'll add my own content here. Now, another thing we could do is tweak the colors of this slide. Let's recolor the bars over here. When I go to click on the shapes, you can see that I can't seem to select the individual bars that I wanna change the color for. I'll right-click and choose Group > Ungroup. Then I'll click the ungroup the overlapping bars again. Now we can select those individual elements and change the colors. I'll click on one of the bars and then come up to the picture tools format box. I'll come to the shape fill option and let's grab the eye dropper. I'll grab a color from the logo and that will fill in these overlapping bars. Next, I'll chose another bar and recolor it as well. Basically, with just a few clicks we can overhaul the color scheme of the chart. I'll change out the content here. And you could also change the percentages here as you want by changing the text and clicking and dragging the bars as well. And finally, I'll tweak the colors for the text. In just a few minutes, we've created two key slides without ever having to open up an app like Photoshop or illustrator. Next up, we're going to keep working on our presentation by building additional slide designs. So, stay tuned.