1.2 How to Use Envato Elements

One of the hardest parts of getting started with building a PowerPoint presentation is designing your slides. Even if you know exactly what you want to say, you might not know how you want to show it in a presentation. One of the options is to use one of PowerPoint's built-in themes. You can come over to the Design tab here on PowerPoint's ribbon and click on it. Now we'll use one of Microsoft's built-in themes by clicking on one of the thumbnails. If you already have a presentation you've developed, choosing one of these templates will basically overhaul the look and feel of your presentation. It changes the color scheme, fonts, and more with just a click. But this isn't really a way to get ideas for your presentation. For that, I can't recommend enough PowerPoint premium templates. They're like cookbooks for your presentation, it's got the recipe for a successful slide design inside of it. You can grab a custom template and use it as the starting point for your presentation. The best way to get ideas for your presentation is to use Envato Elements, an all-you-can-download flat rate service that includes over 600 PowerPoint templates and it's always growing. With a subscription to Elements, you'll have access to all of those templates plus over 300,000 digital assets you can use. Not only does a subscription to Elements include PowerPoint templates, it includes all types of creative files like graphics, stock photos, and more that are extremely useful when building your presentation in PowerPoint. I've already got an Elements subscription and have logged into my account. To get started, I'm going to jump to the Presentation Templates section. And now on the side, I'll go ahead and switch to the PowerPoint themes. You can see that Elements also has templates for Apple's Keynote software, if that's your presentation app of choice. For the purpose of this course, I'm going to use The X Note PowerPoint template. This template includes more than 40 designs for slides that are professional enough for any purpose. It also includes alternate color schemes and multiple file sizes that will be compatible regardless of the screen you present on. The value of using a template like this is that it comes with plenty of ideas. You might already know what you want to say, but seeing ideas for slide designs is a head start over starting from scratch. Let's go ahead and download The X Note template. You'll see that Elements asks us to note the license usage. If you're using this on a project, just note what project you'll use it on and press download. It's important to note that even if you stop subscribing to Elements, you can still use the asset on the existing projects that you've included it on. If you're just browsing and wanna test out files, you can also just choose trial use to sample the asset and see if you want to use it. Don't forget to come back and enter a license usage for it later on if you do include it in a real project. We'll come back to grab some other files later while working on a presentation. I'll go ahead and enter a license usage here for the purpose of this course, and then go ahead and download it. This is another thing that I really like about Elements. You can use it to track how you licensed assets for use. If I click on my username here and come over to My Downloads, I can see a history of everything I've grabbed and notes for how I've used the assets. This is handy to backtrack and remember what I've worked on and see my download history. You can add a license use here later on if you need to. As I mentioned, another value of Elements is that it comes complete with access to stock photos and graphics. As I jump over to the Photos section, you can see a variety of categories for images that you can download and use as part of your presentation. It's easy to navigate. And the cost of an Elements subscription quickly pays for itself with just a few downloads. Whether it's a photo, a graphic, or a PowerPoint template, think about Elements the next time you're building a presentation as a shortcut. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to get started with this presentation template. We'll choose from one of the variants and start working in The X Note. So stay tuned.