5 PowerPoint hacks to design your online course
When you hear the name “PowerPoint”, you think of boring bullet points, blue slides with yellow letters, or 90s effects. No…PowerPoint rarely makes you happy. You start out in good spirits, but often end up with ugly slides and – even worse – they take forever to create. Yet this 30-year-old tool is still in the top 10 of most used tools for online learning. And rightly so! You can do more with it than just make presentations. And above all, it doesn’t have to take long and it doesn’t have to look ugly. With a few Power hacks, you can quickly and easily take your PowerPoint to the next level.
Hack 1 | Power menu
Create a power menu in PowerPoint using action buttons. With the action settings that you find in the “Insert tab” you can turn a simple form into an active button that takes you to a specific slide. The possibilities of these action buttons are endless. Besides a menu, you can also a quizor memory game. And the best part? This functionality is retained when you convert the PowerPoint to PDF.
Hack 2 | Power bubble
You’ve seen them: the PowerPoint slides with your head in the bottom right corner. You are tired of making them, your students are tired of seeing them. Know that you can adjust that frame in the bottom right-hand corner. Yes, indeed, customise it! You can drag the frame, reshapeit, or just drag it outside the slide at certain times. Ha, that looks better already!
Hack 3 | Power pen
Nothing is more powerful for explaining a complex subject than a simple pencast. The best-known examples are the Kahn Academy videos. You can do that too! In PowerPoint, you can activate the ‘drawing‘ tab. To do this, go to > options > customise ribbon. With this drawing tab, you can write on your PowerPoint. A touchscreen with a pen is handy, but a simple cursor and some practice will get you somewhere. Give it a try!
Hack 4| Power ranger
Animations in PowerPoint can be fun, but it takes a lot of time to get them right. Moreover, it can quickly become too much of a good thing. Think of things that turn three times and then fly in, or letters that appear one by one on your slide. Do you like movement on your slides, but you have little time? Then try out the “morphing transition“. You can find this function in the “transitions” tab. No messing around with animations, just slides that flow nicely into each other. This simple feature will amaze everyone.
Hack 5| Power-svg
A svg or Scalable Vector Graphic is an image with potential. An ordinary image often leaves you feeling hungry. It is just not ‘that’. There is a little too much or too little on it, and the colours clash with your house style. Do you want controlover your images? Then insert illustrations (svg files). When you insert these figures, you can edit them in PowerPoint. You can removeitems or changethe colours. You can find them in PowerPoint itself in the ‘Insert’ tab under icons > illustrations. Or you can download them for free from several websites, like unDraw or DrawKit. Discover the PowerPoint Picasso in yourself!
More PowerPoint tips & tricks?
D-teach online training believes in making the most of simple tools and is happy to share its expertise and passion during its courses. We provide PowerPoint training at all levels and on a customised basis.
Contact me at joke.hollants@d-teach.com.
See you soon!
Would you like to see these five hacks again?
Leave your details below and download a presentation where you can see the hacks in action.