How to Create a New PowerPoint 2013 Presentation

Style and color are very important when making a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint 2013. Getting your message across in an elegant and appealing way is easily accomplished by changing the slide background colour.

Here is how you do it:

• First, open your PowerPoint 2013 Presentation.
• Next, click on the button to the far right of the main control panel, it features a paint bucket and says ‘Format background’.
• From this screen you can adjust the background colour of your slide. Some other options are pictures, patterns or gradients.
• Choose the appropriate background colour and watch as it changes on your main slide.

Nothing to it!

Watch the free video here, transcripts for the entire video follow:

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Video transcripts:

Hello again and welcome back to our course on PowerPoint 2013. In this section, we’re going to create a new presentation and this is the first completely new presentation that we’ve worked on. To get started, we click on File to go into Backstage View, then select New, and as you’ve already seen, there are a number of templates available each with a name like Celestial or Integral or Ion, and the very first item in the list here is Blank presentation and on this occasion we’re going to use Blank presentation.

Now before we really get going on this, I need to point out a couple of things to you. First of all, when we say Blank presentation there is actually quite a lot of information setup already when you select Blank presentation. It may not be a very colorful template but there is still a template involved, as you will see. And the second thing to point out is that in this section and the next one when we’re working on the first presentation, I’m going to show you some of the main tools and techniques for creating presentations, but almost without exception we’ll be coming back to them and looking at them in a lot more detail in later sections of the course. So if in some of the things we do in this section and the next one it all seems a little bit sort of quick or that there are many unanswered questions left behind, don’t worry because we should be covering all of those unanswered questions later on in the course.

Now when you create a new presentation, it’s given a default name by PowerPoint 2013. The name will normally be Presentation 1 or Presentation 2 or something like that and the name appears in the title bar at the top. The first thing I do with any new presentation is to save it with a name of my choice. So I go into File, Save As, choose My Computer, and I’ll browse to a folder where I’m going to keep the working files on this course. Now this is a different folder to the one where I’m keeping the sample files that you have as well. So I’m going to browse to that folder now and I’m going to give this presentation a suitable name. So I’ve located the folder. It’s currently empty. I’ve typed in a file name. I’ve called it Demo presentation 1.pptx. Whenever you’re saving a file in PowerPoint 2013, you will need to make sure that you have the correct file type selected. For a standard regular PowerPoint presentation, the extension will be .pptx. If you look at the drop down to the right as Save As type, there are actually many types of document that you can save in PowerPoint 2013. For instance, if you look at the third option in the list here, there is a PowerPoint 97 to 2003 presentation format, a .ppt format, which is the old format presentation. I’ll talk about that briefly a little bit later on. But you can also save a presentation, for example, as a PDF file, a Portable Document Format file. You can also if you are programming, you are including program code in a PowerPoint presentation, it becomes a PowerPoint Macro Enabled presentation, a .pptm file. But for the moment, we only really need to look at .pptx files. I’ll talk about some of the others later. So when I’ve put in my name, made sure I’ve got the right file type, I click on Save. And as you would expect, once I’ve saved I’ve now got the correct title for the presentation on the title bar at the top of the window there.

Now if you look at the way that different people set about creating presentations, they tend to do things in their own particular sequence. And of course, like other people I have my way of going about creating presentations as well. And the method when I’m starting from scratch with a completely new presentation is often quite different from the one where I am for example using an old presentation and just modifying it. In the example here, we’re pretty much starting from scratch. So I’m going to go through some of the main steps in what seems to be a pretty sensible order and you may adapt and adjust that yourself once you get used to using PowerPoint.

Now one of the first things we need to do is to decide on the size of the slides. In the past, the size of slides and the templates have tended largely to be sort of inextricably linked together. In PowerPoint 2013, one of the changes is that it is now a standard basic decision whether a presentation is going to be standard or whether it’s going to be widescreen; that is 4:3 aspect ratio or 16:9 aspect ratio. And I suggest that’s a good starting point. If you click on the Design tab on the right in the Customize Group, there is a Slide Size box and if you click on the bottom of it, the drop down, there are the two most popular settings. There’s standard 4:3 and widescreen 16:9. You also have an option of going for a custom slide size and you can pretty much create any size you like. And you need to be a little bit careful there because depending on how you’re going to present this presentation, a very strange slide size may cause you problems later on. The other fundamental decision you can take at this point is whether you’re making landscape slides or portrait slides, and there is an Orientation option here. In the vast majority of cases, presentations are landscape but there’s absolutely no reason that you shouldn’t make a presentation with portrait slides.

Another fundamental decision related to that is that for the notes, handouts, and outlines, do you want those in portrait or landscape format? Now, that may not mean a lot to you at the moment and the fact that it defaults to portrait may seem a little strange. But when I show you some notes and handouts later on, you’ll see why the portrait option here is the default. So for the moment on this particular presentation, we’re going to stick with widescreen, landscape slides, and portrait notes, handouts, and outline, click on OK, and that’s the most fundamental decision made really.

Now before we go any farther, I should just point out to you that I have got AutoSave set and I will from time to time in any case save my work. But for the rest of the course, I’m not going to say to you every few minutes don’t forget to save your work. But just this once, don’t forget to save your work. So generally when I’ve made any kind of major change even allowing for AutoSave, I’ll go up there and click on the Save button. This is one of the ones where I know the keyboard shortcut by the way. So Save is there. The keyboard shortcut is Control plus S. Get used to pressing Control plus S every now and then, particularly just after you’ve completed a large piece of work on a presentation. So press the Save button or use the keyboard shortcut Control plus S frequently.

Now we’re going to be working on the stylistic and design aspects of presentations extensively later in the course. But let’s do a little simple operation here. Also in the Customize Group on the Design tab, there’s a button called Format Background. So let’s just try a very simple example within Format Background. Click there and what happens is this Format Background Pane or Panel opens on the right hand side. Now this kind of pane is going to be a common feature during the course to achieve certain effects, and Format Background is certainly one which is a flexible and powerful way of making our presentation really look more attractive. Now in this case, the option we’re looking at is Fill. We’re going to be looking at these options for Fill later on. We can have solid fill, gradient fill, picture or texture fill, pattern fill. You’ll see what they mean later on. Let’s just try a solid fill here and let’s choose a solid fill color. Now further down the pane, there is a color option and a control over here, Fill Color; click on that. We get a thing called a Color Picker that I’ll talk to you about later on and what we’re going to do is to choose a fairly pale color from there as a background to these slides. So let’s go for that color there, click on that one, and we’ve changed the background color of a slide to that sort of pale, pasteley blue type of color. We can also adjust another setting transparency, more of that later.

And at any time when you’ve been working on the background of your slides, you have a button at the bottom that says Reset background. And that’s a good example of the type of reset button we see throughout PowerPoint 2013 where basically if you’ve been working on something such as the background in this case and it’s all gone a bit sort of horribly wrong or you’ve changed your mind, if you click on Reset Background, it will put it back to how it was at the beginning. But for the moment, I think I’m quite happy to stick with this light blue background.

So I’ve finished working on the background for now. All I need to do is to click on the Close button on the Format Background Pane and it’s gone. Note that when I’m using those kinds of pane PowerPoint 2013 always automatically resizes the other things that are on display in the workspace here to make good use of the available space. So in this case, the slide that I’m looking at is made bigger to fill the space left by the disappearing pane.

So we’ve added a tiny bit of style to our widescreen presentation. Let’s move on now to actually put some content into it. We’re going to cover that in the next section so please join me for that.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!