Free Power Point Templates

Users of PowerPoint 2000 and lower will only have two background designs automatically supplied with the Masters (counting both the Slide Master and the Title Master). 

However, you can have any design you want on any slide.

From the Format menu, select Background. Check the box that says “omit background items” and this will make the slide ignore the Slide Master’s design.

You are now free to add whatever design you want to this slide.  If you want to do this to many slides at once, go to the Slide Sorter, select the slides, and then use the Format menu command. Remember though that if you choose to do something like put a photographic background on many of your slides instead of doing it once on the Master, which your file size may increase dramatically.PowerPoint 2002 supports multiple background masters.

Using More than One Guide

 If you like using guides, but wish there were more, you can create additional Guides by simply holding down the CTRL key while dragging on an existing Guide.

This will create a new guide. To get rid of guides, just drag them off the edge of the slide.

Using Guides to Measure

Make the Guides visible by using View/Guides.  Then, hold down the SHIFT key while you click-and-hold a guide; the tool tip for the guide will display 0:00.  As you move the guide, the distance the guide covers from the beginning of the drag will be displayed in the units of your ruler. 

In this way you can measure distances between objects, place guides at specific places, etc.

Creating Pages with Slides and Descriptive Text

If you want to create printable pages that have notes or descriptive text associated with each slide, PowerPoint has a feature designed to do just this called Notes Pages, or Speaker’s Notes (depending on which version you’re using). To view the Notes page for any slide, go to the View menu and select Notes Pages.

You will see an image of your slide there, and a placeholder for adding your script, notes, or any other text you wish. To print these pages, bring up the Print dialog, and at the bottom of the dialog where it says “Print what:” select Notes Pages. These pages were originally designed to be used as audience hand outs (with space for the audience to take notes) but were also used by many as speaker’s notes: the text block would have the script of the presentation, to be used by the speaker, or for sales binders to educated sales people.

Making Presentation Files Smaller

 Prior to PowerPoint 97, there was no internal file compression code inside of PowerPoint, and files could get pretty big quickly. The most common cause of large files is the addition of large bitmaps. PowerPoint 97 compresses these bitmaps, but previous versions do not. To keep your presentations as small as you can, try reducing the resolution of your bitmaps, which will bring their size down tremendously?  For viewing on screen, the bitmaps don’t need to be more than 96 dpi; they won’t print nicely until they’re up around 150 or higher, but the screen always displays at 96 dpi, so if the primary viewing medium is the screen, there’s no point in having the bitmaps be a higher resolution. Also, the bitmap format can make a big difference to your file sizes. JPEG and PNG both have good internal compression code.

GIF has some, but not as well as JPEG. BMP files are the largest; TIFF files will also be very large. Sometimes, as you’re working on a presentation, you’ll notice that the file seems to get bigger for no reason.  To get rid of this “bloating”, save the file using “File/Save As” and give the file a new name.  This can reduce the file size up to 50%. 

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