Power Point® All?in?One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Handling Slide Backgrounds

In This Chapter

• Looking at themes and background styles

• Weighing your theme, background, and color choices

• Selecting and customizing themes

• Placing a solid color, gradient, clip‐art image, texture, or picture in the background

• Selecting a theme or background for some but not all of the slides

From the audience's point of view, this chapter is the most important in this book. What your presentation looks like — which theme and background style you select for the slides in your presentation — sets the tone. The audience judges your presentation right away by the first slide it sees. Seeing that first slide, audience members make a snap judgment as to what your presentation is about and whether your presentation is worth watching closely. As you fashion a look for your presentation, what you're really doing is declaring what you want to communicate to your audience.

This chapter explains how to fashion the appearance of slide backgrounds. It examines what you need to consider when you choose colors and designs for backgrounds. You also discover how to select and customize a theme, and how to create your own slide backgrounds with a solid (or transparent) color, a two‐color gradient blend, a clip‐art image, or a picture. Finally, this chapter looks into how to change the background of some but not all of the slides in a presentation.

Looking at Themes and Background Styles

What a presentation looks like is mostly a matter of slide backgrounds. ...