AJ from HubSpot walks through building a PowerPoint from scratch using free templates. Plan your talking track first, pick a template, use white space and short bullets, and skip heavy animations. End with a clear conclusion and contact info.
Chapters
Hi there, I'm AJ from HubSpot. Are you about to make the most important PowerPoint presentation of your career and don't know where to start? Well, you're in the right place. Today I'm going to show you how to create and deliver the best presentation ever using our free PowerPoint templates. To get started, head to the Description to download our collection of professionally designed PowerPoint templates. We've included plenty of options so that you can choose the design that's the best fit for your audience. Now, before you start creating your actual presentation, pause. A PowerPoint presentation needs to be thoroughly planned out before you put words and images on your slides. So take the time to outline your presentation on a Google Doc or a Microsoft Word document first. Heck, you can even use Post It Notes if that's what you need to do. Just plan your talking track before you start adding in animations and images. Give your presentation a coherent beginning, middle and end, and break things up into clear and organized sections. And don't forget to note which visuals or graphs you want to highlight on your slides. Trust me, this makes the process of of putting your ideas into the presentation way easier. Otherwise you might find yourself designing the perfect slide. Then give the presentation a run through and realize you have to go all the way back to the drawing board. This way you get your story down on paper and your slides will fall right into place. Now that your talking track is all planned out, let's begin building your presentation. Start by choosing your design from HubSpot's collection of free PowerPoint templates. Think about which design is most eye catching and appropriate for your audience. For example, this one might be best for a more formal presentation, but this one is better for a more fun and engaging option. For this video, let's go ahead and choose this one because I'm a sucker for white space. Go ahead and title your presentation, swap out the image, delete those instructional slides, and we're off to the races. And keep in mind, everything in these templates is completely customizable, so get creative. Feel free to change the font style or theme colors to match those of your brand or your message. Because PowerPoint presentations can last, well, a while, it's customary to provide an agenda of what's coming and when you want to show you have a clear, clear path for the presentation. It's kind of like showing your copilot on a road trip a map of where you're going and how long it'll take to get there. Plus, it clearly lays out the point of the presentation and gets your audience curious about how you're going to arrive at your conclusion. The agenda should be a simple text heavy slide going line by line for each section, but feel free to add a stock photo or a logo of your brand if you want a visual. Next, if you haven't already, introduce yourself to your audience. It doesn't matter if it's a group of familiar colleagues or complete strangers, use this slide to introduce the speaker or group of speakers, specifically highlighting the speaker's background and qualifications to be speaking today. And don't forget to include a spiffy headshot like this one that HubSpot got taken for me the other day. Okay, yes, we can now get into the actual content of your presentation. Actually, one more thing. Before making each section, make a copy of all of your content slides so that you have a fresh set of templates to work with. If you're making edits to the templates themselves, you'll just have to revert the changes you made every single time you start a new section. So it's a best practice to start fresh. Refer back to that outline we started the video talking about and start building out your presentation. Slide by in each set of templates, you'll notice a variety of slide types like text heavy, image heavy, a data slide, and a quotation slide, just to name a few. Remember, you don't need to use every single slide type in every section, so if you come across a template you don't need in one section, just delete it. You can adjust these designs and vary them up however you choose. For example, on this data slide, you can resize and relabel the content of this graph, or you can use a data visualization tool like Excel or Canva to build and insert a new graph for these images. You can replace them with new graphics and crop them to a unique shape by clicking the arrow next to the crop button, selecting crop to shape, and choosing the design you want. And while it's tempting to get carried away with all of these features, remember white space is your friend. PowerPoint should be used as a visual tool to convey the information that your words can't. With too many words or images on a slide, you can easily overwhelm your audience and detract from the message you're trying to get across. It's still up to you, the speaker to tell a coherent and engaging story that's worth people's time. So leave some buffer room between the elements of your slide and make the slide's content more readable by using short sentences or bullet points whenever possible, and don't forget to end each section with a clear point and takeaway. Once your section is complete, follow the same steps we just outlined, Continue to make a copy of the original templates, and fill out your subsequent sections until your presentation is finalized. Once you're happy with your design now, consider adding animation effects by clicking the element you want to show up, going to the Animations tab, then click the effect you want to have happen and how. Whenever you add a new animation, it will default to come after one previously added and can be triggered by a separate click, but you can change this by choosing with previous or after previous if you want it to happen without clicking. PowerPoint has unlimited creative options, so for each section, try to add different designs or animations to keep your audience's attention throughout the entire presentation. Lastly, wrap things up with a conclusion slide, summarizing the presentation and any next steps or clear follow ups. This could be your last chance to share a thought with your audience, so if there's anything you need to add or specify, now's the time to do it. You might want to include your social media handle or email address if you're presenting to an external audience and are open to follow ups. And there we go. You now have the templates and the know how to deliver a captivating and visually appealing PowerPoint presentation. Don't forget you can download these awesome templates for free from the link in the description. Did we miss any PowerPoint hacks today? Share your tips in the comments below and subscribe for more videos just like this one. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.
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