Give Your Old PowerPoint Presentation a Quick Facelift Using Design Ideas in MS PowerPoint

Alright, good morning everyone. Hey, I just wanted to make a really quick video because I've been using this tool a little bit recently and I thought some of you might be really interested in this. Do you have an old PowerPoint that you're still sort of using maybe as the base for a new updated PowerPoint, but it's still got sort of those old style graphics and everything like that? Did you know that they've actually built in a really cool simple tool to allow you to, uh, give those PowerPoints a facelift so that they can look a little bit more current and trendy, so to speak. Uh, once again, my name is Randy Dean, the Email Sanity Expert. And, um, if you'd like to find out a little bit more about the other things that I talk about, primarily time, project, people, email management, utilizing tools like Microsoft Outlook, Google Suite, and smartphones, go check out my website right there. But hey, let's get into this. So what I want to show you is this. I'm going to go into this PowerPoint which is from a couple, 3 years ago, and I want to update it. Now the first step you're going to want to do is do a File, Save As, because if it's still an old PPT file, you want to upgrade it to a PPTX file. See, so right here it says it's a PPT file. Just take this, update it to a PPTX, and I'm going to make this, uh, 2020, so that way it tells me it's the newer version. I'm gonna hit Save because in order to use this tool that I'm about to show you, you really have to have this in the later version of PowerPoint. Now that you've got this, I'm going to go down to one of my later slides right here, and what I'm going to do is come up here to the corner because this activates this thing right here called Design Ideas, and it opens up a panel of ideas to do, as it says, instant slide makeovers. You know, we're going to give this thing a facelift. So what I'm going to do is pull this up and let's see. Let me see. We have no ideas. Let's learn more. Oh, hold on. I didn't want to jump out of there. Let's try this again. Let's go back in here. If you ever run into this, by the way, simple thing you can do. Watch this. I'm going to come up and make a new slide. I'm going to put in a blank. Okay? So I'm going to put in a blank slide. Now what I'm going to do is grab this text box, do a Ctrl+C, and come over here and do a Ctrl+V. And, um, you know what I want to do actually? See, it looks like— I think it's probably getting hung up on my logo. Let's go down here and make a new slide that is an Office theme slide. Okay, so that brings it in. Now notice what happened, that activated it. So I had a design template in here that it didn't like from the old version of PowerPoint, but now I can come down in here and take a look to see some of the different options that they have available. And if you don't like— you know, I'm not a big fan of any of the ones I'm seeing right now, but I'm going to put the title of my program here, Optimizing Your MS Outlook, and I'm going to come down and hit— and then let's see, more design ideas. And let's see what it gives you. So you can actually look down through here and look for sort of an updated slide design. And like I said, I'm going to keep going until I find one that I think works really well. All right, let's see if we can find one. You know, that one right there isn't that bad. Well, I'll try it. You know, I might not stick with this one for permanently, but, you know, I can try it. Now look what it just did. It took the slide that I was working on and it allowed me to bring in this new slide design. And now that I have this slide design, what I can start to do is just basically pull information from my previous slides and come into here. And let's, uh, let's pull that information. Let's grab that. Let's do Ctrl+V. Now what will start to happen is as you're doing this, it's going to give you even more options. So you can hit Design Ideas right here. Now watch what it does. It's going to give you even more options to change the look of the program. Oh, that one's not too bad. That's a pretty cool little template. And this one down here. And what you can do is you can basically just replicate this process as you go through to make additional slides that sort of match the theme of whatever it is that you're working on. So if you see a slide that, you know, you like, you can actually make a switch to that theme. I'll go back to this one because I was playing around with it. And now what I want to do is go back up to the top slide and I'm going to grab my subtitle. Ctrl+C. I'm going to go back down here into the slide that I was creating. I'm going to do a Ctrl+V. And now what it's doing is, as you can see, if I hit Design Ideas, it's going to keep giving me different ways to play around with this. Now, I want to make this consistent. I want to change that right there. To match sort of the color blue I've been using in the program. So there we go. Optimizing your outlook. And see, all of a sudden now, I'm not sure I'm going to stick with this template, but that's already looking a little bit better than my old Times New Roman slide. And if I want, I could even grab this, Ctrl+C. Let's bring this photo down here and let's drop it in. And let's see what happens. We'll bring this in and I'm going to resize it. Now watch, did you see what's happening over on the side? This is pretty cool. I'm going to take this down, I'm going to move it up over here. Now look what it did. Ooh, now I've got something I might be able to work with. You see, I've got some different slide designs that bring in my artwork and I sort of like that one, so let's switch to that. And, um, once again, let's update the font size. And so as you can see, I might roll with that. That looks pretty cool. And now that I've done this, I can actually take the same template and start doing new slides, duplicate selected slides, because then what it's going to do is it's going to bring in the same design template. And then what I can do is come in here and grab the stuff off of the next slide, Ctrl+C. Let's bring it into here and do a Ctrl+V. And let's go get the header from that slide right here. Do another Ctrl+C. And let's do the— this one in here and do another Ctrl+V. And what I'm going to do is lift this up to the top. And I'm going to now give it a chance to do a design idea here. Let's see what it does when I did what I just did right there. Generating ideas. And now what I can do is I can come down and try to find one that will work better. Now it's bringing in that same graphic, so what you can do is click on the graphic, delete it, and now let it bring in some newer design ideas. And you can take a look to see which ones that are in here, uh, to find something that you like. And, um, let's take a look. Let's see what we've got here. I sort of like— that's not bad. And now what I can do is take this and run it up to the top. Oh, I see what it did. It left the blue bar down there. Sometimes you got to take a look at these things to see what they're doing. That one might be a little bit more tricky because it's in the bottom of the bar. And so we'll see what we can do here. But you know, you can play around with it. Like I said, it's pretty slick. Like here's another option right here. And you know, you can actually take this, run it up here and maybe do a, change to get consistency with your fonts. So this is an Arial. Let's grab this and let's make this an Arial to match. And let's increase the size so it looks more like a header, going up to a 40. And let's, uh, get it to match here. And then what we can do is come down here and take that font, which is a little bit funky— uh, and not the font, the color— and I'm just going to make that a standard black. Let's try that one more time. Didn't quite take. There we go. And so now you can see, you can start playing around with these things. And after you do a little bit of layout, hit Design Ideas again and see if it gives you something you like even better. So you can keep playing around with this to do like real-time updates to get it sort of the way that you'd like to see it. And sometimes it'll give you, you know, even little graphics like this. Take a look at this. This one brings in the little function of the calendar inside. That's pretty cool. Now I can quickly take this and move this up and take this and move this one down. And let's move this back down here. And now all of a sudden, new design slide, you know. So I've been using this. It's a pretty good way to update things fairly quickly so that you can give yourself a new look, a new feel, a new, you know, template facelift. For your programs. And so, you know, you don't have to spend a million hours trying to reformat every single slide. What you can do is take advantage of the tools that they've built in and make a change. Ooh, that's sort of cool. I like that. Alright, that's my tip for today. Let's go back in and finish this thing up. What I want to do here— oh, by the way, if you don't know this little trick, it's called the Shift function. Shift+Function+F5. If you're in PowerPoint management mode like you see right here on the screen and you want to jump to PowerPoint, um, slide, uh, show mode, just do a Shift+Function+F5 and that jumps you right out to the PowerPoint management mode. So I'm going to bring this up here. I'm going to say thank you for your time today. Play around with it. It's the design ideas, uh, it's got to be a PPTX file. Make sure you've updated the file and done a Save As. To bring it to the newer version of PowerPoint. And then once you have that, you can quickly and easily update your older presentations into something that you can maybe reuse again, uh, with a little bit better newer look and feel. Um, once again, if you'd like to find out about my more normal programs, uh, go check out on my website randalldean.com. If you like my videos, please, uh, hit the subscribe button and like this video if you like the video.. And if you'd like to get a whole series of little bonus PDF tip sheets on time, project, people, and email management, um, including even— I, I just created a new cheat sheet to my YouTube channel, uh, which I'll put in the comments below. But if you'd like to get access to all of my little cheat sheets, send me an email randy@randalldean.com and just put YouTube PDF in the subject line. And with that, I'm gonna say we are done.