PowerPoint Video Tutorials

PowerPoint is one of the world's most commonly used presentation design tools. Using its simple and intuitive interface, professionals of all stripes can design evocative and rhetorically effective presentations using its simple and intuitive interface. Watching video tutorials online is a popular method of learning PowerPoint. Video tutorials are helpful as they allow students to control the speed and style of their own learning, enable students to learn PowerPoint in a risk-free environment, and allow students to determine if more advanced PowerPoint training is right for them. This article will cover a range of videos, including what they teach and where to find them.

What is PowerPoint?

Microsoft PowerPoint is the most commonly used presentation software across almost all professional industries. PowerPoint is one of the most important parts of Microsoft’s Office 365 programs, alongside Word and Excel. PowerPoint lets users easily create vibrant and memorable presentations that quickly communicate meaning in a professional setting. Users can add animations, transitions, graphics, and other imagery to their slides, ensuring they produce both communicative and impressive presentations for their audience.

PowerPoint is a slideshow editing tool built to give users the tools they need to organize information, communicate effectively, and produce presentations to deliver through live address or without a presenter. PowerPoint makes the job easier and more efficient, whether you manage important information in advance of a meeting, prepare a sales pitch to a potential client, or compile important workplace policies and procedures in a single place. This versatility has made PowerPoint an industry-standard tool in almost all professional contexts.

Read more about what PowerPoint is and why you should learn it.

What Can You Do with PowerPoint?

PowerPoint allows users to create vibrant and memorable visual presentations that can serve a wide variety of purposes. PowerPoint’s advanced features let users integrate dynamic animations and 3D modeled graphics into their designs, allowing them to create more complex presentations than simple text projected onto a screen. Whether you are attempting to keep an audience engaged during a critical seminar or make a sales pitch as memorable as possible, PowerPoint gives you the tools to wow your audience.

Some users will use PowerPoint to create informative slideshows that condense complicated information into a single, easy-to-digest presentation. This makes the program ideal for both instructors and professionals looking to host informational seminars regularly. In fact, many online classes you take will use PowerPoint to provide students with the main takeaways from a lecture. Some users, who need to persuade audiences, such as entrepreneurs meeting with potential investors, will use PowerPoint to create memorable and persuasive presentations that convince their audience to invest in their product.

Why Are Video Tutorials Helpful When Learning PowerPoint?

Students who are just starting to learn PowerPoint may find that there are many different reasons that video tutorials are a productive place to start. Video tutorials have minimal to no up-front cost, do not require students to commit to a specific training program, and give students greater control over the pace at which they learn. Plus, students who find their training useful can more easily transition to a professional learning environment.

The most significant advantage of video tutorials is that they have minimal up-front costs. Most are free, but those with a paid subscription rarely cost more than a hundred dollars. This means that students may not feel as locked into a particular training program. This gives students more freedom to experiment with various methods of learning PowerPoint. If a student finds that one type of video tutorial is ineffective, they have no obligation to stick with that video because they have only invested a small amount of time into it. Likewise, students can watch and follow several video tutorials at roughly the same time to pick and choose which lessons are right for them.

The other major advantage of video tutorials is that they give students control over their training pace. Since videos can be paused, rewound, or navigated through at a student’s leisure, there is a degree of freedom and flexibility. Students who find a topic complex can rewind to re-watch the instructions, and students who find a topic uninteresting or slow can navigate ahead in the video. Students seeking a specific explanation for a PowerPoint concept can look for that content in the video they are watching, or they can search to find a specific video detailing that concept. This level of freedom is ideal for students who want to learn on their own schedule.

Types of PowerPoint Videos

For students who aren’t ready to enroll in a PowerPoint bootcamp or just want to learn the basics of the program, a free introductory video tutorial may be an ideal place to start. These tutorials are designed to mimic an online training seminar's structure and feel, making them ideal for students who imagine that they will desire further training in PowerPoint. Noble Desktop provides students with a free PowerPoint Presentation Design seminar in which students will learn the basic theories of design that go into creating evocative and memorable presentations. No one wants their presentations to bore audiences, and this seminar is designed to ensure that students have the skills required to keep audiences engaged. Since these tutorials mimic more professional learning environments, they are also an ideal place for new students to ease their way into paid training seminars.

Another common type of PowerPoint training video is a short video explanation of a single concept, such as how to layer in slides to make animation or import data tables from Excel. These videos are ideal for students looking to learn specific skills within PowerPoint rather than looking to learn the program generally. These are also the most common kind of free video tutorials, as the YouTube algorithm rewards service providers for producing a large number of short videos. This means that students will have many different options if they choose to use these videos. These videos are slightly less useful for students seeking a more generalized PowerPoint education or planning to enroll in more immersive training courses in the future.

Why Learn PowerPoint?

PowerPoint is a useful application to learn for workers in almost any professional business setting. Learning PowerPoint will help professionals communicate information in practical and manageable ways, freeing them up to put their energy into more pressing concerns. PowerPoint is an incredibly versatile tool, so its uses will vary depending on a user’s individual needs. Still, almost anyone who needs to communicate with large groups of people will benefit from learning how to use PowerPoint.

For some users, PowerPoint will complement live presentations by condensing important information they may miss. Many audience members may find it challenging to follow a presenter who is only speaking aloud. Knowing how to use PowerPoint will let users ensure that their most important information is understood. For other users, PowerPoint will let them condense vital information to be easily understood and accessed even without a live presenter. This is ideal for compiling stylesheets, company policies, important links, phone numbers, or other information someone may need to reference in a professional setting.

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How Difficult is It to Learn PowerPoint?

PowerPoint is a relatively lightweight program that is easy to understand and use. New users can pick up the basic functionalities of the program relatively easily. However, more advanced program features, such as integrating tables and Excel data or importing multimedia content into a PowerPoint presentation, can be more challenging to learn. Students learning PowerPoint will also likely want design and composition training, which some students find more challenging than learning technical skills.

There are no set prerequisites for learning PowerPoint. Students will need basic knowledge of computers, and they will need to have a system that can run PowerPoint. For more advanced PowerPoint skills training, students may need to learn how to use Microsoft Excel.

While there are several professional and educational routes to acquiring Microsoft Office 365 for free, new PowerPoint users may need to obtain the Office suite. There is a free trial of the program available, though once it has expired, new users can expect to need to purchase a full license. There is currently no way to purchase PowerPoint separately from the other Microsoft 365 programs. Users will either need to pay a monthly subscription fee of about seven dollars to access the program's premium version or a one-time purchase fee of about 150 dollars to access the classic Office programs. 

Read about how difficult it is to learn PowerPoint.

Learn PowerPoint with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

Professionals looking to learn PowerPoint may consider skills development training through Noble Desktop. These courses, available in person at Noble’s Manhattan campus and through live online instruction, will give students hands-on training in designing and organizing information using PowerPoint. These courses, which expert instructors teach, will provide students with the experience needed to build evocative and memorable presentations. Even in online courses, class sizes are kept small, so students can interface directly with their instructor to receive assistance and feedback. Plus, Noble offers free retakes on all its courses, giving students more opportunities to practice building presentations in a professional environment.

Noble offers a PowerPoint Bootcamp, which teaches students, even those without prior PowerPoint experience, how to design compelling and evocative presentations. In this certificate-granting program, students will learn how to work with PowerPoint layouts, add animations and graphics, and work with layers, charts, graphs, and other objects. Then, students will receive advanced skills training, such as creating reusable PowerPoint templates, utilizing multimedia features in a presentation, and recording a presentation for later use. These skills will take students from novices to PowerPoint experts and prepare them to use the program professionally.

Since PowerPoint is a design program, Noble also offers students a PowerPoint Presentation Design course. This class focuses on the rhetorical and theoretical side of communicating through PowerPoint. In this class, students will learn design principles related to color, typography, graphic images, and other visual design elements. Whereas a bootcamp course teaches students how to use the tool to build presentations, this course will teach students how to design them, giving them the composition and design theories they need to make their presentations memorable and effective.