Learning PowerPoint can enhance your professional career, be it sales, management, or academia. Video tutorials offer flexibility and control over pacing, with many free resources available to get started.
Key Insights
- PowerPoint is a widely used presentation software across almost all professional industries, making it an essential skill to have.
- Video tutorials are a popular method to learn PowerPoint as they are cost-effective and allow students to control their pace of learning.
- Introduction to PowerPoint tutorials and short video explanations of specific concepts like slide layering or data importing are common types of video tutorials available.
- PowerPoint's versatility makes it useful across various professional settings, from live presentations to compiling important company policies.
- Learning PowerPoint does not have any set prerequisites and is relatively easy for beginners, though more advanced features may require additional learning.
- Despite being a free tool, advanced PowerPoint use may require a purchase of the Microsoft Office 365 suite, with pricing options including a monthly subscription or a one-time purchase.
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PowerPoint is one of the world's most commonly used presentation design tools. Using its simple and intuitive interface, professionals of all types can design evocative and rhetorically effective presentations. 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 you can 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 that they produce both communicative and impressive presentations for their audience.
PowerPoint is a slideshow editing tool designed to give users the tools they need to organize information, communicate effectively, and produce presentations for live delivery or without a presenter. PowerPoint makes the job easier and more efficient, whether you are managing important information in advance of a meeting, preparing a sales pitch for a potential client, or compiling important workplace policies and procedures in one 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 complex 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 highlight 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 just starting to learn PowerPoint may find many reasons why video tutorials are a productive starting point. 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 different 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 multiple video tutorials simultaneously to pick and choose the lessons that work best 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 of a PowerPoint concept can look for that content in the video they're watching or search for a specific video that covers it. This level of freedom is ideal for students who want to learn on their own schedule.
Types of PowerPoint Videos
For students not ready to enroll in a PowerPoint bootcamp or who just want to learn the basics, a free introductory video tutorial may be an ideal starting point. These tutorials are designed to mimic an online training seminar's structure and feel, making them ideal for students who anticipate desiring 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 equip students with the skills needed 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 explanation of a single concept such as how to layer slides to create animations or import data tables from Excel. These videos are ideal for students wanting to learn specific skills within PowerPoint rather than the program as a whole. 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 somewhat less useful for students seeking a more comprehensive PowerPoint education or planning to enroll in more immersive training courses later.
Why Learn PowerPoint?
PowerPoint is a valuable application 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 otherwise 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 enables them to condense vital information for easy understanding and access, 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.
Read more about why you should learn PowerPoint.
How Difficult is It to Learn PowerPoint?
PowerPoint is a relatively simple 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 specific prerequisites for learning PowerPoint. Students will need basic computer knowledge and a system capable of running 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 purchase 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. Currently, PowerPoint cannot be purchased separately from other Microsoft 365 programs. Users will need to pay either a monthly subscription fee of around seven dollars for the premium version or a one-time purchase fee of about 150 dollars for 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 opt for skills development training through Noble Desktop. These courses, available in-person at Noble’s Manhattan campus and through live online instruction, offer hands-on training in designing and organizing information using PowerPoint. These courses, taught by expert instructors, 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 interact directly with their instructor for assistance and feedback.
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 handle 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 beginners to PowerPoint experts and prepare them for professional use of the program.
Since PowerPoint is a design tool, Noble also offers a PowerPoint Presentation Design course for students. This class focuses on the rhetorical and theoretical aspects 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 them how to design presentations, equipping them with the composition and design principles they need to make their presentations memorable and effective.