Powerpoint

Background style

The Background Styles gallery displays three subtly patterned variations of each of four background colors that you can assign to the theme.

Effects

The Effects gallery displays the 15 built-in effect styles that you can associate with a theme. If one of the effect styles is applied to the current presentation, a box surrounds that effect.

Slide masters

These control the layout, master style, and static slide elements of specific types of slides.

Themes

These control the colors, fonts, effects, and background style of all the slides in a presentation. Many themes include color variants that are identical in all ways other than the color scheme.

Design template

This is a blank presentation with a theme, and sometimes graphics, already applied to it. Some templates supply only a title slide and leave it to you to add the other slides you need; other templates supply an example of each of the available slide layouts.

Colors

Every presentation, even a blank one, has an associated set of 12 complementary colors: four Text/Background colors for dark or light text on a dark or light background; Accent 1 through Accent 6 for the colors of objects other than text; Hyperlink to draw attention to hyperlinks; and Followed Hyperlink to indicate visited hyperlinks. Of these colors, 10 appear with light to dark gradients in the various color palettes. (The two background colors are not represented in these palettes.)

Fonts

Every presentation, even a blank one, has an associated set of two fonts. The Office section of the Fonts gallery lists the 25 built-in combinations of heading and body fonts. The top font in each combination is used for titles and headings, and the bottom font is used for regular text.

Content template

From the PowerPoint starting screen, you can preview and download presentation templates that are available from the Office website. These templates provide not only the design but also suggestions for content that is appropriate for different types of presentations, such as reports or product launches. After downloading the template, you simply customize the content provided in the template to meet your needs.

Slide Show

In this view, each slide fills the screen. You use this view to deliver the presentation to an audience.

Notes Page

In this view, each slide is displayed at the top of a page where you can add speaker notes. You can add speaker notes that consist of only text in the Notes pane in Normal view. However, to create speaker notes that contain elements other than text, such as a graphic or a chart, you must be in Notes Page view.