Since I’m working from home, I’m doing some training to improve my Powerpoint skills, training that I probably can’t access from the office normally nor would I ever have time to do it. I can see from the names of the videos that Lesson 02 (22 minutes) looks at creating and saving, changing themes, slide masters, headers and footers, and file properties, which seems pretty basic. In fact, it opens with things like save and open, and I thought, “Really?”. It’s not like that is any different in any other software package. I started to worry I might be wasting my time. I shouldn’t have worried.

I felt like an idiot when they got to themes and templates. I knew, sure, that when you said “new” and chose an existing theme (colours + empty presentation) or template (colours + pre-filled presentation), you could preview the images in it. I had no idea what the boxes to the right of that were — they look like slides, and I thought they were some sort of preview. I never really paid much attention to it. Now I find out that they’re actually colour schemes? Sort of child themes, for web designers. Crap. I don’t know how many times I found a template either by default or online, liked it, but thought the colour schemes sucked and moved on because they looked too embedded to be worth trying to extensively re-colourize. I never realized they had a “click here” option to choose palettes from the start rather than trying to modify the palettes later once it’s open. Sure, not all of them have it, but most do, tied to the Powerpoint defaults. Sigh.

Then when she shows how to modify an existing deck into a new theme (Design / Choose Theme), she said what should have been obvious — it’s the same list as when you first said NEW. Just presented in a different view. I just always assumed it was in-app changes, not that they were linked. Same with variants to the right, or the detailed drop-down list for colour palettes. I assumed I had to do that after the fact in the deck, not that I could do it from the word NEW.

I also enjoyed the refresher on the Header/Footer options as I rarely use them in my personal work, and for office work, we’re forced to generally use an existing template that has it already included. If we’re playing with it, to the extent we even can, it is normally manually, not using the INSERT / HEADER & FOOTER SETTINGS.

Again, I learned more than I expected to learn. On to Lesson 03!